Their first hours at home had been anxiety inducing and confusing, which neither of them had expected. They were both people who usually did everything right on the first try.
“Why don’t you just relax. The baby doesn’t know how to do it either. We all need to get used to each other. You’ll figure it out eventually. It can’t be that complicated, Zoe. Just take it easy. Why don’t we watch TV for a while?” The baby howled as he said it, and continued to cry for the next ten minutes, until Zoe put the breast in her mouth, which quieted the baby, and then Zoe let out a scream.
“She really hurts.” There were tears in her eyes from the pain.
“She’s been chomping on you all day. If I did that, you’d kill me,” he teased her and turned on the TV, which added more noise and chaos to the scene, as the baby continued crying, and Zoe joined her. She picked up her cellphone and called the lactation expert a few minutes later, and left a message to call first thing the next morning. She said that she had a serious problem with a one-day-old baby who wasn’t nursing. She made it sound urgent and alarming.
By ten o’clock that night, Austin and Zoe were exhausted, the baby was asleep in the Moses basket and had been on the breast for most of the day and evening, and Zoe’s breasts were so tender she cried every time the baby latched on to nurse. When Austin’s mother called and he told her about it, she reassured him that the baby would settle in during the next few weeks, and Zoe would get used to nursing. Austin hoped so. The first day had not been the peaceful idyllic scene he’d imagined, and Zoe either cried or snapped at him every time he spoke to her. This was not the calm, confident woman he knew. He could see that she was genuinely in pain every time she tried to feed the baby, who acted like she was starving, but either choked and wouldn’t nurse or fell asleep before she had a full feed. It was beginning to seem like a heroically difficult project, and not the simple, natural process it was supposed to be.
The baby slept for about an hour, and Austin and Zoe dozed off until the baby started crying again and woke them both. Zoe tried all the techniques she’d read about so diligently, but the baby was too frantic to cooperate and just screamed. The piercing sound of her baby crying cut through Zoe like a knife, and she looked at Austin in despair.
“I could pump, and we could give her breast milk in a bottle,” she said, remembering the suggestion from a book.
“That sounds convoluted to me.” It would be so much simpler if the baby would just nurse.
Zoe handed the baby to him then, still screaming, went to get a large cumbersome box out of her closet, and pulled out a machine that resembled something from Dr. Frankenstein’s laboratory. It looked torturous to him.
“What’s that?”
“A breast pump,” she said, reading the instructions carefully. “I got it for when I go back to work. I can freeze the milk and leave it at home. And I bought a smaller pump to take to work.”
“Won’t that thing hurt more than she does?” He looked worried. He had seen how red and raw her nipples were when she changed her nightgown. “Why don’t you try nursing her again?” he suggested gently over the baby’s desperate screams. They had to find a way to feed her, whatever it took, and he didn’t want to seem critical of Zoe. He had no idea what to do either, and was silently wishing they’d hired a baby nurse to teach them, at least for the first few weeks. He had no idea why Zoe was so opposed to it. For their first baby, they clearly needed help. They were intelligent, highly educated, sensible people, but this was all new to them. The baby hadn’t had a decent feeding since they got home from the hospital that morning, and he and Zoe looked beaten up. He was exhausted, and was hoping they’d get some sleep that night. It was beginning to seem unlikely that they’d sleep at all.
Zoe tried again then, and this time Jaime took the breast more peacefully, and managed ten whole minutes on one side before she fell asleep. Zoe