tit for tat

Poor Greg.

Poor, poor Greg.

He woke up this morning to the dulcet sounds of a cooing baby and her doting mother in the adjoining room. He walked into said room to snuggle the baby, smiling and pink on her playmat. Mere feet away was her mother, gray and pasty, hunched in the corner with all manners of milk-extracting apparati suctioned to her person. Greg, not wearing his glasses yet, didn't immediately realize what was happening, only connecting the dots after he identified the telltale mechanic groan of the breastpump.

"Woh. I didn't realize you were, um ... doing that."

Now, Greg is no prude, in fact he's quite a champion of breastfeeding and has endured a lot in our little jugg journey. But he's become accustomed to me bleating out, "DON'TCOMEINHERE! DON'TCOMEINHERE! DON'TCOMEINHERE!" while I'm pumping so as to preserve some measure of modesty, a practice I didn't bother utilizing this morning because I thought I was being stealth.

Thought.

Mother feeding child? A beautiful, natural thing. Mother grimacing topless with vacuums tugging at her nerples in a disturbingly bovine manner? A little upsetting.

The fact that I pump at all is sort of a joke anyway. June wants no part of the bottle. When she was really young she took the occasional pumped option without a problem, then one day, after putting two-and-two together she gave me this look like, "Nice try. But I want the big ones" and that was the end of that.

Still I pump just in case she changes her mind. This morning I retrieved a clean bottle in which to pour the goods and a ladybug flew out of it, so you know how well that's going.

After scouring the bottle and doing the switcheroo, I noticed a flier from our hospital in the pile of yesterday's unopened mail. Its subject was breastfeeding in the news and included little nuggets like, "In New Hampshire last year, 78.6 percent of new mothers breastfed, but only 47 percent were exclusively breastfeeding at three months of age..."

Thankfully, June is still of the "exclusive" camp, save for the occasional morsel of Sour Cream & Onion potato chip that may cascade from my mouth and into hers during "House Hunters" marathons. Point being, she's taken very well to the practice, which wasn't always a given.

Dartmouth-Hitchcock was pretty dang good at preparing us for life at the teat, and leaving the hospital the nurses and lactation consultants gave her a "10 out of 10" on the eating front. Like mother, like daughter.

What the they failed to mention was the possibility, nay probability, that a few days after baby is born, when the chuckwagon finally rolls into town, that the mammaries will be so laughably huge that baby may be unable to eat. Like trying to latch on to a basketball. This happened to us.

Poor Greg was elected to be the one to make the calls to the lactation consultants and the pediatrician, because he was the one not weeping, and then get dispatched to rent a hospital grade pump, because he was the one wearing a shirt. After about six hours of attempted latches and a round with the pump, I found myself flopped on our bed, useless. June was a puddle herself next to me and Greg was feet away on the phone uttering the following to a nurse.

"Yes, her nipples were erect when she was through pumping."

Even in the depths of my worried, self-pitying funk I remember thinking, "Holy crap, did he really just say that?"

God bless this man. Seriously, it takes a special person to do what he's done. I was a lump on the bed -- hopeless, hapless, topless -- and he took charge and checked his heebie-jeebies at the door. I will never forget that. And I'm afraid neither will he.

Everything turned out just fine. The pump did its thing, Junie took a bottle in her desperate hour of need, and half-a-day later we were back at it, machine-free.

She's nearly 15 weeks old, which means her pediatrician might greenlight her for solids in the next month or so, or she might wait until the more standard 6-month mark. Either way I get a little sad thinking it won't just be the two of us anymore. But that's mothering I suppose. I'd rather have her growing and hitting the expected milestones than being like that sadsack kid in "The Last Emperor."

And this way Greg will be able to put his powers of mental suppression to rest for a while.

Poor, poor Greg.

(Aside: Dad, I'm sorry for using "correct" terms like "breastfeeding," "erect" and "nipples." I've peppered this post with euphemisms as well, just for you. The title is also in your honor -- "Who the hell would want 'tat'?")