down the drain

This is what the top shelf of my freezer has looked like since Britton was born. Almost an entire year that shelf has been home to a rotating, then static, supply of breastmilk. But yesterday after work, it all came out.





And you're probably thinking, "But that stuff is liquid gold! It takes so much effort and energy and patience to get such a bountiful supply of breastmilk!" And you would be right. But I can't use it and won't be able to at all, and I certainly don't need a daily reminder that the one activity my baby solely relied on me for was, for lack of a better term, a failure. All the days, weeks, of nipple shields and clogged ducts, and getting up every two hours, were gone. Poof. Just like that. When my pediatrician, after warning he never liked to get between a mother and her baby, suggested the only thing we hadn't tried to make Britton's digestive problems go away. No medicine, no procedures, no more elimination diet, no extensive superstitious rocking and rubbing and burping and tucking legs under bottoms and swaying. Just no more breastfeeding. No more breastmilk. No more soothing with the boobies.

And it worked.

And I was heart-broken.

It's not that Britton still has those same problems, or that my milk would cause her the same problems. It's that we don't know - what effect it would have on her, how safe it really is after ten months in the freezer, with its ice crystals forming. The window of opportunity to make use of my milk has passed.

Jessica comes to visit next week, in fact the day after she finds out the sex of her baby. And during her visit, we will go through baby things, and ohh and ahh over little mittens and socks and onesies, and she will pack up new and old things to take home. One of those things being the breastpump. And I'm sending her with the bottles upon bottles I bought to store the milk I can't use. So, into the sink they went, to defrost, and today I dumped them, one by one, down the drain.