I am very proud to share that this post was first published at Mothering Magazine earlier this week, when I guest blogged for my dear friend and fellow childbirth educator Lauren McClain of Better Birth Maryland.
We wear invisible badges of honor as parents. Or rather, we earn these measures of our strength and fortitude, and we earn them in ways that do not come up in typical daily conversation. Not everyone can get a badge for the same thing, because for one parent a milestone might be easy while for another it requires Herculean force. Our badges say things like “I survived going back to work at 6 weeks when my FMLA was up and sometimes I still feel guilty” or “No one in our house slept through the night until a month ago” or “3 years of fertility treatments”. Not all our invisible accomplishments become badges. I don’t even think we wear badges for those things we cope with that make us feel like better people afterward. Those challenges that clearly benefited our relationships and our selves are absorbed into the body as new assets, glowing quietly within us. We feel proud when we think about those times, and can look back on our hardship with compassion, love, and gratitude for the experience. I feel this way about my husband’s deployment. It was hard, but we came out with so much insight and tenderness, I’m happy when I remember it. I don’t have to wear deployment as a badge. Badges are for trials we haven’t quite recovered from yet. My badge says “Breastfeeding.” Maybe it should really say “Breastfeeding with insufficient glandular tissue,” but I didn’t know that for sure while it was happening. Truly, I don’t even know that for sure now. But what I know, I know after nursing, syringe feeding, finger feeding, feeding with an SNS on the breast, paced bottle feeding, pumping, pumping after nursing, pumping after bottle feeding after nursing, cleaning bottles when I should have been sleeping, meeting with two International Board Certified Lactation Consultants, appointments with my doctor, my pediatrician, my midwife, and an endocrinologist, an invaluable but overwhelming online support group, and a battery of tests done in one day that included at least 10 blood draws (was it more like 14?) and that glucose drink everyone loves. In the end, there’s “nothing wrong with me”. It was time for celebration, but perhaps moreso, grief. The irony was not lost on myself or my family—‘nothing wrong with me’ meant freedom from my struggle, it meant I had received my diagnosis of exclusion for IGT. It meant I had done all the right things. But it also meant that it was time to put the dog down and live with the fact that there was nothing more to do at this time. I did allow the numbers to affirm all the hard choices I have made in the last ten years to prioritize my health. I did soak in the confirmation of how much I had done during my pregnancy to care for myself and my baby. Those things glow within me, they travel with me invisibly on the inside. But “Breastfeeding” still reads clearly on my badge. My badge is my yearning to tell my story, to honor my grief, to embrace my truth, to heal myself and those also affected by this thing that looking back, I don’t really know how I survived. But I did, one moment at a time. So, until I reveal my hurt in words so many times that the words stop hurting—until I glow instead of suffer—I will wear my badge. And I will try to listen closely, to see if you want to talk about your badge, too.
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AuthorMary Hawkins is many things, including a writer and a mommy. ArchivesCategories |
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