Why I am not a lactivist.

I was going to do everything "properly" with my first baby. Natural birth, no epidural, no C-section. And I was going to nurse my baby from the start; formula was evil. It's amazing how dogmatic you can get when you really don't know much about life.

From the start, things were not as I had so carefully planned them. I was sick all nine months of my pregnancy, including one hospitalization and several E.R. trips to remedy severe dehydration. Then the baby was late -- very late -- and we needed to induce labor.

Labor lasted thirty hours. It was hell. I kept up my resolution to not use drugs until the twenty-sixth hour when, physically exhausted and discouraged, I begged for an epidural. Several hours later, my son was born.

As many babies do, he needed to be fed frequently. I was still exhausted from labor, and being woken up every two hours to feed simply deepened that exhaustion. I vaguely remember begging my obstetrician not to send me home after 24 hours. He, of course, had no choice: insurance being what it was, I would have had to pay for the hospital bed an additional day (even if the hospital would have let me stay, which was unclear), money which I just didn't have.

I went home to a household filled with grandparents just in time for the Thanksgiving holiday. Given that my mother-in-law was there, I was determined not to let her do all the work. (She had rearranged my living room furniture while I was in labor. I had something to prove, or thought I did.) And the baby still needed to be fed every two hours.

My husband called my sister and a local La Leche League consultant. No, it was important that we never supplement. I was ready to throw in the towel, but he held firm. (In his defense, he didn't know anything more about this than I did.) My exhaustion deepened; I began to feel as though I was completely disconnected from the world.

I have suffered from depression a lot in my life, but nothing was like the pit I descended into then. It was as though the ground had dropped beneath my feet leaving me in utter blackness. I began to lose contact with my surroundings. My sleep deprivation was becoming severe. And the baby needed to be fed every two hours.

And he started to cry all the time. Nothing would soothe him. I would hold him, and he would be okay, but soon he would be crying again. I could not escape the crying. I started being unable to sleep between feedings, because the baby was crying all the time.

I still remember the day I went to the store to get a few items. I was on the way back when the baby started crying again. I felt such despair, the baby was crying again -- would it never stop? Was there nothing I could do?

The baby was not in the car with me, but at home with my mother.

It says something about my mental state that it was not until several months later that I recognized the fact that I had been hallucinating. And probably not for the first time: about a year ago, my husband and I were talking about when my son was a newborn. "He cried all the time," I said. My husband gave me a strange look," No, he didn't, no more than the other two. He didn't get colicky until he was several months old."

I was in freefall. Things came to a head a week later, when my husband had to go out of town for a business trip, leaving me and the baby alone in the house (my mother had gone back to Florida a day or so before). I looked at him calmly and said "If you leave, one or the other of us won't be here when you get back." What I did not tell him -- or anyone -- until years later was that I had already known I was going to kill myself. I thought there was a good chance I was going to kill the baby, too, and whatever spark of compassion I had in my soul (not fear of damnation -- I was already damned) made me feel that this was grossly unfair to the baby. It wasn't the baby's fault I was its mother, he shouldn't have to die for that.

He got angry, but called my obstetrician, who had me hospitalized. The first things the doctor did? Take the baby from my care, have my husband feed the baby formula, and have me sleep for twenty-four hours. When I woke up, I felt far more sane than I had in the previous two weeks.

There was still a lot to be done -- my relationship with my son had been damaged by my psychosis, and that needed to be repaired. You may notice above that I refer to "the baby" and even "it"; that was how I thought of him. The social worker made me start calling him by name, and seeing him as my child rather than this alien being. When I think of those first days, I can't help but think of him as being born during my second hospitalization -- that was when I got to know him and see him as my child.

After that, we supplemented wherever it was necessary to make sure that I had at least four to six hours of uninterrupted sleep. And we did this with the second and third children as well. Prompt treatment of post-partum depression helped insure that I didn't end up psychotic again.

So whenever I hear lactation fascists go on about how horrible bottles are, and how awful mothers are who feed their babies formula, I just want to tell them to go straight to hell. Hopefully, a hell as deep and black as the one I experienced when I came frighteningly close to committing suicide and murder.