Breastfeeding Is Basically Impossible—Why Don’t We Say That More?

Eventually, the round-the-clock nursing slowed, as people had said it would. We added a formula bottle here and there (a recommendation from the aforementioned pediatrician after I burst into tears in her office). I got into a good pumping schedule, and my husband took over all the early-morning feeds, letting me catch up on sleep until ten or eleven a.m. Around three months, my daughter and I discovered the magic of the side-lying position. As a novelist who’s written many a chapter on my laptop in bed, I’ve always been a fan of making hard work easier by doing it lying down. The work of nursing turned into bonding and cuddling and something actually quite beautiful, all the things I’d been promised but that took so long to come.

And then something else happened—I found I couldn’t stop talking about my experience. The toll it had taken on my body, my mind. The expectation that mothers do it all with a grin and a glow. On social media, I shared some of my struggles, and soon my text messages and inboxes were full of messages from people I didn’t even know that well—college friends’ wives, former coworkers, people I’d grown up with—all there to say that they went through this, too, but they were afraid to share how hard it had been for fear of sounding like a bad mother.

So I did what I always do to process trauma. I wrote. I set a murder mystery against the backdrop of the terror of new motherhood, something we are finally admitting is a bit of a horror-show, and is being reflected more in film and TV. The book would be the thing that occupied all my creative efforts and thoughts for a year-and-a-half. 

A few weeks ago, some early reviews for the book started to trickle in—among the usual mix, I found something new: Several reviewers questioned why the book needed to portray so much breastfeeding, whether this was even realistic for a woman left alone caring for a six-week-old infant. I sounded off on Twitter, and the response was astounding. Women and gestational parents had consistently the same story—breastfeeding was all-consuming. My experience wasn’t an outlier; it was happening to people all over the world. So why don’t we ever see this? Why don’t we talk about the true cost of something that can be so beautiful but so terrible at the same time? 

Because if we did, we’d have to really reckon with what we’re asking, with the world we’ve created for new parents. Formula shortages. Long working hours with few protections for employees. The insult-to-injury insistence on calling breastfeeding “free.” We’re not ready to admit just how much we’ve let our mothers down. And so it remains a magical, wonderful bond between mother and child, something that happens every four hours on a schedule and is, as one Twitter user quipped, as simple as topping off a gas tank.

Breastfeeding can be beautiful, it really can. I did it for 19 months with my daughter, and sometimes, I even miss it.

But it’s hard to do without losing yourself. And we need to be allowed to share that side of it, too.

Leah Konen is the mother of a three-year-old daughter who is still as hungry as ever. Her forthcoming thriller, You Should Have Told Me, is based in part on her own experiences with breastfeeding and post-partum depression and is out January 3.