Yesterday, I caught up with a neighbor friend whose baby is 5.5 months old. I hadn’t seen her or properly spoken with her since her baby was about one month old, so I wasn’t sure how she was doing or how her pumping journey was going. Similar to Kaia, her baby just wasn’t able to suck well and was also a bit on the smaller side at birth, so she had to resort to pumping quite frequently early on. She knew my journey was still in progress, and so she leaned on me for a lot of advice and tips. She told me that while on a trip visiting family in Utah and Colorado at the four month mark, she finally just decided she couldn’t do it anymore, so she weaned herself off pumping quickly to dry up and switched 100 percent to formula. She said she already wasn’t able to provide even half of her baby’s needs with pumping, so she didn’t see a point to continue. And though she has just gotten comfortable with her baby being exclusively formula fed now, she still has pangs of guilt every now and then, especially since she still hasn’t gone back to work and won’t until January.

“I feel so liberated, though, so free!” my friend said. “I felt guilt, but I have so much more free time to just enjoy her and do other things and not be stuck connected to a pump. I can leave the house and feed her anytime, anywhere! I can hold her just for the sake of holding her. I feel like I can have a life again!”

I hear this a lot from moms who make the switch to exclusive formula feeding, that it’s freeing, liberating, gives you agency over your life and your body. It gives you more time to bond with your baby. I get all that, and last January, I momentarily even thought about just stopping. But I’m still happy I kept up pumping. It definitely has been a sacrifice, and my life certainly has not been that free because of this chosen journey, but my baby will only be a baby once, and so I have no regrets that I went this route. But what this also means for me is that whenever I do finally wean off the pump and completely stop breastfeeding, it will definitely warrant a celebration of some sort. It will be the end of an era and the beginning of a new one, plus open the doors to new ways to bond with Kaia.

I was never going to be sure when my period came back, but based on everything I had previously read and what all my mom friends and colleagues warned me about, once my menstrual cycles resumed, my milk supply would drop. I was mentally bracing myself at around the six month mark, since my doctor had told me that around six months would be a “normal” time for my period to come back, assuming actively breastfeeding. My friends told me theirs came back between 8-9 months with active nursing/pumping. Well, lucky me, mine didn’t come back until the 10.5 month mark, so it was later than I guessed. But the decrease in supply was not welcome, and as it started plummeting days before my period, I’d figured that was the sign it was back. Seeing my output numbers decrease day after day and the sharp drop in milk output on my day over day graph hurt. I’d spent the last 10.5 months exclusively pumping. The first 2 months were the greatest struggle. The next four months, I saw my maximum output and was so proud of what I’d achieved after the slow and miserable start. And to see all of that hard work starting to get chipped away with a decrease in output just felt so sad to me. Academically and logically, I knew pumping would be an emotional journey, but I would’ve never imagined at the beginning how much I could tie my self worth as a mother to my milk output. And to see the numbers decrease the way they have in the last two weeks just felt miserable. Even if Kaia is drinking less milk now, it still made me sad. It’s work I did solely to provide sustenance for her and no one else. I saw it as my duty as her mother to do this, to nourish her for as long as I physically could.

One day, I’ll look back on this journey and be grateful and extremely proud of what I’ve done, despite how grueling and miserable at times it was. Even now when it’s “easy” because I have my routine down pat and know what I am doing, it’s still annoying to be tied up to an electric nipple sucker for 4 hours each day. Each day of this journey, I have been grateful for my body. I hope one day, when Kaia is old enough, I can share this with her, and maybe, just maybe she will appreciate all the time I sacrificed, attempting to give her the very best.

I went back to the orthopedic doctor this morning for a second cortisone shot in my left wrist. I let him know that the pain had pretty much subsided in my right since he gave me a shot there about two weeks ago, but it was clicking a lot more in the last few days, plus I’d had a little pain in it depending on the type of movement. He told me clicking was normal at this stage and was a sign of healing, which was good. But he did take a look at both wrists and noted there was still a lot of stiffness, likely from tendon adhesions as a result of lack of full mobility from the pain I’d had. So he suggested I do hand therapy, at least 1-2 sessions, to learn exercises to get my mobility back. I didn’t want to cause any permanent loss of mobility in my tendons in my hands; my hands are pretty damn important and integral to my health.

Recovery is on the horizon, I thought, as I walked home and made call to set up an OT evaluation for my wrists. I can’t believe there’s finally a potential to be pain free in my wrists soon. It feels like forever since my wrists and thumbs felt completely normal and I didn’t even notice them. I suppose that’s how you know you take your good health for granted; you don’t even appreciate your limbs until something like this happens, and everything just feels like it’s going wrong.