We have baby no 2 on board and the final addition to our family. This blog post chronicles some of my struggles in my postpartum journey. Not only has the second C-section been much harder recovery-wise than the first, but I’ve fallen yet again into the club no one wants to join – the Exclusive Pumping (EP) club. I’ve written previously with my first about the challenges of breastfeeding. However, despite knowing what I know, I find myself face to face with the same challenges as last time, which fills me with a sense of dread at the months ahead and immense grief at the repeated pain of this experience. I wrote this blog post as a pressure vent for myself, but also that someone else with the same struggle may read it and feel seen in this rare problem.
For those unfamiliar with the term, exclusive pumpers pump breast milk to feed their babies and often don’t supplement with formula and don’t breastfeed, though the exact definition used depends on which source you consult. The sorriest thing about this state is it’s NOT a choice, but the majority of women, who have no issues breastfeeding, will keep treating it and judging you as if you’ve made some terrible choice. I remember being at a barbecue once and a friend looking with open curiosity as I whipped out a bottle to feed my 4 month old, whilst she had hers latched on the breast. Exclusive Pumpers are mostly comprised of a group of people who have flat nipples, inverted nipples, large nipples, differently shaped nipples. tongue-tied babies, babies in NICU and a whole host of other conditions that make the act of latching or breastfeeding either painful or simply not possible.
Taking stock of why it sucks
For me the resentment and grief related to exclusive pumping falls in these categories:
Inefficiency and the ensuing sleep deprivation: I hate things that are inefficient and EP is the most inefficient way of feeding a baby. With breastfeeding you have the breast and your baby, and your milk comes out perfectly clean and at the right temperature. No equipment required. May be a nursing pillow or 3 nursing bras if you wish. But those are optional. Pumping takes equipment required to the next level — and the monetary expense and time to clean and sanitize said equipment only adds to the burden. Here’s the equipment you need:
- Pump: which comes with numerous parts itself: flanges, storage bottles, duckbill valves, backflow protectors. All of which need to be cleaned pretty much after every use
2. Pumping bras: 3 of them at least. You could hold the flanges to your breast but then you really have dead time.
3. Bottles and nipples: 4 at least. These need to be cleaned after each feed.
3. Drying rack for all these items: the counter space these items take up is not trivial
4. Bottle warmer: may be your baby will accept fridge-cold milk but most don’t so we warm it up 2 mins each time.
5. Cooler bag and ice packs for travel
6. Portable bottle warmer: I skipped this for first baby, will try to see if can get away with skipping for second too.
Fundamentally it also separates the act of milk production from milk consumption. So you’re doubling the amount of time needed to feed a baby from that alone, and then adding all these cleaning and maintenance tasks on top. I’d estimate it adds about 6 hours of extra work per 24 hour period, to an already busy day! It affects your whole household, not just you, because they need to pick up the slack on all the errands you can’t do like laundry, cooking etc.
Delays in feeding and helplessness when baby is crying: everyone hates that feeling when the baby is crying whilst you’re willing the bottle warmer to hurry up or you’re clumsily trying to measure out the right amount into a bottle
Risk of infections: You’re constantly worried that a part isn’t clean enough or trying to remember when it was sanitized.
Throwing milk away: You have to make terms with regularly throwing milk out. I trash on average 1-2 oz per feed so that adds up to sometimes 10 oz per day just thrown away, because if a baby doesn’t finish a bottle within 2 hours, it hits the trash
Thin silver linings
Having reviewed why it sucks, it offers a few benefits that are pretty trivial for the most part but could be meaningful to you depending on your lifestyle:
- Others can feed your baby: this is probably the biggest advantage (though to be clear it nowhere near makes up for the inefficiencies). But because you’ve divorced the act of production from consumption, you can set a predictable pumping schedule and have someone else feed your baby when they are hungry whilst you take a shower, or write a whiny blog post or go to an appointment by yourself. You do not need to take your baby with you everywhere anymore. If you have another child or children, you can arrange your schedule to spend more time with them.
- If you are an over-supplier, you can pump up to 2 feeds in one session and get longer stretches of sleep – this assumes there’s someone else there to feed your baby for you.
- You know how much your baby is eating, and can have some peace of mind seeing an empty bottle whereas a breast is a bit of a black box. This could be reassuring in the first few weeks when establishing that your newborn is gaining enough weight is important.
- If it weren’t for the pump, your baby would get no breastmilk at all, so in that sense I’m grateful to be able to provide some antibodies at least for a couple of months to see her through, especially as our household is sick very often due to our toddler’s preschool shenanigans now
Tips and Tricks
There’s a ton of resources out there on exclusive pumping but I’ll share some of the more unconventional or less repeated advice. I pumped for a year for my first child, and here’s what I learned from that experience:
If you’re going to do EP, it’s a massive commitment and you need to take care of yourself as much as possible. This means being honest with yourself on how many pumping sessions you can handle in a day. For me, the upper limit is 5 sessions in 24 hours (and I’m tired with those too, as I also take care of bottle feeding from midnight to 7 am which are the hardest hours to be up). I can’t do more. The sixth would totally break me. So if I cannot pump enough to feed baby in 5 sessions, then we have to supplement with formula for the rest. There’s some tradeoff here as sleep deprivation makes your immunity fall and cortisol is transmitted over breastmilk, so overly stretching yourself is not being a selfless parent, but kind of self-sabotaging your own experience of a beautiful phase of your life and for very little benefit for your baby.
EP is a very lonely experience – you spend hours with just you and the pump. I listened to this podcast on solitude and take it as a solitude practice. I also wrote and pinned up a list of activities I can do whilst pumping so I feel less angry about the time spent: Reading, making phonecalls during day time pumps, doing life admin that can be done on the phone, messaging people, online shopping, journalling, meditating during night-time pumps.
Get more bottles: invest in parts and bottles so you’re not feeling like you need to wash everything immediately after use, which is especially challenging during the night.
Get the best equipment: trying to cheap out only backfires. If you’re going to do this, do it properly. This means getting the Spectra S1 which has a battery, rather than the Spectra S2 which really confines you to the power socket. Stay tuned as I’ll be trying a wearable pump too to see if that helps at all in multi-tasking with physical errands (I’m doubtful but that’s what the product advertises!).
Treat it like an operations problem: optimize every step. I put my portable pump on a trolley so I can wheel it around the house and sit next to baby in bassinet or in the living room and be a bit social during pumping. This can help counter the loneliness of it. It’s hard to think clearly when you’re tired and that’s why I use AI tools as thought partners on operations problems. You can go back and forth and hack a process for efficiency with an AI agent.
Use formula supplementation: if you can drop a session, I doubt that will make any difference to your baby’s health or life, but will for you. Personally, my partner is not on board with formula, and my first baby would not even accept formula when we tried at 6 months old. But if you have a more agreeable situation, I think this could be a game-changer for one of the night-time pumps and feeds. Formula fed babies also sleep longer.
The emotional aspect of this is the grief I feel about the inability to use a body part as intended. I envy the close physical bond that other mothers talk about and demonstrate so effortlessly in playgrounds and out and about with their babies. We cannot have it all, and what gives me hope is that part of the grief journey might end in at least partial acceptance of this life fact. What gives me hope is that I came to terms with my C-section births eventually. And that too despite how harshly judged, misunderstood (it’s not a choice), painful (for weeks) and completely unrepresented in the media C-sections are (despite 1 in 3 babies being born via C-section, you’ll never see one happen in a movie). In hard times, sometimes we can look backward and see what we survived and came to accept in order to move forward.
