Of Mammary Glands and Maternal Instincts

For most of my life I’ve had an ambivalent relationship with my breasts, probably because they’ve been too small to be either a benefit or a bother. As with everything else, though, pregnancy has changed those dynamics. 

The transition has been a three-step process, best described as:

Painful: “Please don’t hug me or I might scream in agony”,

Prominent: “My boobs and my belly touch when I sit up straight - ick.”

And practical: “Huh - I’ve become a food source.” 

Having already blogged about stages one and two, I wish to focus today on the whole lactating business. 

I have a lot of anxiety about breastfeeding. This is, perhaps, the blessing and curse of being the last of my friends to reproduce. Prior to them having children, my understanding of breastfeeding was naive, but straightforward. Breast makes milk. Milk comes out nipple. Baby drinks milk. QED. Thanks to my wealth of secondhand experience, I now know about and fret over things like latching problems, inverted nipples, and the ever-popular mastitis. With such looming obstacles to feeding a newborn, it’s a wonder the species survived until the invention of powdered formula.

Even now, with my baby still on the inside, I find the whole business of lactating odd and uncomfortable. I can’t get over the strangeness of discovering my rib cage has a self-inflicted milk mustache. It would be one thing if I could predict or control it, but I’m never sure what’s going to set off my inner cow. (Now that I think about it, this is probably the closest I’ll ever come to knowing how a man feels. For the first time, I too possess a body part that reacts to outside stimulus without regard for conscious thought.)

For me, leakage is usually triggered by lying or standing in a particular position. However, sitcoms and wives tales assert that the sound of crying or the sight of a cuddly newborn can also cause a mammary version of the Bellagio fountain. Despite interacting with many an adorable baby, this has happened to me only once. 

I was leaning over, smiling into his little brown eyes, stroking his soft dark hair, and cooing a little to quiet his snuffling whimpers when I discovered my heart wasn’t the only thing going gooey over this tiny, perfect creature. My shirt suddenly sported a tie-dye of milk stains and I was both embarrassed and deeply troubled.

The problem was this: the infant that had made me lactate was, in fact, a German Shepherd puppy. How’s that for misplaced maternal instincts?