laptop vs. breast pump

no epiphanies here

Happy Sunday from nowhere! After a long hiatus, I’m back—and I had a baby 🙃 My brain remains loosely in tact, and I’ve missed our regular contact over the past many months. Unsurprisingly, the job of parenting has been on my mind, so today’s essay is dedicated to that.

Me with my very own daughter, Nova Nell Danahy 💫 Look at our matching boings of hair!

new gig, same feels

A few months ago, Mike and I were packing for a trip to New York City. It would be our first trip with our new baby daughter, and I was still on leave from my job. As I went to pack my backpack, I realized that I wouldn’t need my laptop (so fun!), but I did have to account for something else. Did they make backpacks with built-in slots for … an enormous breast pump?

Even before I started to seriously consider having kids, I was curious about how I would feel about the job of parenting. I trace this to the experience of observing my mom, who, in addition to being my mom, worked as a lead pastor at a busy church during my childhood. What I picked up from her was that her professional job and her parenting job were generally at odds: one was always taking time away from the other, making her stressed, weighing her down with enormous guilt. And at the same time, I could tell that she derived meaning from balancing the two, particularly as someone for whom feminism was an important part of her identity. The resulting narrative (combined with the broader, probably sexist, cultural story at the time) suggested that even though it was difficult, being a working mom was the intellectual choice, the feminist choice, the noble choice. The only choice. 

But I secretly harbored a fantasy that when my turn came, I’d have some obvious, undeniable reason to pick one or the other. To opt out of professional work and become an incredible baker-slash-lunch-packer, OR to go all-in on non-parenting work and hire someone to be the incredible baker-slash-lunch-packer. The in-between just looked too … hard. (Not becoming a parent at all didn’t really occur to me as an option, which is why the fantasy of being able to “choose” felt so appealing.)  

So in August, when I found myself on the precipice of becoming a parent, I crossed my fingers for the epiphany that would determine my direction. I wrapped up meetings on a hot summer Friday for a four-month hiatus, intentionally pausing a week before my daughter’s due date so that I’d have a bit of buffer time between my old life and my new one. A few final moments to get ready for the big reveal: that I was, after all, totally obviously definitely cut out for full-time [parent/work]ing! But Nova wasn’t interested in buffer time; she was born the next day. Overnight, one job ended and the other began. And instead of the life-changing, single moment of clarity I’d been waiting for, all I could seem to do was draw parallels between the new work of parenting and the work I’d known before—particularly through the lens of breastfeeding.

It really hit me when I went to pack my backpack for that trip to New York. The stark contrast between the technology I needed for my desk job, a laptop, and the technology I needed for my parenting job, a breast pump, felt comical to me—but at the same time, the fact that I had just traded one machine for another highlighted the literal replacement of one job with a different one. Despite the daydreams I’d concocted while pregnant, the “work” of parenting wasn’t some sublime, otherworldly pursuit. It was just another job that required me to lug around a heavy thing that plugs into the wall.

And there were other similarities, too. The ever-present stress of my desk job—does the team have enough to work on? Is the feature we just built performing well?—was one of the aspects of professional life I was most eager to pause when cosplaying the full-time job of parenting. And I was excited to find that those thoughts exited my brain pretty quickly. But like a boy in khakis who taps you on the shoulder at cotillion, breastfeeding immediately cut in and took over as the dominant source of stress in my universe. 

To break it down a bit: babies need to eat every 2-3 hours. So instead of phrasing and re-phrasing Slack messages about engineering timelines while holding my breath, the stress came from a constant mental calculation of how long it had been since my daughter last ate. My days became a blur of  counting: if I misremembered the time of her last feed and sailed past the next one by mistake, or overstayed my welcome in the bakery section at Whole Foods, it was a race against the clock to get to a chair, rip off my clothes, and get my boob into her mouth. While that’s a different stress than presenting product plans to a room full of Zoom people, it didn’t matter—it was still stress.

In actuality, Nova is pretty easy-going. Half the time I’d freak out for nothing; she’d start eating only to look up at me and smile like I’m the baddest b*tch in the United States. Even so, as I’ve had for years with my job, I had stress-dreams about feeding, too, the worst of which featured a bloody crust forming around my daughter’s mouth in a horrifying subliminal representation of my failure as a mother. When I had that first stress dream, my first thought was: wait, I thought parenting meant escaping work stress. Why does this feel so … similar?

 One thing that felt pretty different, though, was that the mental stress of breastfeeding brought a friend: physical stress. For a long time now, I’ve touched my computer for money; ie, I’m a knowledge worker and my job demands very little from me physically (perhaps besides making me largely desk-bound most of the day). However, breastfeeding is extremely physically demanding in a way that no job I’ve ever had can rival. (This from someone who spent a summer as a “female stunt” at Casa Bonita, where my literal job was to get pushed off a 15-foot “cliff” 3x/hour dressed as an overzealous zoo employee. You heard it here first: breastfeeding is 5000% harder.) 

The physical demands of breastfeeding weren’t at all what I expected. I’d heard people describe the experience as feeling like their body was “no longer their own.” But if anything, it felt more like my body belonged to me: I became hyper-aware of its bizarre capabilities and their effects on me. And it became suddenly, viscerally obvious that I wasn’t in control of any of it. For example: bras. Already, they suck, and are only somewhat effective at helping women feel like we have some control over the shape of our bodies. But breastfeeding killed any remaining vestige of faith I had in bras as a form of comfort. If finding and/or wearing a bra felt challenging to you before, try finding one that can support two XL chest canteens, not put your ribs into squeezy-wire jail, and be easy to take on and off eight times a day. File that one under nope.  

That, plus so many other things: soreness. Engorgement. Leakage. Pain during feeding. Phantom pain before and after feeding. Neck and shoulder pain from constantly craning to see if she’s eating, if I’m leaking, or a combination of the two. Wrist pain from constantly adjusting her head. Exhaustion from waking up at night to feed her. It’s … a lot. The whole thing caused an eerie cognitive dissonance: why was this body, which I’d previously believed I was in control of, going rogue without my permission? (In hindsight, it’s strange that I didn’t really feel this way during pregnancy—but that’s a topic for another essay.) Alongside the actual physical demands, it was this lack of control that felt the most divorced from any prior work I’d done, where I felt generally in charge of my own destiny. This felt like a movie I’d been told I was directing that turned, dream-like, into a movie I was living instead.

So perhaps that was one point in the “I’m not cut out for full-time parenting” camp. If the mental stress was an even trade, and both jobs required a heavy piece of machinery (lol), at least my desk job didn’t cause me physical pain. But then there were the upsides of each job to consider. 

Like a good Millennial, I’m an empty shell of a person without the purpose and meaning my job brings to my life. I wasn’t too worried about missing that when I went on leave—I could still tie my identity to my job, even if I wasn’t actively doing it—but I was surprised to discover that breastfeeding brought me purpose and meaning in spades. Pumping is notoriously difficult: it requires all these small plastic parts, which have to be dismantled, washed, and reconstructed for every single session—and your supply always seems to slow down at the exact moment you’ve finally decided to get it together and attach yourself to the machine. So when I manage to successfully produce a 5oz bottle, I’m like, Um, am I … INCREDIBLE?! I am a literal WIZARD!!! 

And on a more serious note, the feeling of feeding your baby, watching her open her eyes, take in the world, and look at it in astonishment—an experience you enabled for her—is one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. It’s not wholly unlike the most idealized version of our professional pursuits: you make something, you give it your time and attention, and then you get to watch what happens when you put it into the world—which is pretty dang satisfying. But that experience in the context of something you made with your body, also with the body of a partner who you love? I mean, that’s next level.

So now I’m back at square one: the physical demands of parenting are at an all-time high, but so is the sense of purpose I get from it. Neither “job” feels obviously more fulfilling—both are challenging, boring, joyful, absurd. It’s becoming clear that the epiphany I crave in my long-held fantasy, and the meticulous exercise of stacking up the evidence on each side to try to get it to materialize, is just that: a fantasy. There is no way to “opt out” of the struggle I watched my mom endure; choosing full-time parenting or cranking the dial to 100 on my professional work would be just as difficult as pursuing a balance of both.

In her essay “The Trick of the Epiphany,” Haley Nahman writes, “it seems obvious to me now that self-knowledge isn’t a journey toward a singular state. That life is just a series of settlings and unsettlings on repeat.” And that, I’m learning, is where the meaning comes from: in the daily discovering, the perpetual unsteadiness that comes from an attempt at balance. I think that’s what I picked up on from my mom all those years ago: I saw the struggle and the confusion and the murkiness she felt in choosing to be both a pastor and a mom. I understand now that it’s this meandering, this squinting through the mist, these spaces between feeling settled and feeling completely unmoored that make the meaning. 

Fittingly, it’s taken me a while to accept that clarity and conviction don’t materialize overnight, even in those strange, exceptional moments in life when a new job does. I’m trying to remember that as I find my way through returning to work these next few weeks—for the first time as a mom, but for the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time as me: just a person who is living in the balance.

🌞

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Thanks for reading! A wee housekeeping note: I moved this newsletter to Substack a while back, which means you’ll get it in your inbox and find it on the web here. You can still reply directly to me via email, and you can also leave comments if that sounds fun. You can unsubscribe any time by visiting your account (top right > manage subscription) and scrolling to notifications > unsubscribe.

And finally: I’ll resist using this space to overload you with Nova content, but if you want to zoom in on pictures of her hair, just email me and I’ll add you to our shared Google album.

Sending love,
Becca