I think a lot about how I thought my breastfeeding journey would look like, versus what it actually turned out to be.  And the more I think about it, I think about how I felt set up to “fail” — and what the word “failure” even means in the context of breastfeeding.

Six weeks.

That’s how old my daughter was when I went back to work full-time.  Six weeks. At the time when I was planning my maternity leave (which was just me using all the paid time off I’d accrued that was available to me) six weeks sounded like plenty.  Six weeks is a lifetime! That is…when you’re not holding a six-week old baby who’s so, so tiny, and your body is still healing, and it turns out, breastfeeding is already difficult.  Six weeks was a terribly short amount of time, and to have to then reorganize my breastfeeding to a pumping schedule was, surprise surprise, not easy on my mind or my body.

Lunch breaks turned into pump breaks, lunch became a thing I tried to get but never quite could.  Pumping interrupted meetings, happened in depressing little closet rooms, or rooms with windows that barely had proper blinds.  My supply dropped, then dropped again.

I got home each day more tired than the last, weary to my bones.

And of course I did!  

I was trying to keep a tiny weeks-old baby fed and growing while maintaining a job and a schedule that simply wasn’t made to accommodate having a child, even if there are “laws” that supposedly make this possible.  The reality was, I was running myself absolutely ragged, and I simply couldn’t do it. My body was too tired, and sooner rather than later, my supply dropped off entirely.

And for a long time, I quietly berated myself for it.  If only I had made my maternity leave longer to get a better nursing relationship grounded.  If only I’d been better at eating enough to keep myself from feeling run-down. If only I didn’t prioritize my job’s meetings over pumping sometimes.  If only, if only, if only…

But maybe I’m looking at it all wrong.  What if I looked at my “failures” as not personal ones, but societal ones?

What if maternity and parental leave were automatically paid for more than six weeks?  What if pumping breaks weren’t looked down upon as necessary evils? What if the working world understood the difficult position moms who are pumping are put in when it comes to needing to appear present for full meetings?  What if work-life balance truly were possible?! What if keeping a child fed was looked at as an important job, not something you guess that a woman has to do while at her day job, but couldn’t she just do that at home?

Someday, maybe it will be better.  

Until then though, I’m going to keep reminding myself that my failures were set up to be that way from the start by a society that doesn’t prioritize what it means to be fully human postpartum.  When things don’t go as planned, look to the source of your difficulty, and don’t automatically blame yourself.