baby juna is 12 weeks old today! i’ve been completely disregarding my blogging efforts, choosing to spend my scant kid-free windows of time just sitting in bed angrily eating chocolate while a spectra pump mangles my nipples. but i mean to keep writing, because i don’t know a better way to hang on tight to these memories, cast a lasting imprint of these long days that inevitably compress to shockingly short years. and though those daylight hours dragged on so blearily and endlessly during the early months of james’s life, in the blink of an eye he’s a chatty, sweet-natured three year old treat boy. so i try to take photos of it all. and in between the pictures, i grope around for the words.

all throughout this last pregnancy, i thought endlessly about postpartum mood disorder. i did not have to re-read my earlier entries to remember that weight on my chest, the suffocating blanket of dread and misery. i remembered how much i sobbed in the early days of august 2016, and worried that a second childbirth would break my brain again—for good.

but the theme of this blog, and my life, is that i am wrong. i am always wrong. i do not know if it is the preparation, the prolonged skin-to-skin, or just the fickle nature of biochemistry—but i do not experience the baby blues at all. even the dreadful physical recovery does not dim the glow of love and joy i feel towards this tiny little meatloaf. even though i know that newborns—even james, in retrospect—lowkey look like shit, my view of juna is softened and blurred by the filter of oxytocin. i want to look at her always.

every time her goofy little hospital-issued hat falls off, ian carefully replaces it. over the three days we spend in the hospital, his priorities are in order: (1) baby, (2) wife, (3) hat.

i feel unbelievably loved and supported to have my husband with me, sleeping cramped up once again on a hospital loveseat for the entire duration of my postpartum recovery. my amazing mother shuttles james back and forth from daycare, cooking dinner and taking care of him at our house each night. my dude bears this change in routine bravely, though we can tell that being away from us saddens him. he visits us for a couple of hours in the evenings, tromping into my recovery room with an armful of jigsaw puzzles and a stuffed animal for baby juna.

mama, did you got hurt? he asks me curiously as i shift around in my hospital bed, wincing.

i got hurt approximately the same amount as last time, but the blood transfusion adds anemia to my collection of grievances. pain management is much better this time around; i do not have to beg nurses for pain relief after the c-section. in fact, i don’t even ask. a sweet night nurse, who tells me happily that she is leaving for a vacation to italy the next day, administers buprenex in my iv (when i google this drug name the search bar autofills ….for dogs). i realize several minutes later that this may have been overkill, and now i am high.

so my body is alight with a warm opioid buzz and my brain is still basking in the glow of this perfect baby, and my father-in-law brings me a deeply craved half sweet, half-unsweet tea to break my fast. i am perched on a small cloud of happiness. i feel like a lakitu. even with the threat of a hysterectomy in the morning and a medical team rummaging between my legs tensely to monitor my hemmorhage, i am feeling good.

this felix felicis carries me joyfully through the first night of breastfeeding, during which juna achieves a latch that is lauded as absolutely perfect by her pediatrician. i am pleased, thinking how much easier this was than initiating james’s initial feedings (a bewildering ordeal during which i was instructed to hold him like a football and my dumb ass felt exactly like that white lady looking at complicated math).

the triumph lasts only a day. i am sitting up alert and ready for the infamous second night cluster feeding. i have a spotify playlist on deck, link’s awakening on my switch, and plan to nurse the night away. but then juna begins to get frantic, desperately rooting, latching, sucking for a few seconds, and popping back off angrily. her frustration mounts and her panicky little efforts feel like a knife in my chest—both physically and emotionally. she is either not getting enough colostrum, or not getting it quickly enough.

a nurse tells me—most unhelpfully—that when baby is getting this worked up, she is losing precious calories in her effort to get them. ian and i exchange worried glances. i try everything i can think of to keep her latched; a night nurse comes in and dutifully goes through her bag of tricks as well. the nipple mangling begins at this point, and any rosy sentimental thoughts i had about nursing in the past two blissfully milk-free years evaporate immediately. i remember that breastfeeding—even a relatively easy journey, as i had with james—still fucking sucks.

the sucking is the issue at hand with juna. her perfect latch falters as she desperately scrabbles around. within hours, my nipples are bleeding, and now i worry that she’s being put off by the taste of blood. baby is frustrated. i am frustrated. ian replaces her hat.

but after a few minutes of grappling with the intensely primitive fear of not being able to feed my hungry child, common sense finally graces my frontal lobe and i remember that i live in the miraculously modern world of formula. i ask the night nurse if i can supplement with formula to allay her hunger. not because i am giving up on breastfeeding. not because i don’t intend to establish my milk supply. but fed is best and and i cannot watch my newborn starve in the hopes that she’ll “figure it out eventually.”

herein lies the insidious nature of the baby-friendly initiative! this is some neoliberal ass nomenclature that i didn’t think about much the first time around. i thought it mostly had to do with encouraging skin-to-skin and letting the baby hang out in that little buffet cart in the room. but the emphasis on breastfeeding is an overwhelming part of the policy that (in my opinion) disregards maternal exhaustion and infant distress. the nurse tries to dissuade me from supplementing, cautioning that it will hinder my ability to breastfeed. she says the world formula like it’s taco bell. i don’t know how to tell her i would gladly place a chalupa supreme in juna’s mouth to keep her from starving.

i am not brand new, so i am not easily scared off. juna continues to frantically root and sob, and i call the nursery for formula. to their credit, they drop off two six-packs of ready-to-feed formula with all the accompanying disposable nipples i need. this is a relief, because i do not want to ask for one bottle at a time like my father unabashedly testing the limits of riscky’s all-you-can-eat beef ribs special. they caution me not to feed her more than a couple of ounces, or else i’ll spoil her and put her off breastfeeding entirely.

juna eats so hungrily, she seems intent to demolish entire bottles. but i dutifully cut her off and continue to offer her my woebegone breasts. at the time, i clearly recalled each nurse’s disapproving frown. nearly three months out now, they just feel blended into one slightly icy demeanor. my bravado and science-minded pragmatism cower under the prospect of disapprobation; i hastily hide the formula bottles behind my bed when nurses check in like i’m secretly doing whip-its with my baby.

lactation consultants make dreaded visits to my room. they also poke and prod their way through the breastfeeding setup to encourage juna to nurse properly. she continues to pop off after latching and wails unhappily, despite everyone’s best efforts. winnie, one of my lactation consultants, is a middle-aged asian woman who manages to smile wisely and talk simultaneously. she pats my hand and gives knowing winks and looks like the absolute paragon of information. she tells me i can pump, but that it’s not as effective as nursing. your baby is your best pump, she tells me with a sagacious little smile. i remember my nemesis, the medela pump, that nevertheless wrested 40 ounces of milk a day from my body. i do not think that even a baby with ian’s appetite could do the same.

so i pump little test tubes worth of colostrum, and feed it to juna via syringe. we subsist like this over the next two days; a painstaking endeavor to give her everything i can, in as many ways as she can eat. her pediatrician stops in to tell us i’m glad you’ve started supplementing. i was going to recommend it today, since it looks like she’s a little over 7% for weight loss. it is still within a normal range, but i am glad to be on the same page as a doctor i admire and trust with both of my children’s health. later, a lactation consultant comes in and tells me again i shouldn’t supplement, because juna is only at 5% weight loss. she is using an earlier weight measurement to make this calculation. it is a very small discrepancy, but still infuriating to feel like i am constantly at odds with healthcare providers.

(i do, however, love the nurses who are tasked with maternal health. they breeze in and out without a single care as to how i’m feeding baby, and mostly gush about what an easy patient i am. they also admire my hair and makeup and tell me i look amazing, which i know in my heart is a lie they must tell all the recovering mothers because my legs have swollen to tree trunks, i am leaving blood clots the size of a deep sea octopus in the bathroom, and i have not showered in living memory. one kindly nurse tells me that ian and i look like movie stars and i can only imagine she means the ones in a post-apocalyptic zombie film, but i really love compliments so i will be forever fond of this postpartum experience.)

winnie’s second drop-in coincides with my mother’s visitation, and i am unsurprised to see these two little women magnetize to one another, switching from english to speaking mandarin at a rapid clip. my mother is eager for me to be overflowing with milk, so she is the ideal gratefully receptive audience for a lactation consultant. unfortunately, at some point i overhear winnie recommend green papaya and fish heads to increase milk supply and i sit in bed just mad as hell thinking the last thing i need is for my well-meaning mother to bring me a dang fish head.

i continue undeterred to combo feed my astonishingly hungry baby, and we eventually make it to discharge still within acceptable limits of newborn weight loss and good bilirubin levels. the final lactation consultant visit was shady enough to even attract ian’s attention. i see that you’re supplementing with formula, she remarks while flipping through the chart. is there a reason? the question sags with pointed skepticism. i tell her it was recommended by the pediatrician, but i’m irritated that i even need to explain that the only reason i’m doing anything is to keep my baby fed. why else would i supplement? what kind of question is this? i’m not carrying out a plot to hustle a bunch of similac out of their nursery. ian tells me later that he did not realize how intense the breastfeeding push is at bfhi hospitals until this experience. i mean, thanks for the cool hat but we could’ve done without the guilt trips.

my milk finally comes in over the weekend once we return home, exploding back into the horror show boulders i remember from the first time around. i remind myself never to go big on implants. over the first couple of weeks, as i chain myself back to the pump and start bottlefeeding breastmilk, i wonder if i really have failed juna and deprived us of a breastfeeding relationship. slowly but surely, however, our nursing sessions stop feeling like a futile wrestling match. i get nipple shields, which are essentially structured condoms for tiddies, and they ease her back into staying latched. within a few of these sessions, we dispense with the shields entirely and she nurses with a newfound ease. we fall back into the same feeding patterns we did with james: bottles during the day, nursing at night. everything is coming up milhouse.

later, we switch to formula for a week when i embark on a high dose schedule of steroids to combat a terrible allergic reaction i had to adult diapers. i don’t know why i even typed out that sentence but i hope it makes its way into my obituary. i am resolved in my certainty that formula and breastmilk are equally good and fine, and they are not mutually exclusive feeding methods despite lactivism propaganda to the contrary. so even though like, just five paragraphs ago i concluded that i am always wrong about things, i know i did not err in keeping my baby fed and no new mother should be harangued into watching her baby starve. most importantly, juna tolerates all her feeds well and has grown nice and round over these past 12 weeks. she’s picking up fat folds, starting to look like a stack of biscuits, and i am back to cleaning milk out of these smuggler holdfasts.

but we have, unfortunately, lost that little hat.