This afternoon, around 1pm, Maia started getting a little fussy. The first thing I did was try to get her to nurse, but no luck. Awhile later, we figured that maybe her teeth were aching (we think she may be getting one of her top teeth in, as well as both of her bottom one) so I tried applying some Orajel, which resulted in me tweeting the following (at 1:43): “bad news: it’s hard to apply orajel to a squirmy, angry baby. good news: if Maia’s lips were hurting? THEY AREN’T ANY MORE!“
Yeah. No one told me how hard it is to apply Orajel. Holy shit.
So anyhow, after I numb her entire face, she ends up falling asleep against me, having not eaten in several hours. Whatever. She’ll nurse when she wakes up from her nap, right? She only naps 30-45 minutes at a time these days, I can deal with that. Turns out, she sleeps until 4pm. AND DOESN’T WANT TO NURSE.
But oh. my. God. She is throwing a MASSIVE fit every time I try to feed her. I’m starting to get engorged. Then I get angry, pass her off to Chris, and we decide to all go for a walk.
The walk is great, she’s lovely and happy the whole way, and when we get home, I try to feed her again.
CATS. SLEEPING. WITH. DOGS.
She freaks out.
I pass her off to Chris and open my copy of “The Mother of all Baby Books”, read the section on Nursing Strikes, don’t like what it says, and call my mom, babbling and most likely nearly incoherent. She tells me that maybe Maia wants some real food and isn’t really all that interested in nursing. Of course, my response is “But what’s wrong with my boobs?!”
Anyhow, Chris gives Maia some food and she starts to dig in, happier than a pig in shit. Which when you think about it, is not the most apt metaphor when referring to someone eating, but the point is… I felt horrible. I felt rejected. She greeted my boob with screams, but Real People Food with adulation?
When she lost interest in her food, I tried nursing her again. Still no luck. Again, she started throwing a fit.
By 8pm she still hadn’t nursed and still had no interest. We’d started her bedtime routine at 7, like usual, but she wasn’t falling asleep. By 8:30pm I’d managed to hand-express 1.5oz of milk into a bottle.
There are no words for how absolutely rejected and worthless I felt as I held her, watching her hold onto the bottle and drink from it, feeding herself. She didn’t need me. It could have been anything in that bottle. It could have been Chris holding her, or she could just have been laying on the bed, and nothing would have been different.
Since she enjoyed that milk so much, I went into the washroom and studiously expressed another 1.5oz, which she gobbled down just as gleefully.
Honestly, though, what really matters here, why I really need to write this post, is this:
I am so angry. At her.
It’s like a switch flipped and my mommy empathy turned off. When I tried to nurse her and she rejected me, screaming with a pitch and fervor that showed her absolute displeasure, I set her down on the bed and laid down alongside her… I watched her cry. I could NOT bring myself to hold her against my aching, engorged breasts. I felt no sympathy for her. Nothing was wrong with her. If she wanted to eat, I waited; if she wanted to sleep, she could curl up against me. There was no reason for this screaming. No reason to reject me.
I think that’s the crux of it: I feel like she rejected me.
And it hurts.
I don’t want her to suffer, but I don’t understand why she’s suffering. Yet… she’s only “suffering” when I try to feed her. Other than that, once I set her down and she realized I was no longer trying to shove my boob in her mouth, she returned to being happy. I don’t know if I kept trying to feed her because I hurt (physically and emotionally), because I thought she needed it (clearly she didn’t), or because that’s just what I do, I feed her, that’s a big part of my job. I guess she wasn’t hungry. Tonight, it seems like I needed the connection more than she did.
Chris stepped up to the plate BIG TIME. He told me he’d watch Maia while I went and tried to hand express. He tried to comfort me as I sat there aching, fighting tears, feeling my heart crumbling in my chest. He reminded me “it’s not about you, it’s not personal” as I stared at Maia holding the bottle in her mouth. He held her close and sang to her when she got sleepy but wouldn’t sleep for me. She fell asleep in his arms. When she woke up a few minutes later, he told me to stay put, and went to her, rocking her to sleep again.
That’s the one good thing that came from tonight: she wanted him, and he wanted her.
But I feel lost.
