By Agent Tarter
Posted on Sunday, June 26th, 2016
If you breastfed your baby, think back to the information you got when you were getting started. You probably remember lots of information about building your supply. Build that milk supply! Make sure you nurse at night – that’s when the hormones that build supply get produced! You can drink special mother’s tea that will help give you more supply!
Yeah, you know what would have been useful? Talking about the opposite situation.
I did NOT have to worry about having enough. My milk came in before I left the hospital, 48 hours later, and man oh man, could you tell. Once, long ago, I remember a time when I was a C cup; I left the hospital with a pair of Es or Fs crammed into a DD nursing bra.
The guidelines all say kids should gain at least 4 ounces a week. My son O.’s record was a POUND. My family doctor laughed and said, “Well, some women make milk and some make cream!”
But it wasn’t just that my breasts ooze butter…it was also that there was SO DAMN MUCH of it. When O. nursed on one side, I could feel the other let down like someone had put a clamp on my boob. Only one brand of nursing pad could contain it, and even then I had to change them four times a day. If O. let go while I was letting down, jets of milk would spray all over his face, and on multiple occasions he actually choked when my letdown gave him more milk than he could drink. For a few weeks, I had to nurse him while leaning back in a recliner so that my milk sprays would have to go against gravity.
It is a bit of an understatement to say that O. regularly spit up. Actually, his poor little belly was so overfull that he regularly hit the far wall of the nursery. I learned to keep two or three burp cloths handy: one for him, one for me, and one to clean up whatever hit the floor.
When you have an oversupply, you frequently run into a problem called “foremilk / hindmilk imbalance.” In a nutshell, the first milk out of your boob is thin, and it gets thicker/creamier as kids empty the breast. If you have an oversupply, kids fill up on the foremilk and don’t get the hindmilk. This tends to make them cranky (since they don’t get the satisfying fat) and it also – fun fact – makes their poop foamy and green. No, really green. Green as the grass. Seriously. I have never seen anything like it and I hope I never will again.
The solution is to start feedings off of the same breast multiple times in a row. Sounds simple, right? It is…sort of. What the cheerful suggestions online or in guidebooks don’t really discuss is what to do with the other breast, the one that is slowly inflating and leaking and generally starting to scream at you that you should really get a baby on there. Eventually you find the oh-so-helpful advice that you should pump or express a bit from the opposite breast – but not too much, lest you prompt the buildup of even more supply. Also, you can run into some weird side effects…a friend who also had an oversupply ended up feeding off her left side so often that her baby decided he would only nurse from the left. The end result was that her right breast’s supply dried up, so she spend nine months with an engorged D cup on one side and a shrunken light B on the other. Ah, the majesty of childrearing.
Even with all of this, I was not prepared for the greatest of challenges: the first time O. slept through the night. It’s supposed to be a glorious day! You’re supposed to wake rested and refreshed with the birds chirping and a renewed love for your beautiful infant child, who is sleeping angelically.
Yeah, no. What happened to me was I woke up at 3:00 in the morning, both boobs as big as volleyballs and about as hard to the touch. My full milk ducts felt like cables under my skin, and the breast I’d accidentally rolled over onto was frantically squirting through my nursing pad and my pajamas. I didn’t have a pump, so I spent an hour awake milking myself into towels until everything (including me) calmed down enough to go to sleep. So glamorous.
Eventually, of course, things settled further. By the time O. was eating solids, my supply was generous but no longer so overwhelming (although my letdown was still dramatic, so my partner and I still joke that the first time O. tries a beer funnel in college he’s going to feel strangely reminded of Mom.) And for any other moms out there with oversupply, at least in my case, the rumours are true: with a second baby, it’s not as ridiculous. When I had G. things were much more under control, both literally and figuratively.
I don’t envy women who struggle with low supply, but I do wish that more people had talked about the possibility of having too much of a good thing. It came with its own set of challenges, and it was surprisingly difficult to find solutions to those problems because everything I looked for was busy talking about how to build supply up.
In the long run, though, I guess it’s good to know that if civilization collapses, I have a secure future as a wet nurse ahead of me.
About the Author:
Avid reader, budding writer, incessant singer. Married to a partner with OCD and parent of a child with autism. My opinions may be slanted by my experiences living in the socialist paradise of Canada.
