Mama Bear

I had heard that women experience what some call the Mama Bear response whenever their baby, and later child and even adult, cries or expresses fear or pain. This shit ain't no joke. When Jupiter cries - not fusses, but cries - my body reacts as if he is trapped in a burning building. My heart rate goes up, I sweat, I get butterflies, and eventually it takes a surprising amount of mental control to keep me from running to him or yelling at Jay to go to him faster.

Because we have been letting Jupe cry a little bit when he wakes (maximum of five minutes), he is now able to put himself back to sleep most of the time when he wakes but is not hungry. Which is seriously great. But no matter how many times we do this, I still get this response. Funny enough, it's significantly less fast to engage with a middle-of-the-night waking than with an early evening waking - I think my body is (thankfully) prioritizing my rest over the baby's slight unhappiness. Because that's what it is: slight unhappiness. Knowing this does not make things easier when he's crying in the early evening, though. Fortunately, he cries less and less. We've only gone the full five minutes a handful of times. Sleep is getting better, friends.

But the Mama Bear in me manifests in other ways, too. Tonight, what inspired this post is the decision Jay and I made to have him try to give Jupe a bottle when he wakes for his first feeding. We have never done this before. We should have done it, should have been doing it much earlier when my sleep was an utter disaster and I was feeling the stress of deprivation. But we didn't. I have an overabundance of the enzyme lipase in my breastmilk - how we finally figured this out is a story unto itself. But what it meant was that Jupe wouldn't take a bottle without yelling about it, even though we started before he was a month old. And once we figured it out, I had to throw away all the milk I had stored in the freezer. Oh, heartbreak. Damn that was hard. And then I had to build up the supply again, scalding the milk immediately after pumping to kill the enzyme that soured my milk if it sat outside my body for more than a few minutes. Which meant that we stopped giving a bottle regularly, so I could freeze what I was pumping. BAD IDEA.

A few weeks later, he wanted nothing to do with bottles. Period. We tried several bottles and nipples, several ways of holding and walking with him, even sippy cups. We finally found that he will sort of take the Nuk Orthodontic nipple or the Nuby sippy cup, but it's slow going with both. He likes to play with the bottle and has yet to drink more than two ounces at once - it's just not what he prefers. So tonight, we decided Jay would give a nighttime bottle to see what might happen if a sitter had to feed him. Because WE WILL BE GOING OUT SOON.

And that brings me back to the subject of this post. The idea of going out - shit, the idea of Jay giving Jupe a nighttime bottle - gives me the heeby jeebies. I feel protective of my nursing, of the very thing that steals my sleep and ties me to this boy all day, every day. I am sitting here, typing this blog post to try to work the heeby jeebies out, to try to destress. But I can't exactly say why it's bothering me so much. I want the boy to take a bottle - I NEED TO GET OUT. But there's a sizable part of my emotional self that is sad (?) about not being absolutely needed like I have been for the past four months. No one can feed Jupey like I can, and I like that. As difficult as that fact has made my life, it's true.

We have a nanny starting in one week, for two days per week, and Jay is taking a morning shift one day a week, all so I can leave the house and get back to my own work. Jupe will be getting at least three bottles a week. This feels like the beginning of the end. I can absolutely understand why some mother/baby pairs nurse well into the toddler stage. It's precious and I don't want to let go. Not even a little. But I have to. Don't I?