Carolyn Hax: Mourning the loss of nursing her baby

Adapted from a recent online discussion.

Dear Carolyn:

My son was born at 29 weeks. Since then he has grown like a champ; he is healthy and happy and finally home from the hospital. He looks and acts like a real newborn now, and he's even starting to get that baby chub.

And yet I'm still a wreck. I've pumped milk for the last two and a half months because he couldn't nurse and now it looks like he never will -- I never had much milk and he's too used to the bottle now anyway. I finally made the decision to stop yesterday, to stop pumping and trying and stressing us both out, but now all I want to do is cry when I think about it.

Intellectually I know this is all because of his early start, that my hormones are all disordered and that isn't my fault. But I'm still feeling the loss of that possibility: the experience of nursing. How do I reconcile this? How do I mourn the loss of something that never was -- so I can finally move on?

-- Mourning

He's home and growing, yay! Those neonatal intensive-care days are harrowing for parents, we learned firsthand.

It's good that you're giving yourself a break about the nursing -- intellectually at least. If anything, you're doing so too narrowly. It's quite possible you have some degree of postpartum depression and/or PTSD from your son's premature birth. It is scary and disorienting stuff, and that doesn't (always) simply go away the moment your baby is out of the NICU woods.

Please talk to your obstetrician (or son's pediatrician) about how you're feeling and ask for the names of people who counsel and/or support new mothers. Could be anything from therapy to a support group to a doula. You have lots of options, once you recognize you don't have to tough this out alone or dismiss it "intellectually" when your whole being is in pain.

As for the "loss of that possibility," please know, even when we get to enjoy something great, that experience automatically rules out some other thing that might also have been great or even greater. So we're always, always saying goodbye to something, some possibility, some other way of telling our story. It's natural to feel these losses more when we're giving up something we specifically hoped for or that most people seem to have, or when it's the result of something going wrong -- but the process is the same. It's about grieving what isn't to be, then embracing what we have, and even finding advantages we didn't expect.

Re: Nursing:

It's totally OK to cry. I had to give up nursing my then-one-month-old, and cried for days, and I'm not usually much of a crier. I went on to have twins who nursed and bottle fed for 9 months. Nursing can be a wonderful experience, but you are not less of a mom if it doesn't happen.

-- Not Much of a Crier

Re: Nursing:

My situation was nigh identical to yours. Does the experience of nursing mean closeness with your child, cuddling, talking, being together? All of that will be improved if you aren't stressing about one physical act you're struggling with for perfectly normal reasons.

-- Anonymous

You guys are great. Thank you.