A note before you read this one: If you’re wondering why I’m giving so much detail about trying to feed my baby, it’s because it’s important later on in the story. You’ll see why when we get to that part. In the meantime, please bear with me or feel free to skip these parts if it’s too much to digest. Thank you!
I’d lost a lot of blood during the delivery, and following Jai’s birth, I was ghostly pale with severe anaemia. The doctors wanted to give me a blood transfusion. They said I needed it; my body was shutting down. But the family decided against it. My iron supplements were upped, and my father-in-law suggested I drink Guinness to boost my haemoglobin. I didn’t, of course, as I was still trying to feed my new baby… And that wasn’t going quite according to plan either.
When the first day’s excitement was over, and everyone had gone home from the hospital, when it had finally been time to spend some much-anticipated bonding and cuddling time alone with my baby and feed him for the first time… my baby wasn’t there.
My first night was spent alone. No baby in my belly to talk to. No Baby in my arms. I had only a Polaroid photo of him, which they’d snapped and handed to me when they’d taken him to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.
Alone now, in a sterile, empty hospital room, with nothing but a drab Polaroid photo with the date scribbled at the bottom to look at, felt eerie, and my body felt vacant. I didn’t like it. I missed him so much. I cried myself to sleep with Jai’s photo in my hands. Was my baby going to come back?
It turned out that Jai was a little jaundiced (quite common amongst South Asian babies) and had to spend his first few days away from me under a UV light in intensive care.
There, they had already, without my knowledge or consent, begun to feed him by the bottle. Exhausted from the labour, I slept the entire night. Nobody came to wake me to feed him. And on the second day, when they finally did bring him to me, he wouldn’t latch on.
I’d read all the baby books, Maanav and I had attended all the prenatal classes, and I knew I wanted to give my baby the best start in life; I was adamant about breastfeeding him. But Jai didn’t want to take it. It seemed, once he’d had the comfort and ease of the bottle on the first day, he wanted it and only it. The breast must have been hard work for him and for very little sustenance at that, because my milk hadn’t come in yet.
I spoke to a nurse about it. She disappeared and returned moments later, rolling in a Victorian-looking contraption on wheels: a breast pump, I was told. My eyes widened. I was being introduced to Daisy. Yes, as in Daisy the Cow. That benign name was what the nurses had named that thing. Daisy looked like she’d been stolen from a museum. The nurse strapped me up and went on her rounds. The chugging, hissing and thumping sounds were deafening. I felt like I was in a factory, not a hospital. And, oh my God, it hurt so bad. My heart went out to all the dairy cows in the world.
After around 15 minutes of excruciating pain and noise, Daisy had left me swollen and badly bruised. A nurse who’d come in to take my vitals saw my pained face and was alarmed. She immediately switched off the pump and helped me get out of it. I was panicking as the nurses were arguing. I shouldn’t have been attached to the machine for so long; it was only supposed to be ONE minute to begin with. The nurse who’d hooked me up to Daisy in the first place apologised, but the damage was done.
Still, I was determined to successfully feed my baby. I took advice from everyone. I tried every trick and gadget available. For weeks at home, I tried everything until I got a severe case of mastitis and infection set in with freezing chills and a high fever. I had to take antibiotics, and I knew it was game over. At least I could say I’d tried my best.
Throughout all of the breastfeeding drama and severe anaemia, I felt the effects of my hormones playing the dreaded game of post-natal depression, or the baby blues, as it’s also called. I hadn’t heard much about it before, though, so I had no idea that when I was crying on the garage floor, practically hugging the tyre of my husband’s car, begging him not to leave me, not to get in the car and go to work, it was a serious case of the baby blues.
I could hear my in-laws shouting at each other inside the house. “Do something. Get her inside!” my father-in-law was pleading. “We have to go to work!”
“I can’t!” I heard my mother-in-law retort. “What am I supposed to do with her. All she wants to do is go to her mother!”
Leaving me in a heap of tears on the garage floor, I watched Maanav’s car back out of the garage and drive off. The automatic door whirred down on my darkness again. I lay there sobbing alone until I exhausted myself. Then I noticed it was quiet. Where did everyone go? In a daze, I picked myself up off the floor and found my way back to the other side of the house, to my sleeping baby, blissfully unaware of his mother’s torment.
This is just one memory of the months of postnatal anguish I went through. I didn’t know then that it was hormonal, and my husband and his family hadn’t realised either. The tension bubble between us had begun to expand. We were no longer a happy family.
I couldn’t discount that it had been barely two years since I had tried to take my own life, and I had not received any proper mental health support since. So it should have been no surprise that adjusting to my new life wasn’t so simple, not just because of the baby. I went from a working-class household of abuse and neglect to living independently as a precocious teenager with no rules and no one to answer to, drinking daily, smoking cigarettes and weed, to a sober mother, and the daughter-in-law of one of the wealthiest and most respected Jain-Indian families in England.
And although they bought me clothes, a car, trips abroad, and we remodelled the entire top floor of the house where Maanav and I slept, which I was grateful for, I still felt like an outsider. Their lives were beautiful and blessed, no doubt, but so different from anything I knew.
And none of us was given much of a grace period to adjust; I was already pregnant and sick every day when I moved into their home. So rather than taking it slow and getting to know each other, they had to take care of me from the outset. Although I did my best around the house, and they loved my cooking, I felt more like a patient in their home than a family member. My mother-in-law worked tirelessly to take care of me before and after Jai was born. It was far from easy for her. I should have been the new daughter in the house, taking care of her, but I couldn’t. Perhaps it caused a spark of resentment somewhere.
Coming in and wrecking this family’s peace, I felt like a frickin’ cow.
(Originally published on os.me on November 7, 2022)