Dear all:

Since this is my third message of the day, I'm cheating - with a double. 

First, many thanks to the listmothers and to all the participants on this website!  I have learned 
more on this website than all the conferences and training that I have undergone.  Plus, all the 
wonderful range of personalities and opinions.  This website, to me, is the epitomy of the 
democratic process in action.  Sometimes we get pissed off and vent more than we should and get 
admonished to watch our words, but we discuss the full range of viewpoints.  I have been swayed 
from some of my ideas by those who have opened my eyes to new ways of thinking.  I belong to a 
number of other Listserves and none even compares. I'd say there is about 0.01% the dynamic 
interaction that I have encountered on this website.  

Second, because I'm still glowing from Diane Weisseninger's talk which I so really needed and all 
the passionate posts by Jennifer Tow and others about how birthing impacts the breastfeeding 
experience --- I need to share again after watching the bonding process in action (or in this case 
NOT!).  A friend of mine, with whom I was a breastfeeding buddy and we both nursed for such a 
long duration that it would have many mothers in our nursery schools aghast at the horror of it - 
just had 2 babies via IVF seven years after her first.  This was a mom who nursed anywhere and 
everywhere - on the subway, in the park, on the floor of the Museum of Natural History on the 
dinosaur floor.  She whipped it out once at the Central Park Zoo with her son sitting on the table at 
the member booth.  But after preeclampsia and 34 week twins, she was consigned to her room 
with her twins down in the NICU a floor below.  Her blood pressure was through the roof.  

So, without contact with her babies, her post-partum brain focused all of its obsessive compulsive 
tendencies on her husband and her 7 year-old.  She was actually calling up and organizing food to 
be delivered for the babysitter for her 7 year old and her husband.  I didn't actually manage to get 
her to pump, but I did take out the pictures of her two babies and put them on the chocolate box 
that another friend bought and told her that they were the ones who needed her - to refocus her 
energies towards relaxing to get her blood pressure down and do it by looking at her babies and 
getting the oxytocin rush from pumping briefly.  I chopped up a Gap camisole top, stuck two 
Pump in Pal breast shields through it (which fit very easily into the Hollister pump in her room) 
and we were able to get her in a comfortable position lying at a 30 degree angle where the milk 
would flow straight down into those bottles.  The angles are spectacular.  

The very next morning she was so much happier having spent more time with her babies, 
refocused her postpartum brain on her babies, rather than her husband and her son who are 
perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, and she was bowled over by being able to lie in bed 
and pump comfortably.  

In the meantime, it was so obvious watching her that the separation from her babies had really 
kept her from even thinking about them.


Susan Burger

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