An online acquaintance wrote this.
http://oneyawn.blogspot.ca/2013/01/fuck-you-low-supply-and-i-am-not-about.html
She, too, has IGT and low supply. All of us low supply boob junkies marvelled at how her breasts were growing half-way through her pregnancy, excited for her and hopeful for us all. I generally find myself coming to the conclusion that I will never make enough milk to feed a baby all on my own. Not even if I follow the rigorous, complicated plan I have concocted for myself to begin once Linus decides to wean (probably, and hopefully, not for another year or two).
Nursing a toddler is so delightful compared to our experience of nursing a newborn. He nurses without the SNS, adjusts his latch to allow me to place the SNS when he’s ready and only if he really wants it, drinks happily, and runs off or falls asleep. The only time we REALLY need the SNS is when he is going to sleep at night or having a nap after serial nursing all morning. There have been a couple of times where he’s even fallen asleep without it. I don’t have to bring it along with us to play group any more. I don’t have to worry that we might not have enough milk along, and that he will be upset or hungry. Nursing – just me, no tube – comforts him when he is hurt, angry, or frustrated. That is so very healing. Nursing a toddler after nursing a baby with IGT is an absolute delight.
I hate low supply, too. Most days, I can live with it, and some days I don’t even think about it any more. I can look at my misformed boobs in the mirror and not feel complete and utter loathing for them. I no longer have to smother the urge to fling the SNS across the room, sobbing my heartbreak out while my baby arches his back and cries for food. We have more than enough milk in Linus’ freezer, so I’m not forced to wean him on to some other kind of milk or off of the SNS completely. That’s something I never dreamed could happen in the early days. There are even days that I can proclaim myself thankful for IGT. What? Yes, really.
When does it get to me? When I start thinking about the exhaustion of doing this again. The anxiety over whether or not we’ll find another milk donor in time. Balancing the desire to give Linus a sibling and my very deep-seated fear that, emotionally, I won’t live through ‘failing’ to produce enough milk again. When someone tells me, “Oh, you won’t have problems next time.” I smile and nod, knowing that they can’t possibly know how much their words sting.
They sting because it feels as though they think I didn’t do or try enough this time, and that’s why it didn’t work. Or, my favourite is when someone tells me they had low milk supply, but they just took some fenugreek and drank more water. They can’t BELIEVE how lazy women are to not try something so simple as that, because they really believe that is all it takes to solve chronic low supply. Or the ones who don’t believe primary low supply (LMS as a result of the mother) really exists. It’s too rare. You can’t have it because it’s rare.
I smile and nod anyways. Sometimes I educate, but mostly that’s just too painful, because they are so willful in their beliefs. I understand. I used to think those things, too. It’s why my baby spent the first 11 days of his life starving, wasting away.
I smile and nod because they can’t know the perverse number of pills I’ve downed in order to make a measly half supply. They can’t know how many times I hooked up that damn pump after nursing my baby, only to throw the bottles back into the pump bag 15-20-45-x minutes later because they don’t even have a single drop of milk in them to wash out. They don’t know the times I have cried my heart out, begging the universe, a god I don’t believe in, somebody, ANYBODY listening to please just make my breasts grow and fill with enough milk to feed my baby. They don’t know. They’ll probably never know. Maybe they think they are being helpful, encouraging. I know they mean no harm. But even 14 months later, it can still hurt.
(Nursing in the Kinderpack, no sns and sound asleep).(Children’s Museum in Seattle)