Breastfeeding: The Ironman of Good Enough Complexes
Except there is no official medal.
I am going to start with a confession. There is a small part of me that breastfed my children so I could say that I did it. As a runner of only one marathon to date, there is a small part of me that ran 26.2 miles so I could say that I did it. I got a medal for the marathon. There was no medal for breastfeeding, although I suppose I could fashion one out of Medela Symphony tubes.
I suspect many other people would confess to the same thing regarding breastfeeding, running a marathon, or completing an Ironman. All of them are grueling, mentally and physically challenging experiences that test the limits of human capacity. To say you’ve done it is hugely validating and part of the reward.
As a validation junkie, I held up breastfeeding as one of the foundational principles of “being a good mother” - if not the main principle. I did not realize that breastfeeding would be, for me, the Ironman of good enough complexes.
I spent my whole life soaring through school and most of my pursuits. Gifted. A after A after A. My high school principal, the incomparable Shirley Gaede Speaks, joked my junior year that I should have my own chair on stage because I’d been up there so many times to accept awards. It remained a Bacchanalia of brainy kids with LL Bean backpacks and Mead binders through college. After graduation the accolade gravy train dropped me off in the real world. Two degrees, too many courses of college calculus, and a thesis paper on Julio Cortázar didn’t fully prepare me for the challenges of breastfeeding.
They did prepare me for setting up and following a complex pumping routine, complete with color-coded Google sheet to track production. But when the numbers didn’t add up to enough, it added up to not being good enough.
I didn’t consider the fact that my first baby was born 11 weeks early and my body wasn’t ready. I didn’t appreciate that I couldn’t nurse her directly for over a month and thus was never able to develop a supply based on her needs. I didn’t take into account that per doctor’s orders, and due to the need for steady weight gain, I could only nurse twice a day once she was home. I didn’t even really consider pumping as breastfeeding. All I could see was that I couldn’t pump enough breast milk to satisfy every feeding. I equated that with not good enough - it literally wasn’t enough - and thus, I must not be good enough as a mother.
There it is - the Ironman of good enough complexes. A physical and mental mind trip akin to a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride, and a 26.2 mile run. I am supposed to be able to do this and I can’t! This is critical for my baby! She’s a preemie and what about all the stuff she is supposed to get from breastmilk, she won’t be able to get the full benefits! What about her development? I AM RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS! How can I be a good mother when I can’t even do the one baseline thing that mothers are supposed to do?
And so I threw myself into training. To find the things that could make me perform better, to pump more milk. In school I could always study harder. At work I could work harder. In this case, the more I worked, the more it seemed to work against me. Nothing I did really got the supply up. I was so hard on myself for not being successful at breastfeeding, which to me, equated to nursing my baby directly and being able to pump enough breast milk for every bottle feeding.
And so I limped along, trying to reach the finish line: breastfeeding for one year. I signaled the course officials around 11 months to take me out of the race. When I stopped pumping, I dealt with a little disappointment that I didn’t make it to one year, but the overwhelming feeling was relief. I didn’t have to put myself through the physical and mental anguish anymore. I felt I failed to measure up as a good mom when the milk didn’t measure up. Once I stopped pumping, I was no longer confronted with that feeling.
I am almost eight years past my first bout with breastfeeding, and I still grapple with being good enough as a mom. It’s still there, just not as intense. It’s not at Ironman level, and not having a visual reminder in the form of milk dripping into bottles helps. And while that first time I didn’t make it a full year, I still get to say I did it. Which is probably more than I can say for an actual Ironman. The marathon I could do. The biking probably. You lose me at the swim. While I’m a child of the cold, early morning pools of the Midwest, that involved swimming laps in water you could see. Open water? No thanks.
I started a journaling practice while breastfeeding my third that I wish I would have had the first time around. Last year I turned it into a book. It’s much more fun than my Google spreadsheet, trust me. If you or a friend would benefit from reconnecting with intuition and practicing a bit of mindfulness while breastfeeding, I invite you to check it out: https://www.emilylkendall.com/books
It’s available on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Bookshop.org.
I did have fun writing this piece about marathons and breastfeeding.
To learn more about a real Ironman athlete, check out Chris Nikic.
- helped inspire the title of this piece in a chat we were having about good enough complexes. Follow his first season here: I’m (not??) The Best. It tracks. You’ll laugh a lot too, but better do those pelvic floor exercises to keep the tinkle in.