Conclusion: 'There's no use being a damn fool about it'

I started writing this journal just over a year ago, to work through my feelings about breastfeeding as I contemplated the possibility of feeding a second baby.  As the arrival of that second child draws nearer, I am finally able to bring these musings to a close.  And at this point I must confess that, in embarking on the process of writing, I thought I knew how it would end.  I had the final paragraph composed in my head, and I reproduce it here now:

‘I’, ‘could’, ‘not’, ‘breastfeed’.  Four little words that it took me a long time to allow myself to say together. Was I one of the estimated one in fifty who are physically unable to do so?  I have no idea – maybe, maybe not.  There are so many ‘what if?s’, so many unknowns.  As I contemplate the thought of feeding another baby, I know that next time I will be so much better prepared.  Those things I now wish I’d done differently, I will be able to do differently.  If it’s physically possible for me to breastfeed successfully, then I’m confident that I will manage it. I have a mountain of knowledge about breastfeeding, and it would be wonderful to complete that with the one piece of knowledge I still don’t have, a piece of knowledge that can’t be found in any books: to know what it feels like to nourish a child with one’s own body, to give suck and to know ‘How tender ‘tis to love the babe who milks me’.  But despite all this, despite all my efforts to succeed, if I’m honest with myself I must acknowledge that, deep down underneath it all I yearn, not to succeed, but to fail again.  Why?  Because if I go through it all again, doing all the things I wish I’d done first time around, knowing all that I now know, and still do not succeed, only then will I know that there was nothing I could have done first time around either.  And only then will I be able to look at myself in the mirror and say four more little words that I long to be able to tell myself: ‘It’, ‘wasn’t’, ‘my’, ‘fault’.

Thank goodness I no longer feel this way.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the process of writing this journal, it’s that none of this was my fault, and that the technical question of whether exclusive breastfeeding was ever going to be physically possible for me is entirely irrelevant to that fact.  True, breastfeeding is physically possible for all but 1-2% of mothers.  But I of all people should know that that physical possibility is not the only kind of possibility, or even the most important kind.  Aside from what’s physically possible, that is, what’s consistent with the facts about the physical world, there are (amongst others) the questions of what’s practically possible, of what’s rationally possible, and of what’s emotionally possible.  Even if breastfeeding is physically possible for all but 1-2%, it will not be practically possible for nearly so many. For many more it may be both physically and practically possible, but still not rational, to pursue a goal of exclusive breastfeeding at all costs.  Yes, all things being equal, breast is best, but all things are rarely equal and there are many other issues that may reasonably, on a purely rational cost benefit analysis, tip the balance of reason against breastfeeding in certain cases.  And perhaps what’s most important to remember, but easiest to set aside, is the bounds of the emotionally possible.  At the point I threw in the towel, continued breastfeeding certainly wasn’t consistent with the emotional state I found myself in.  We all have our limits, points at which we simply cannot take any more.  So I am finally able to say to myself what I will readily say to anyone who has faced that point where they just can’t see any way of going on: it wasn’t your fault.

And as to my thoughts about what happens next time?  Well, what I now realize is that I have absolutely nothing to prove.  So I will not go on at all costs.  I will not torture myself testing the bounds of the physically possible.  Instead, I will approach things with an eye to what’s practical, to what’s reasonable, and to what’s emotionally acceptable for me to do.  I choose to define my own success, and this time my success will be measured not by the amount of milk I produce, or the amount of hardship I endure to get it.  My goal is simply that I, and my family, emerge from the experience relatively unscathed, and with my sanity relatively intact.  And if we do, I won’t have failed.

One of the MOBI mothers has, as her email signature, a motto that I once thought of as encapsulating my approach to breastfeeding this new baby.  It’s from C.S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.

‘My own plans are made.  While I can, I sail east in the Dawn Treader. When she fails me, I paddle east in my coracle.  When she sinks, I shall swim east with my four paws.  And when I can swim no longer, if I have not reached Aslan’s country, or shot over the edge of the world in some vast cataract, I shall sink with my nose to the sunrise’

A noble sentiment, perhaps, but this world’s no place for noble failures, and I have no intention of sinking in the single minded pursuit of this one little goal.  So I set it aside and turn instead to W. C. Fields for the motto I will try to keep with me this time around:

‘If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again.  Then quit.  There’s no use being a damn fool about it.’