It's 3am. I'm pumping. This is my MOTN session and I've done it every night since February, and I'm typing this one-handed with the Baby Buddha going, because if I don't say it now I'll lose my nerve by morning.
LO is 5 months. EP since week 3. I have never once fed her from my body and I've made my peace with that, mostly, at around 2pm on a good day!
Here's what my life is. Five pumps: 3am, 7am, 12, 4, 9pm. Twenty minutes each, plus setup, plus washing, call it 35 real minutes a session, so about three hours a day. I make 31 oz. She eats 28. I have 340 oz in a deep freezer in the garage that we bought FOR the milk. I have three sets of flanges, two pumps, a wearable for the car, a cooler bag, and a drying rack that lives on my counter permanently and that I hate with my whole chest!
I'm the person who tells everyone else which pump to buy! I have a note on my phone with duckbill valve replacement intervals. If you'd asked me in March I'd have said I'd go to a year, easy, I have the systems.
And I want to stop so badly that I sat in my car in the Target parking lot on Thursday and cried about it, and then went inside and bought more milk storage bags. Lol.
Nobody is making me do this. That's what I can't get past. My husband told me to quit in May. He said it kindly and I snapped at him. My mom told me to quit. My best friend, who formula fed both of hers and whose kids are fine, tall, happy, told me to quit. There is not one single person in my life on the other side of this argument. It's me. I'm the entire opposition!
So I'm not asking how to wean off the pump. I know how. Drop a session every few days, watch for clogs. I've read all of it, I could write it. I'm asking when YOU stopped. And I think, being honest at 3am, which is the only time I'm honest, I'm asking somebody to say a number smaller than a year out loud so I can hear it and not fall apart.
Because here's what I can't say in daylight: I don't like her as much when I'm pumping. When she's crying at 3am and I'm attached to a machine and can't pick her up, I resent a five month old. And then I hate myself. And then I do it again the next night. Three hours a day of a thing that's making me a worse mother, so that she can have the good milk, from the worse mother.
I have 340 oz in the garage. That's twelve days. Twelve whole days of being someone who can just pick her up.
When did you stop? Did the guilt go away? Please just tell me a number.
Nothing clinical from me. Corinne's covered it and the moms in here did the actual work.
But something about this thread keeps catching at me, because I've been running this community long enough to see the shape of it. You wrote five hundred words at 3am with a pump attached to you, and every single one of them was you arguing with yourself, and there was nobody on the other side. Not your husband, not your mom, not your best friend. You built the opposition out of nothing and then you've been losing to it for five months.
That's what I want...
IBCLC. Saying the thing my profession is bad at saying, and then I'll be useful.
Stop. You have my permission, for whatever a stranger's permission is worth, and at 3am I think it's worth something.
I sit with people doing exactly this every week, and my field got so good at protecting supply that we forgot supply was never the goal. The goal was a fed baby and a mother who's still in one piece. You have one of those, and you're spending the other to buy more of the first, which you already have enough of. Thirty-one oz for a baby...
Okay. Dropping the 9pm next, then the 12, one every four days like you said. Pump to comfort, not to empty. I didn't know that, and I would absolutely have emptied, because emptying is what I've been trained to do for five months.
Days 5-10 mood dip. Writing that on the calendar so future me can't argue that it means something. That's the most useful sentence anyone has given me, and it's the exact one I would have used against myself.
I told my husband this morning. He didn't say I told you so, which I'd braced for the whole way down...
Twins. Nine months old. I stopped at four and a half months and I have never once said that number to a real-life human being, so congratulations, you're getting it at 3am from a stranger.
I was pumping for two babies. Six sessions. I did the math once and it was four hours and ten minutes a day, which was more than I slept, and I want that on the record because it sounds like a joke and it wasn't. I pumped MORE than I slept! For eleven weeks.
What did it was this. I was pumping in the nursery and they...
Seven months. I stopped at seven months, and you're getting the whole thing, because you asked for a number and a number on its own is useless.
I EP'd too. Mine's 11 months now, so I've had four months on the other side of the door you're standing at.
The day I stopped wasn't a decision. I got mastitis for the third time, 102 fever, and I was lying on the bathroom floor at 4am with a hot washcloth on my chest, and my husband said "what are we doing," and I said "I don't know," and that was it. That was...
"I wanted an alibi."
I've been up since I posted and I can't stop looking at that. That's it. That's exactly it. I've been half hoping for a clog. I have genuinely caught myself hoping something goes wrong with my body so that it isn't my fault. What is that.
And Nadia. The milk was for them but so was I. I'm going to be carrying that around for a while.
I skipped the 3am. Just now. Didn't do it! I'm typing this in bed instead and my chest is uncomfortable and I feel like I've committed a crime, and also I have...