The Bottle Whisperer

Today's Washington Post features DC's "Breast Whisperer"--a $150 an hour lactation consultant who saves new moms from resorting to the unthinkable: bottle feeding. She is booked around the clock with $150 home visits and $85 an hour office appointments--all told she sees about 80 women a week, according to the article. Don't think she's in it for the money, though--the article points out that she magnanimously reserves two free visits a week for low-income families!

No, she's not in it for the money--the article says that her message is:

Breast-feeding may not always be easy, but it's the healthiest option for babies' development and immune systems, as well as for their mothers' stress levels and improved protection against some cancers.

I think she's onto something--not with her opinion that breastfeeding is the end all, be all--but that women are willing to pay top dollar to have someone help them feed their babies. I will spare you my rant about why I'm sick to death of hearing how "breast is best" and how breastfed babies never get sick or have allergies and are all geniuses. Suffice it to say that back when I had Mimi I was just like the women in this article--brainwashed to think that not breastfeeding your baby was tantamount to feeding it Drano and any mom who wasn't willing to go to whatever length necessary to breastfeed for at least a year deserved to have her baby taken away from her.

I did everything in my attempt to keep breastfeeding through severe postpartum depression and nipples that were basically dangling by bloody threads as a result of Mimi's bad "latch": I forked out money to a lactation consultant who sent me home with a hospital grade breast pump (even though I was home full-time with my baby and had enough milk to feed 5 babies) and detailed instructions to do something to my nipples pretty much every waking hour of the day: soak them in soup bowls of warm water, blow dry them, put neosporin on them, put antifungal cream on them (just in case I had thrush, even though neither I nor Mimi had any symptoms of it), put hot compresses on them, put cold compresses on them--oh, and walk around without a shirt or bra on anytime I was home.

Thinking back to that time just makes me shudder--I was such a mess and drove myself absolutely crazy obsessively trying to ignore my bleeding, mangled nipples and do what good moms do: breastfeed my baby. When, after 6 weeks, the psychiatrist declared that I needed to either go on medication or be hospitalized, I dejectedly called the lactation consultant to get her guidance on how to wean the baby--because everyone knows you can't just quit cold-turkey. Like a salesperson trying to prevent a customer from walking away from a sale, she helpfully pointed out--and this is not a joke or an exaggeration; these were her EXACT words:

"Sometimes formula-fed babies sleep so deeply they never wake up."

But I digress...I forgot I said I'd spare you the rant. At any rate, I think I should go into business as a bottle-feeding consultant. That's a service that society is severely lacking; someone to tell you that the world won't end if you decide not to breastfeed your baby. I could offer anecdotes about all the breastfed babies who actually end up not actually having immune systems of steel--I mean, seriously--do you honestly think that every single one of the millions of kids who are deathly allergic to peanuts or milk or dust or who knows what was bottle fed? I could compile lists of geniuses throughout history who never tasted so much as a drop of breastmilk.

Seriously--for every woman out there desperate to spend any amount of money to have someone be her breastfeeding cheerleader, there is another who'd pay just as much to have someone reassure her she's not a monster or a bad mom for wanting to feed her baby formula. For $150 an hour, I could be that woman.