Essay: I Quit Heroin So I Could Breastfeed
On postpartum, mental health, and resilience
We’re so excited for you to meet Emily Hancock, the girl genius behind the Women's Work substack. She’s a freebirther, nurse, a farmer, and a card carrying Radical Mom. Get ready to fall in love. This is a re-send from last year that originally appeared behind a paywall.
I was 21 when I first learned what it meant to have another living being depend on me in a truly tangible way. I thought I knew before. I thought I could imagine it. The second her skin touched mine I felt the all-encompassing need of this tiny being. Her warm, slippery, writhing little body felt like the concept of desire embodied. Her desire to find her place, to wriggle her way to where she was supposed to land, to where she would be safe, was so palpable in her movements and her cry. I was fully submerged in the turbulent sea of her need while simultaneously being called to rescue her from it. It was only with lots of time, time spent up at night with her alone, nursing her, that I would learn how to float alongside her in peaceful waters, rather than flail about.
Before I became pregnant with this magic daughter who taught me how to float, I was a heroin addict. I was in the business of floating by way of my opiate receptors and boxed red wine. I came to my addiction through a compulsion to squash my anxiety, my depressive tendencies, my perfectionist leanings and my low self-esteem. From childhood I always felt wrapped in a nervous layer of unease that drugs dissolved, I could laugh freely, divulge my secrets without fear and where the world felt okay for the time being.
I had a pronounced shyness as a child. Shyness that I am now convinced originated in a sort of evolutionary mismatch between my personality and the time/place I was born into. This led to social anxiety. Anxiety led to self medication with opiates and alcohol and marijuana and benzos. Ongoing addiction, an emotionally and physically abusive relationship and poor self esteem led to a cycle of mania and depression.
In a sense, I became pregnant at the perfect time. Even though I had a few months of sobriety under my belt, the temptation to use started to creep back in. Now with a being developing inside me, it was do-or-die time. I chose to be brave and take the path that required more of me.
I was full of fear during my pregnancy. I was afraid that my inherent flaws would taint my baby, that the badness that lived in me would take over. But I also felt excitement, tenderness, and a fundamental need to make things right for this baby. But I also felt a compulsion to control all the little things around me. I fixated on how clean the countertops were, how to organize her onesies by color, how many times I checked the locks on the doors. A mix of cleanliness-is-next-to-godliness and classic OCD symptoms that the opiates had suppressed.
When I first got clean, obsessive compulsive rituals helped soothe my newly sober brain. I would snap my fingers over and over in the car while driving over bridges. I checked the windows and doors ten to fifteen times. I had to turn the lights off in a certain order, starting over for every mistake. I’d do knocking in patterns on the window sills until I heard the “right” quality of sound.
I share all this to say, I know what mental illness looks like and none of it has to do with what biological processes women undergo during pregnancy, birth and postpartum. It is the systems we have built around them that are making us sick.
In the therapy-speak that now saturates popular culture we are increasingly defined by our traumas, neurosis, and various disorders. People swap psychological diagnosis like they were star-signs, a tidy little descriptor for everything from personality quirks to the darkest pathologies. It’s no surprise then that concerns around a mother’s mental health become utterly intertwined with maternity, so much so that even the word “postpartum” is commonly understood to mean depression after a large event.
When did motherhood turn into a state of dis-ease?
When did birth turn into a maelstrom of traumas destined to break us?
When did breastfeeding become the catalyst for certain motherly mental breakdown?
Our modern culture is seemingly not able to ask these questions in earnest.
So many people seem totally complacent with how hostile our culture is towards the motherbaby dyad. They are oblivious to the fact that these biological processes are not the problem, the systems we have built are. I look around and ask myself-how are we accepting this? How is our C-section rate so high!? Why is everyone I went to high school with induced at 37 or 38 weeks? Why do women have to leave their babies after 3 weeks to return work? Why do we seem so eager to invest in a breast pump for every mother but never invest in her ability to be present for her child?
I wasn’t asking those questions back then though. I was simply trying to prove to myself that I was good enough to be a mom. Despite the mistakes I had made up until that point in my life, I was able to access the wisdom of my body and know that “good enough” meant fulfilling my biological imperative and that meant breastfeeding.
Breastfeeding my first child was a study in perseverance. Below I will list some of the hardships I ran into when learning how to breastfeed my baby:
I didn’t have an invested, or even present, partner.
I went back to my community college classes a couple weeks after giving birth, sweating and leaking through my shirt as I stood in the front of my class to give a speech.
My cheap Walmart breast pump was exceptionally useless and hooking myself up to a plastic milking machine felt like a dystopian mix of a job and torture.
I had never seen another woman nurse her child in person in my entire life. My little sister was breastfed but I was too little to remember that. None of my friends had children yet either.
My daughter had a thick lip tie, responsible for the gap in her front teeth she still has today and equally responsible for my nipples that felt like someone had rubbed sandpaper all over them. No one professional in the hospital, her pediatrician or the lactation consultant I saw after birth-diagnosed it or even looked.
The nurses told me my nipples were too flat for her to latch onto properly, when really they were just swollen from the IV fluids they had given me.
She dropped more than 10% of her birth weight and I sat in the pediatrician’s office sobbing when they told me.
I supplemented with formula because I was convinced my body wasn’t doing its job.
I pumped with my loud pump and too-big flanges three times a night in addition to nursing her when she woke.
When she was four months old and I was able to stop supplementing and she was finally able to nurse without it hurting me-we both got an awful case of thrush that took a solid two months to fully rid ourselves of.
I got glared at and cat-called while nursing in public.
All this, and I still kept at it. I nursed her until her 4th birthday. Not because I’m a martyr, but because I’m a mammal.
I still look back on that time and see the slow mastering of the beautiful skill of nursing my child as the one thing that most impacted my self-image as a mother and a woman. Ordinary things are built of extraordinary effort and commitment. Two things I had let myself falter on before I had given birth, two things that became easier with momentum and time.
I still had cravings for opiates and it was hard to not let my mind go there when I was up pumping at 3 AM watching Judge Judy reruns and trying not to obsessively stare at the drops collecting in my pump. Still, I pushed through both because I knew that providing my milk for my baby was just what I needed to do. And despite my list of hardships, I liked it.
Breastfeeding my child made me feel ethereal and beautiful and like the pinnacle of woman. Breastfeeding helped to chase away my cravings and kept me away from alcohol as well. Breastfeeding felt like the one thing no one could take from me, like this perfect little secret between my baby. It was the goodness I held within me despite my shortcomings manifested into an act and a substance that I knew was the best thing I could do for my daughter. Breastfeeding was foundational in building my perceptions of myself as a mother, a foundation that set me on a path that led to many culturally radical decisions regarding my life and my children that have been and will continue to be the source of true well being for us all. Breastfeeding changed the course of my life because it made me more courageous-it is easier to be courageous when you know you are capable.
I went through a period of time postpartum where my intrusive thoughts and the weird obsessive compulsive rituals I had fashioned for myself in order to stop them were becoming really bothersome and borderline frightening. I felt like disassociating often. Looking back, I can see I was also dealing with birth trauma from my episiotomy that still hurt and all of the strange people standing around me and screaming at me to push. This time is also where my addiction cravings and the despair that came with them peaked.
This time is when I started working again. I was also going to class and doing lots of school work. I was not eating very well or resting like I should have been. Is it any coincidence that my “mental illness” symptoms peaked when I was separated from my baby and not resting properly, stressed from outside factors that only separated us more?
No. My symptoms were not an ‘illness,‘ they were messages. Messages to slow down, enjoy my baby, feel into the moments with her that my body knew were so good. Just like my body told me that the best way to find my way to being a good mother was fulfilling my biological imperative to nurse my baby, my body told me that the solution to my mental woes was to nurse my baby.
No one can convince me that blaming breastfeeding is the answer for maternal mental health issues. I absolutely refuse to believe that putting a newborn that is born of our flesh and blood to our breasts and watching them suckle and be satiated by a miraculous substance that we naturally make ourselves is a bad thing. I also absolutely refuse to believe that teaching mothers to give up on something so powerful is empowering.
I know we are not one and the same with other mammals, we are uniquely human, with a capacity for self discipline and temperance unlike our animal counterparts. Underneath the complexities of human life though, lies the framework for our thriving through the biological imperatives set out for us by our mammalian nature. When we don’t fulfill the requirements of the framework, we fail. When a bear or a cat fails to properly nurse her young, they die. Our babies may not die, but both mother and child suffer, whether they realize it or admit it or not.
When it comes to how society approaches breastfeeding and the mental health question, we falter. We fail the dyad. And yet…the gritty spirit of hope in her truest form prevails in the women who choose to push through to the other side, the side where we not only give but also receive while we nurse our babies to sleep each night, knowing more than anything we have ever known before that this is what true love is and that it is for us.
Thank you so much for sharing. I've experienced some of these things and didn't know how to understand them and this has helped a lot. It may well be the best thing I've ever read on substack by which I mean most full of much-needed truth.