It was a no-brainer for me: All the books said I should breastfeed my baby because it was best for her—that she would be stronger, faster, smarter, better for it. And so I rushed out and bought myself a fancy Medella breast pump and stocked up on breast milk storage bags and got all giddy when I started filling out my nursing bras. (Um, yeah—I was the president of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee and so the prospect of having boobies was a huge plus on my “Reasons Why I Should Breastfeed” list.) And I proudly told anyone who would listen that I planned to feed my child the natural way—the way my mother’s generation and all the generations before hers did, too. The way God intended.

Um, yeah. The nurses at the hospital where I gave birth to my beautiful Mari had other intentions. I mean, in theory, breastfeeding made all the sense in the world for me and my baby. But in the real world, a.k.a. a hospital in the middle of Harlem, where the environment made doctors and staff more prone to assume that a young black woman pushing out a baby was single, poor, uneducated, and alone, breastfeeding just didn’t fit into the equation.

And so the nurse put my Mari in my arms and disappeared, leaving me for 12 hours with nothing more than my baby and a “goodie” bag full of coupons for baby lotion and soap, useless pamphlets, and two bottles of baby formula. I was absolutely terrified, overwhelmed, exhausted and clueless; I simply didn’t know how to feed my newborn child. No manner of picture/conversation/book chapter prepared me for The Show—the actual breastfeeding of my baby. Was I supposed to be sitting any particular way? Pop in my boob any kind of way? Squeeze it to help get the milk into her mouth? Where was the milk anyway?!

I mean, I was convinced the baby would starve to death. And that she would die with a piece of my nipple in her mouth (those little gums were killer, especially when I unwittingly pulled my breast out of her mouth).

When a nurse finally made her way back into my room, she seemed surprised to find me breastfeeding. (She was also surprised that I had a husband, insurance, a good job, and that Mari was my first child—more on this ignorance in another post.) Still, she made quick work of showing me how to get the baby to latch on, how to get her to stop sucking, and, most importantly, she gave me a number to La Leche League so that I could ask an expert questions on how to feed my baby the right way.

Getting the breastfeeding right wasn’t easy or natural; for the first two weeks, the skin on my nipple was literally shredded and my breasts were raw—it was like a toothless little man was sucking on an open, achy wound. I’d smooth Lasinoh on my skin between feedings and sit shirtless with ice packs on my nipples, and literally cry out when Mari latched on.

But I didn’t give up.

Through the pain.

Through the doubts.

Through the pumping in the bathroom at work.

Through the ridicule from my more old school friends and family members who wondered loudly and unabashedly when I’d stop letting my baby “suck on my ninny.”

I breastfed my baby for 10 months, and pumped and fed her my milk for two more months after that, even after she stopped taking my breast. I was proud of myself for hanging in there. And proud of my daughter, too, for being patient with me. I know that it would have been just as easy for her to reject my breast. But she didn’t. And for this, I’m grateful.

There are plenty of moms who aren’t as fortunate—who don’t have the benefit of expensive breast pumps and copious amounts of time to recuperate from the painful beginning stages of breastfeeding or halfway understanding bosses who give them time to pump or even a pamphlet’s worth of information telling them how it’s done or extolling its benefits. These are things that some of us breastfeeding moms simply take for granted.

Of course, there are plenty of moms who forgo breastfeeding to formula feed—and this is their right. No judgment here. To each her own.

But I thank goodness that there are plenty of resources available for moms who do want to successfully breastfeed—much
more than was available when I had Mari more than 10 years ago.

And for this, we should all be grateful.

For more information on breastfeeding—from how to do it successfully to how to dress to what breast pumps to buy—check out the March of Dimes website, which is rich with great information on this and many other helpful “bringing home baby” tips.

This blog post was donated by MyBrownBaby to the March of Dimes as part of its March of Dimes Moms initiative.

To celebrate Mother’s Day and say “thank you” for being one of their mom ambassadors, The March of Dimes sent me a beautiful necklace from Red Envelope—one with a pendant rendered from a single, unending loop of sterling silver. The Red Envelope description says it’s meant to be a unique interpretation of mother and child caught in an eternal embrace.

I wanted to brag on the gift—show it off and wear it well and tell you that it reminded me of the “push gifts” my husband gave me when I birthed his two daughters almost 10 and 7 years ago respectively (I reminisced about my beautiful sterling silver necklaces last week when my blog friend Future Mama wrote a post on her terrific site, Baby Makin(g) Machine, about the push gift she’s angling for when she becomes a mom).

But when I clicked over to the Red Envelope page to see details about my gift, I saw a simple message telling me that 10% of the proceeds for every sale of the Mother’s Love Necklace will go to the March of Dimes, an incredible organization that has worked tirelessly to improve the health of babies by preventing birth defects, premature, birth, and infant mortality through research, education, advocacy, and community service. And suddenly, my keeping the gift for myself didn’t seem as important as letting my readers know about the importance of doing what we can to help The March of Dimes continue its important mission of helping mothers and babies in need.

Particularly moving was the symbolism of the pendant—“the mother and child caught in an eternal embrace.” It made me think of my fellow March of Dimes Mom Ambassador Heather Spohr of The Spohrs Are Multiplying, who recently lost her beautiful one-year-old daughter, Maddie. She’s been blogging about life without her child, and, true to what the words “eternal embrace” laid on my heart, I found a post Heather wrote last week about how much she misses hugging her child:

My arms tingle, and I remember that I’ve had this sensation before. When I was on bed rest, my legs would ache and tingle. I mentioned it to my Obstetrician, and she said, “those are your legs muscles atrophying. It is an unfortunate side-effect of bed rest.” My arm muscles are tingling because I am not picking up Maddie. I am not lifting her up, holding her weight, feeling her cheek against my chest.

I want my baby. Oh Maddie! I need you!

No mother should have to ponder life without the embrace of her child—to have to face Mother’s Day without her baby there to touch her cheek and climb into her arms and say, simply, “I love you, Mommy.”

But there are many more Heather Spohrs.

The March of Dimes is doing its best to help stem this tide. It is my sincere hope that MyBrownBaby’s readers will help, too, by supporting The March of Dimes. You can do this by donating directly to the organization, or by purchasing a Mother’s Love Necklace for yourself or for a Mother’s Day present for someone you love. ProFlowers, the corporate owner of Red Envelope, is also donating $10 of every order of Mother’s Day flowers to the March of Dimes, in support of programs in communities throughout the United States.

To inspire you to give, I’m giving away my Mother’s Love Necklace to one lucky reader. All you have to do is leave a comment telling me what you love most about your child’s embrace AND click over to the March of Dimes website and tell me something you learned about the organization. Your offering MUST include both comments to qualify.

Please leave your comments by 11:59 p.m., Tuesday, May 5th, 2009. I will choose a winner via Random.org and announce the winner Wednesday, May 6th, 2009.

Good luck.

By DENENE MILLNER

I found the papers when I was 12—in a metal box tucked under my parents’ bed. I wasn’t supposed to be snooping all through their personal belongings; my mother had put a lock on her door, presumably to keep my brother and I from dipping into her stash of moon pies and using her pricy, smelly lotions, and discovering her and my dad’s copy of “The Joy of Sex.” But kids are experts at getting into stuff and finding the hidden, and that little flimsy lock was no match for the wits of a curious preteen and her big brother. If we wanted to see it, it was going to get seen.

But this? This I wasn’t ready for.

BABY GIRL…
DENENE MILLNER…
HEREYBY FORMALLY ADOPTED ON THIS DAY…

My fingers trembled as I brought the paper closer to my face—as if the words would magically morph into something wholly different if I just stared at them a little harder, a little longer, a little bit more closely to my 20/20s. But the words just… wouldn’t… change.

And then, suddenly, it felt like someone had fired buckshot into my chest. The shock was almost unbearable: My mom and dad weren’t my mom and dad. My brother? Not my brother, either. None of them by blood, anyway.

To this day, I can’t tell you how I got those papers back into the metal box, how I pushed that metal back under their bed, how I convinced my legs to carry me out of their room and shut the door and lock it back and act like I’d never seen those papers.

How I managed to keep their secret—my secret—for all those years.

For years—more than 20 years—I refused to acknowledge my adoption or tell my parents I knew they’d adopted me. At first it was because I was scared they’d be mad at me for snooping, but as I grew older, that morphed into my need to protect their privacy. Maybe they didn’t want to explain to everyone coming and going why they didn’t have biological babies together, or where they found me, or why my birth parents gave me up. Maybe, I reasoned, my mom and dad feared I would search for the people who abandoned me on the stoop of that New York City orphanage—that I would find them and, in turn, reject the two people who didn’t give me blood, but who truly gave me life.

I couldn’t do that to them. To me. To us. Though my birth parents deserve praise for birthing me and having the courage to love me enough to give me away, my parents get the glory for raising me, educating me, supporting me, disciplining me, and loving me beyond measure—and doing it with an enormous amount of grace and wisdom. Despite the odds. With little money. And no help. Just them.

And love.

No, there was no need to find the birth parents—it didn’t even occur to me to do so. Not until, that is, I became pregnant with my first baby.

Not knowing, you see, wreaked havoc on my health history, which, because I don’t know who my birth parents are, is basically non-existent. From the time I’ve been old enough to go to the doctor on my own, I’ve been forced to leave the “family history” part of the stacks of first-visit papers blank, which always leads to a really awkward opening conversation with my doctors, who realize pretty early on that they’ll have to treat whatever is ailing me without the extremely valuable “family health history” tools they need to figure out what might be causing my health problems. I haven’t a clue if cancer runs in my family, or diabetes, or weight problems—hypertension, stroke, gout. You name it, it could be lurking, waiting to claim me, and I will have no clue until it taps me on the shoulder and goes to work on my system.

This was most glaring while I was pregnant; neither of my ob-gyns had the valuable information they needed to help me figure out health risks for my pregnancy and, more important, my children. They knew Nick’s family’s health and were able to keep an eye out for specific Chiles family issues. But my side of it was the big unknown—you might as well have crossed an “X” across my paperwork.

And this disturbed me greatly.

I couldn’t change this in time enough for my pregnancies, and while I still have no interest in finding out who my birth parents are (wouldn’t be able to anyway, seeing as she/he/they left me on a stoop in the middle of Manhattan) I do wish that the government would change laws to at least allow adopted kids access to their health history, even if their adoption records are sealed tighter than Ft. Knox.

This doesn’t—and shouldn’t—be your story if you know who your birth parents are you’re looking to get pregnant or are pregnant. For sure, all you have to do to gather up your family health history is to start asking questions. Ask your mother and father who has/had what in their family; hit up your aunties and uncles at the next family reunion; quiz your cousins at the next barbeque. Your play aunties might even have some info—might know what your granddaddy’s brother might have had when he passed on.

Then take that information and write it down. The March of Dimes is a fantastic resource for info on the importance of family history, and has on its website a downloadable family health questionnaire to help walk you through the information you should be gathering. Take a look at what the March of Dimes has to say about the importance of genetic testing, too, to help you see into your baby’s health future.

I didn’t have this option.

You do.

Please, don’t take it for granted.

For more information on family history, genetic testing, and pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and newborn care, please check out the March of Dimes website. This blog post was donated by MyBrownBaby to the March of Dimes as part of its March of Dimes Moms initiative.