Guest post: Can you make the 4th trimester suck less?
Hold the cabbage
First before I get to today’s guest post, two quick announcements/calls for input:
Witch Edith Zimmerman is looking for advice from those who have been there on moving with small children (from upstate New York to Orlando; kids preschool aged and younger.) Please reply to this email if you have any experience on this topic and I’ll send them to Edith/round them up for a future issue!
Live in Chicago? Friend/death doula Erica Reid Gerdes is going to be in conversation with Becky Robison, author of My Parents are Dead: What Now? at Women & Children First January 29. Whether your parents are dead or will be at some point this is going to be a great conversation.
Julia Elmaleh-Sachs is a lawyer and new mom in New York who had a feeling she was an Evil Witch before she even gave birth. Today, please enjoy a guest post from her about a few preemptive decisions she made around trying to make her postpartum experience less shitty, and if that was possible to do without feeling bad about it!
Before I even knew what the fourth trimester was, I became aware sometime in my twenties that the first six months as a new mom were NOT fun. “Miserable” is how one friend, one of the first in our friend group to have a baby ,described it. The older I got, the more friends succumbed to the trend of procreating, and the more the dreadof the nightmarish intro to parenthood became solidified in my brain. “Don’t take these times for granted: you’ll never be free again,” one newly postpartum friend advised me. “I didn’t sleep or shower for weeks,” said another. “I thought about asking for a divorce,” said MULTIPLE people.
The already daunting prospect of having a baby grew exponentially more terrifying. But once my husband and I decided that children were part of our imagined shared future, I decided to dig a little deeper. Was there anything I could do to transform this unequivocal hell into a less-terrible moment in time?
I surveyed the population, as well as my own set of values. I knew there was no way I was doing maternity leave by myself — in NY, we were fortunate enough to have 12 weeks of paid family leave, the details of which I am intimately familiar with due to my job as an employment discrimination attorney. If my husband wanted offspring, he was taking those 12 weeks with me, whether or not he got paid his full salary. I would rather eat peanut butter and jelly for dinner every day to save money than learn how to become a parent to a newborn alien by myself, and then have to teach my husband everything I knew after he got home from work. That would lead to divorce in less than a week.
The other thing I knew about myself by the time I got into my mid-thirties is that I am not a functioning human when I don’t get enough sleep. It is a waste of time for me to try to process information if I haven’t had a solid 7 hours. If I cannot process information, I certainly can’t learn a new skill, i.e., how to make sure your baby survives and potentially thrives. Solution? A very expensive night nanny. My friends who had hired one said it was “the best money they had ever spent.” How could I argue with that? As we began to try to get pregnant in our mid-thirties, we pooled together our savings and prioritized hiring a night nanny.
I had one friend who commented that it was kind of dumb to get a night nanny if you were breastfeeding because you had to wake up in the middle of the night anyway to breastfeed and pump. Like many progressive NY millennial women, I had always simply assumed I would breastfeed my children when the time came. I remember even remarking to a friend in high school that the “downside” of getting breast implants was no longer being able to breastfeed (I’m not sure how I knew this and whether it’s even true?) But as my friends started having babies in our early thirties, I began to understand that breastfeeding and pumping were kind of... hard? It might have, for some, contributed to the hellish landscape of their fourth trimesters.
By this time, at work, I had also represented a number of postpartum women who had been fired by their soulless employers after returning to work from maternity leave. My clients told me horror stories of pumping in the office (and by office, I mean a random storage closet with a broken lock and no sink or storage for pumped milk), pumping in a car, developing mastitis, and ever-dwindling milk supplies causing never-dwindling anxiety. None of that sounded like anything I desired to experience firsthand — hearing it secondhand and having to explain the guilt and shame my clients struggled with to old white male judges, opposing counsel, and mediators was more than sufficiently taxing.
When I got pregnant at 35, I wondered whether breastfeeding was worth the potential stress, inevitable physical pain, and inherent unbalanced division of labor. Then, during the first trimester of my pregnancy, four of my close friends gave birth to healthy babies. Two went straight to formula, and two attempted to breastfeed/pump. The anecdotal evidence of these four friends was dramatic: the two who went straight to formula had no postpartum anxiety, were sleeping almost the entire night because their partners were feeding their babies, and they were feeling like they were reinhabiting their pre-pregnancy bodies at a faster pace. Meanwhile, the two who breastfed and pumped were exhausted, meeting with lactation consultants, crying more, and/or refused to leave their babies at home with their husbands, even just to get a 30-minute manicure. One of these friends ended up breastfeeding and pumping for eight or nine months; the other one ceased attempting to breastfeed after eight weeks.
Given these stark differences and the fact that my breasts, which were already quite substantial, had doubled in size during my first trimester, my decision was easy: breastfeeding/pumping would not be part of my or my baby’s future. Once I made this decision, I learned of a medication called cabergoline that could dry up one’s milk supply instantaneously. I asked my friends who had gone straight to formula if they had been prescribed this magic pill: neither one had. They told me stories of wearing two sports bras at night for two weeks after the hospital, and nursing (pun intended) their swollen breasts with frozen cabbage leaves and ice packs. Luckily for me, once I mentioned it to my doctor, she said I just had to ask for it at the hospital, and she would make sure I got it. (This medication has fallen out of favor compared to earlier generations, but NYU is one of the few hospitals in the country that will dole out this medication postpartum to its patients to dry up milk supply!)
I am fortunate enough to have experienced only two instances of judgment and unsolicited feedback regarding my decision to go straight to formula, which I shared widely and loudly with any friend, acquaintance or service provider who would listen. One was from a physical therapist I started seeing during the last two months of my pregnancy for excruciating back pain; during our first meeting, she told me that formula was crap and that breastfeeding would make me lose weight. When I told her that I had made up my mind and there was no convincing me otherwise, she backed down and never brought it up again. The other instance happened during a prenatal massage. The masseuse told me she was a lactation consultant, and when I explained that I would not be breastfeeding, she looked at me in what can only be described as abject horror. She must have realized her mistake because she later apologized for her inappropriate reaction.
On July 5th, my due date, my water broke at 2:30 am. After a 30-hour labor, I gave birth to a healthy baby via emergency C-section. During the c-section, I developed uterine atony, which means that my uterus had trouble contracting enough to close the blood vessels, such that I hemorrhaged quite a lot and almost had to get a blood transfusion. The surgery took a total of two hours, and I was throwing up and shaking the entire time. The four days that followed in the hospital are blurry,y but I remember feeling immeasurably grateful to my nurses and all of the staff who never once pressured me to try breastfeeding or pumping.
As planned, they gave me cabergoline the day after my surgery, and when we went home a few days later, I asked my husband to grab a cabbage from the grocery store and throw it in the freezer. But I never had to use it! I never saw even a drop of milk come out of my breasts, nor did they feel painful or swollen. And thank god for that, because anyone who has gotten a C-section will tell you that the recovery in that first week is something else. From gas pains to incision pains, to being unable to walk or even lift the baby, I could only fathom what attempting to breastfeed or pump would have done to my mental health.
As the weeks went by, friends and family continuously checked in on me. “How is the fourth trimester going? I know it’s hard but it gets better.” But, much to my gratitude, I didn’t find it as hard as I feared. I loved hanging out with my family and friends, having drinks when I wanted, not having back pain, being able to wear all my clothes again, and getting to know the little human I had painfully grown and birthed. Aside from recovering from the trauma of an unplanned surgery and hemorrhage, it was freeing to feel like my body no longer belonged to an unknown fetal entity, that it was entirely autonomou,s and the only person I had to worry about was myself (I helped care for and bonded with our baby obviously, but I let my husband do all the worrying). I’m so happy for my friends who enjoyed breastfeeding (I don’t think anyone actually enjoys pumping?) and who had an easy time with supply and latching. But I also wish there weren’t so much societal pressure and blanket assumption that breast is best and everyone should at least try. I believe that going straight to formula and ensuring that feeding was a two-person job rather than a one-person duty was the right choice for me, and likely the right choice for many other women.
And if anyone gives you a hard time, remind them that it’s YOUR body and therefore YOUR choice only. I have no regrets whatsoever, and my husband knows how to take care of my daughter from feeding to diapering just as well as I do (he would argue better).
Julia Elmaleh-Sachs is a partner at the litigation firm Crumiller, where she leads various civil rights matters that include pregnancy and race discrimination, sexual harassment, and a plethora of other lawsuits against (true) evil actors. Prior to entering into the field of employment law, she began her legal career as a Juvenile Rights attorney with the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn. Also, at 8 years old, she acted in a commercial for a Britney Spears Barbie doll and was paid in candy and dolls.
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