News

Feb 01, 2024

Learning how to parent in a world I cannot control

In my first week of motherhood, my nipples bled. Soon I had clogged ducts I needed to massage in the middle of the night. Then there was the painful milk blister that lasted for two and a half months,

In my first week of motherhood, my nipples bled. Soon I had clogged ducts I needed to massage in the middle of the night. Then there was the painful milk blister that lasted for two and a half months, more than half the baby’s life, that, with instructions from my doctor in lieu of an appointment, I lanced myself with an unused sewing kit needle. Twice.

I was lucky to be able to breastfeed, but I chose to do it mostly because I felt I should. The books said it would protect her, make her strong, keep her safe. But since becoming a parent, I have learned that no matter what I do to protect her, to make her strong and safe, there are no guarantees. I have also learned that even when it hurts, even when it is difficult, even when it is futile, I will continue to try.

It seems my daughter has always lived with danger in the air. She was born in 2020, and just as she was old enough to make her tiny way into crowds and germs, the world shut down. Suddenly, keeping my baby safe was exponentially harder, with threats in the very air she breathed. I knew nothing about raising a child, and even less about covid. It was the most uncertain I have ever been, in a time of worldwide uncertainty.

Through every challenge, every gassy scream and sleepless night, I whispered to my baby that we would figure it out. Then I cried from loneliness, at the impossibility of introducing her to the people who loved her, at the fear that she would contract an unprecedented virus. Outside my apartment there were sirens and silence, so I stayed home, and I breastfed. Nursing became routine and mindless. My body created milk without my asking it and hers, from birth, knew how to get it. We responded to our needs, creating the first strands of a relationship.

I wanted to breastfeed for a year. But she turned 1, then a month went by, then two months, and we continued. Just when it seemed we were both ready to stop, scientists found that vaccinated moms pass along their antibodies through breastmilk. This was the spring of 2021, and I had just gotten my first coronavirus shot.

Finally, there seemed to be a measure of protection for young kids, but with a mandate: Breastfeeding is like a daily pill, reports said, the protection does not last. I turned to my husband, deflated. “I am never going to be done with this, am I?” I meant breastfeeding, and covid, and the work of motherhood. This foreverness, I realized, is parenting. This lack of control? Parenting.

So I nursed my daughter every morning and night, even after discovering her favorite foods were oranges and blueberries. She soon learned the word “nurse” and started to request it. After I was no longer a “new mother” but still felt scared and insecure and tethered to my baby. After I was unsure if she still counted as a baby.

I struggled for my life to return to normal, to remember who I was, when I was further out from birth than everyone else in the virtual postnatal yoga class. But continuing to breastfeed did not feel like a choice. Would I not do anything for my daughter, who was too young to wear a mask, who seemed so soft and small and vulnerable? Would I not do anything to keep her safe?

I decided I would breastfeed until she turned 2 or was vaccinated, whichever came first. This decision, the way out, was a gift to myself. In the months that followed, I taught her the great things her body can do, like jumping, clapping, eating, but gave little thought to the accomplishments and possibilities of my own. I remind myself that producing milk is energy. It is not nothing. Neither is carrying her to our fourth-floor apartment or sleeping next to the baby monitor, my brain biologically trained to wake at a sound. I am learning to honor the physical work I have done, am doing, to take care of her.

Before she was born, I already thought of my daughter as strong. Early in my pregnancy I bled. Due to our different blood types, my body was rejecting her. I ran to the doctor for the first of three shots, common, they said, and my baby stayed healthy. When she was breech I had a procedure in which doctors flip the baby into position from outside and which can lead to fetal distress.

It felt like 15 minutes of a long punch to the stomach. When it worked my obstetrician high-fived the other doctors. During labor, my baby’s heart rate dropped and I had an emergency C section. I learned later that her heart rate was so low that my doctor screamed at another to get me in the operating room immediately.

My baby withstood all of this, she is strong, but it occurs to me that these moments marked my strength, too, and my desire to protect her. The needles and finger-shaped bruises on my belly, the scar just above my pubic bone, wider than my hand is long. I gave my body, my comfort to her. To protect her. Before she was born, I was already a good mom. I like to tell myself this. But as time goes on I realize how little strength matters when there is no alternative.

Just before her 2nd birthday, my daughter got covid. Her symptoms were mild. Like my ability to breastfeed, that could be luck, a trick of genetics or ventilation, or maybe, just maybe, she was not incredibly sick because she got antibodies in my breastmilk. I am not sure if I helped. The studies are debated. She got covid anyway. She fought it on her own, in a way I could not help her with. I tried to protect my child in a planet-halting emergency. I did and did not, could and could not. She was safe, until she was not.

Two weeks after her positive coronavirus test, I weaned her. She had her own antibodies now, better than what I gave her. Immediately I missed breastfeeding, as I suspected I would. I gave her something of myself, hour after hour, day after day, and now she no longer needed it. I know, of course, she is not done needing me, and breastfeeding is far from the last thing I will give her, far from the last attempt to ensure her safety.

Protection is slippery. Once one threat is neutralized, another emerges. I breastfed for two years, hoping it would protect my kid from covid. It did not. Now covid is less of a threat, but there is toxic smoke in the air, and masses of people are gunned down in malls and schools and movie theaters, over and over and over again. Roe is overturned, health care for trans kids is under assault, lifechanging books are banned in libraries, and children get sick without warning.

I put my daughter to bed drowsy but awake, I teach her the signs in the crosswalk, I tell her she is strong and brave and the boss of her body. But what does it matter if she has good sleep habits if she is shot by naptime? That she recognizes a walk signal if climate change destroys her world? That she knows her body is her own if a man uses his power against her?

I now think about the myriad ways we care for our children and the infinite ways we fail. This one thing I did, which feels by turns mindless and like a vast imposition, may have helped her at any moment, but there is no way to know. I still provide for her, but what I give may not make a difference. Does what I do keep her alive? Increasingly, I realize, it does not. And yet, I do it anyway. Because what is the alternative?

There is so little I can protect her from, really, so little I can do. But I could breastfeed. Maybe it was for me more than her, to feel like I was doing something proactive. I desperately need to believe that something I have done, decided, sacrificed for, has made a difference for the better. This, I realize, is parenting, the hope, against any evidence to the contrary, that what I do matters.

Katy Hershberger is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in the New York Times, Longreads, Slate and elsewhere.