Embarassment of Riches

I was happily catching up on my Bloglines feeds, and had an Ah hah! moment when reading Julia's recent posts and found her link to this. Nice to identify what's been going on with me. I've been worried, annoyed, and just confused by Monito's constant burping, spitting up, discomfort, gas, and agitation around feeding. Pequita suffered from none of that, so it was a rude awakening when my spawn struggled so. Many of the remedies the article lists are things that I arrived at by myself (after myriad combinations of habits & techniques) or cobbled together from advice and suggestions. Monito and I are managing pretty well now, at almost 3 months, but it sure would have been nice to have this information early on. I almost went to a LLL meeting several times, but figured I wasn't having trouble with his latching on, my supply, or nip.ple pain and didn't make time for it.

I know many people who had it much worse than I do, who struggled with cracked and bleeding nip.ples, not enough milk supply (=interrupted nursing, expensive formula, gadgets to help feed their baby that require set up, cleaning, sterilizing etc. even in the middle of the night, not to mention the heartbreaking disappointment of not being able to bond over the boob with their babe) and I would choose an oversupply problem any day. Nonetheless, it has been trying, and has caused much anxiety and crying on my part.

I figured out early in life that the worst you've encountered/experienced is the worst you can grasp. I arrived at this conclusion when at 18 years old I was in my car accident. I would be lying in my hospital bed with 2 broken legs, a crushed ankle, head contusions, et al, and a visitor would come to cheer me up and compare my convalescent experience to their traumatic elbow sprain when they were 10. This really infuriated me for a while. I mean, come on, really - an Ace bandage vs. traction & a wheelchair for 6 months? After a while I figured out that *I* certainly hadn't understood real pain, limitations, and loss of independence until it happened to me and I couldn't escape it. I had to learn about all those things and to accept them as lessons over time, and I'm mostly grateful for the knowledge, even as I resent the hell out of the physical limitations and expense and trouble of shoe shopping and modification. So my breast milk oversupply is like a sprained elbow to another persons multiple fractures.