The first time around, breastfeeding was hard. The first four months were rocky. Axel couldn't latch without the aid of a handy-dandy piece of silicone. I thought he was wasting away and took frantic trips to see a lactation consultant. Then he wanted nothing more than to be attached to my boob for hours on end every evening, and we both wailed in frustration. I wore a groove in the couch, sitting and nursing and watching constant reruns of America's Next Top Model. Even when we finally got the kinks worked out, when Axel and I were both pros, I rarely had peaceful, beatific, earth mother moments of joy while a wriggling body sucked fluids out of me. Honestly, I kept at it for ten months because I didn't want to shell out hundreds of dollars on formula, and I'd worked so hard to figure it all out that I couldn't give up too soon.
This time around, I'd been too overwhelmed by the chaos and busy trying to keep all of us alive to notice that breastfeeding is going pretty well. Sure, Jonas has times when he decides he's ravenously hungry an hour after he just ate. Yes, he's a moderately cranky puker. And he does that zombie baby thing where he ferociously wags his head and tries to latch on to anything - the nursing pillow, his hand, his sleeve, my arm - and gets more and more angry that he's not getting any milk when the milk deploying equipment is literally smushed up against his nose.
Other than the regular baby spit-up and tears, though, it's been pretty smooth. It's easy and natural in the way that I very naively assumed breastfeeding would be before I had Axel, and found out that it is not always easy, especially during those sleep-deprived and hormonal early weeks of motherhood. I'm more experienced this time around, Jonas has a stronger latch, and I (mostly) got over my hang-ups about nursing in public, which makes leaving the house much easier. I'm better at going with the milky flow, navigating the relationship between the new baby and the boob in a way that works for us. It's actually sort of nice and cuddly, in a way I hadn't imagined it could be with Axel. And I've done a lot of reading of back issues of The New Yorker at 2 am.
