One of the things I was asked the most when I was pregnant was whether or not I was planning on breast-feeding. Just the nature of that question used to annoy me because it really wasn't anyone's business whether I was planning to or not, and yet I never responded to that question by saying that it was in fact, none of their business. Mostly, I guess, because the people that asked only meant well (except for the fact that my child's well being was - and is - my business) and also because I wanted them to hear my response that I used over and over - that I was certainly going to try my best. I did so much reading prior to having Clara about everything and anything and when I tackled learning about breast feeding, I very quickly realized that breast feeding wasn't as clear of a choice that I - and many others - were led to believe. I learned very quickly that breast feeding, though natural, doesn't come naturally for many, that it's a lot of work when it doesn't come naturally and worse yet, for some women, it just doesn't happen at all.

Are you going to breast feed? It's not the yes or no question that people think it is.

The hospital where Clara was born is very big on new mothers breast feeding - within moments of your baby being born, she is placed on your chest so as to allow the mother to breast feed and a nurse is nearby to offer assistance if needed. Numerous nurses - both in the birthing suite, where you have the baby, and in the obsetrics unit, where you go to recover, came to us to make sure we weren't having any problems - or, to make sure we WERE breast feeding because god forbid if we weren't. If I hadn't lost all modesty in the delivery room with numerous people seeing me mostly naked the rest of it was stripped away as various nurses walked in on us while I breast feed and groped my breasts to make sure that I was doing it right.

Except, and this is the frustrating part, I wasn't. And yet none of the five nurses that attended to us was able to see that. The night I spent in the hospital, Clara was awake most of the night, feeding. I'd get her to latch on, she'd eat and eat and eat and then fall asleep - I would take her from me, put her in her bed and she'd start to cry - so I'd put her to my breast again and the same thing would happen. The nurse that came and saw us in the middle of the night, watched her feed, and listened to me describe what she was doing and told me that Clara was cluster feeding. Perfectly normal, she said, and it would last only a couple of days.

Except that it didn't. Clara cluster fed the first couple of nights we were home and after hours of having her at my breast, I was sore to the point of bleeding. When we took her for her three-day check up, she had lost too much weight and the doctor was concerned she wasn't get enough to eat and pushed us to supplement with formula. Then one night, which I consider to be one of the WORST nights of my life, I found myself unable to feed Clara because it hurt so much and I was more exhausted than I've ever felt in my entire life. I turned away from my crying child and I cried myself to sleep.

We got help the next day - I booked an appointment with a nearby breastfeeding clinic while I cried on the phone with a nurse from the public health office. The nurse there watched Clara breast feed, she saw the physical damage that had already been inflicted and then she did what no other nurse prior had done - she stuck her finger in Clara's mouth. Clara was bottle sucking, we were told seconds later, which was causing the pain and the bleeding and her inability to get enough to eat - which was driving the crying and the cluster feeding. Her recommendation (and one that she had never made before to a nursing mom) was to stop breast feeding immediately and get myself an electric breast pump. Put Clara on a bottle and feed her breast milk that way until I had healed enough that we could try again.

I started pumping that weekend, and Clara starting eating. A few days later, we went back to the clinic and she had gained weight. We tried breast feeding again, with not very much success - I went home and kept pumping. A few more days passed, another trip to the clinic - same thing, Clara was still gaining weight, it still hurt to feed her, she still wasn't latching on properly. Every visit to the clinic resulted in both Clara and me crying and we'd leave and I'd ask myself why I was torturing us both the way that I was.

There is so much pressure on new mothers to breast feed and I was allowing myself to fall to that pressure. I looked past the pain that I was in, the misery that my daughter was experiencing, the blood that stained her pajamas when we woke up the next morning after a night of forced breast feeding (my blood not hers). Breast feeding is not neccessarily an easy thing, even if it's a natural thing, and yet, it's not supposed to hurt. It's not meant to be a bloody affair and that's what, for Clara and I, it had become.

And so we stopped. And as a decision that was a long time coming, it wasn't a decision that I was able to make easily. I believe in the benefits of breast milk, wanted to give Clara that the antibiotics that naturally existed in my milk, wanted her to be one of those babies that wouldn't get sick as often, get ear infections and whatever else because she was breast fed. I wanted her to have all those things but I was at the point where I didn't want her anywhere near my breasts. If you watch her eat, and other people have seen this, she's ferocious. She attacks like a snapping turtle when food is nearby.

So I did the only other thing that I could do. I started using my pump all the time, never the eight times a day which is what's recommended (every three hours, are you kidding me?) but often enough. Five, sometimes six times a day. For at least twenty minutes, sometimes thirty. I have healed physically, Clara continues to gain weight.

It's been seven weeks since I started pumping and other than the rare, random time I try and breast feed again (because I'm feeling optimistic or because Clara wiggles herself into position next to my breast and I think she wants to feed from it and I feel guilty that she's not) Clara eats from a bottle. Other than the few ounces of formula she was fed at the beginning while I was trying to pump enough to get ahead of her feeding schedule, she's been on breast milk exclusively. At her four week appointment with the doctor, she'd grown half an inch and had gained two pounds. Very healthy baby, my doctor commented, as he admired her in her orange G-diaper.

And still, we get asked if I'm breast feeding and I falter with my answer. Because yes, she's being fed breast milk, but it's not from my breast. I use a machine to express it, she's fed from a bottle, it's not really breast feeding. Or is it?

We haven't been able to watch as much television as we used to, but on two different shows, a reference was made to pumping. There was a Time article recently on breast pumping about the rise in women that have opted not to breast feed and instead choose to pump and feed. There's a convenience factor there for sure, and it makes it easier for women returning to work and it makes it easier for women who want the freedom to go out and run errands while leaving their baby at home. There's the freedom to drink a few drinks and pump and dump, feeding your baby milk that you've saved in the fridge or, thinking ahead, frozen in the freezer. It's a raising trend and, when you read the article, it almost seems fashionable.

But what they don't accurately capture in the article is just how much work it is. How difficult it is to attach yourself to a pump numerous times a day, how difficult it is to make plans when everything revolves around when you pumped last and when you need to pump again. How you CAN travel with your pump, but then you have to consider how you're going to clean your equipment when you're done, and how you're going to store your milk. They don't really discuss what it's like when you're attached to the pump and your baby starts to cry and you have to choose between letting her cry (which she's too small to do) or, tending to her which means stopping in the middle of mid-flow, detaching all the equipment, getting her to settle down and then hooking up again. There's no mention of how much it HURTS if you don't pump when you're supposed to because your schedule gets thrown off by what your child wants (just because you think she's going to eat or sleep at a certain time doesn't mean that's when she's going to do either). Or, and this is perhaps the worst of all, you can't really enjoy it when your child starts to sleep longer at night - you don't get the benefit of that seven hour stretch because guess what? You're getting up every three to four hours, and you never want to skip that middle-of-the-night pumping session because those are the best ones of all (because that's the time of day when your hormones peak and you produce the most).

There's a group of women in the online community that refer to themselves as ec0-breast feeders, having coined the term as a result of this uprise in pumping mamas who still refer to what they do as breast feeding. Not wanting to share the credit perhaps, these women are breast-feeding the natural, old-fashioned way, and what they're doing is more environmentally friendly. They don't waste electricity running breast pumps and water washing pump parts. They probably breast feed at night by candlelight, or perhaps by the light of the moon, unlike pumping moms who have figured out how to go hands-free and pump by the light of their laptops or iPhones.

(I wonder how many of these eco-breast feeding moms are using disposable diapers, or, for the ones that are using cloth, how much water they're wasting washing diapers?)

One night last week I stood in the kitchen and I assembled my equipment to do my last session of the day so that I could go to bed. I settled in on the couch to begin, and before I could start, I started to cry. I'm not sure exactly WHY I started to cry - it could partly have been because I was tired (but no more tired than normal) and maybe I cried because it just seemed to be never ending. It could partly have been because I still deal, on occasion, with my disappointment in not being able to breast feed, or how, on occasion, I feel like a failure for NOT being able to breast feed (due in part to the nurse at the breast feeding clinic hinting that my epidural may be the cause for Clara not being able to latch properly). Maybe I cried because of the ec0-breast feeding mamas out there, trying to take credit away from pumping mamas who work so hard to give their babies what the eco-mamas seem to be able to do so easily.

Or maybe I just cried because all of this was not what I expected. At all.