Chapter 213: On Writing From Heartbreak
Four years ago, Miriam Wasser came to me with a story she needed to tell. In truth, it was not quite a story, not yet.
Miriam, a senior reporter at WBUR, Boston’s NPR affiliate, had been my student in 2013. She had graduated at the top of her class, gone on to a terrific career, gotten married and was now a mother of an infant daughter. She was in despair.
This had nothing to do with work, which is why former students usually got in touch. Rather, this was about her daughter, a healthy child, who represented a challenge Miriam could never have anticipated and which, as Miriam put it so poignantly, was making her lose her mind.
Her daughter, River, was six weeks old when, without warning, she refused to let Miriam nurse her. A seemingly transitory problem, that in the short term could be solved by bottle feeding, until River was ready to be nursed again and Miriam could return to being the mother she hoped to be.
“I remember that I wasn’t upset,” she later wrote. ”Surprised, sure. But it wasn’t a catastrophe yet.
“I pulled her upright and cradled her head against my neck. ‘Shhh, shhh,’ I whispered. She soon calmed down. Just a fluke, a weird baby thing, I thought.
“I laid her back down. Same results. Not a fluke.
“Unsure what to do, I called my husband.
“’Maybe try the bottle?’” he said.
“And so it began. For the next several months, breastfeeding became a ‘hit’ or ‘miss’ activity — though, it was mostly ‘miss’.
Sometimes she’d start crying right away, other times she’d latch on for a few seconds, then pull off, squeeze her eyes shut, and scream. Please, please, please, I’d beg, as if I could will — or guilt — her into nursing. But I couldn’t. She wouldn’t. And I completely fell apart.
Grief takes many forms but what can make it feel so much worse is loneliness, the sense that no one understands my grief, or worse still, appreciates why I feel it. Miriam’s grief was of a peculiar sort: it was not occasioned by death or illness. Yet, as Miriam would write four years later in Breastfeeding Grief, which appears this week in the Delacorte Review, was a profound sense of loss and failure. “I was afraid,” she told me, “that my daughter didn’t love me.”
Miriam is enough of a pro not to feel that four years was entirely too long to report and write her story. But stories, like children, have lives of their own and need to proceed at their own pace. Miriam was living her story, and there are few things harder in our work than being able to see the story while you are enduring the pain you’re trying to understand and capture.
So, four years ago, Miriam started writing letters to my colleague Cissi Falligant, who in her wisdom and sensitivity, felt like the best editor Miriam could have. Miriam needed a guide and a partner. She also needed time – time to do what writers do in the face of chaos: report.
Miriam’s journey from crisis to story is a long and complex one. And while I typically will ask writers two or three questions about their stories or books, this one felt as if it needed time and space – for Miriam to tell the story of her story, in a way that captured both the emotions she experienced, and what she needed to learn about herself as a writer to tell it.
So this week we’re trying something new. In addition to a short Q and A that follows I’ve added at the top of this chapter the conversation I recorded with Miriam earlier this week. We spoke for about an hour; it is unscripted. There is also an edited transcript.
(I’d be interested in hearing what form you liked best - and whether the different ways the story is told worked together. If you’d be willing to answer a couple of questions there is a very brief poll at the end of this newsletter. Thanks.)
I cannot recommend this story highly enough. While the subject will be of particular interest to the many women who experienced what Miriam experienced as well as to their partners, friends and families, I believe it speaks to anyone who is or has endured feeling alone in their sometimes inexplicable grief.
Meanwhile, I did put one question to Miriam - the question that is at the heart of so much of what we do: why did you need to write this story?
I had a gut feeling that reporting out my experience and putting it into words would help me understand what had happened, and in doing so, help me heal.
When I began writing this four years ago, I was still in the depths of this grief. My early drafts were rambly, sometimes angry, and just dripping with sadness. But as I continued to write and as time passed, I began to connect dots -- like that breastfeeding was intimately connected to my new identity as “mother.” I also met a lot of women who struggled with breastfeeding or who couldn’t produce enough milk for their babies, and who, like me, completely fell apart because of it. Learning I wasn’t alone in this added to my conviction that this story needed to be written.
And that brings me to the second reason I wrote it. When I was in the darkest days of my breastfeeding struggles, I’d often find myself staying up way too late scrolling the internet or Instagram looking for solutions. There’s a lot out there about breastfeeding, and people have no shortage of hot takes about the topic. But nothing I found spoke to what was happening to me. In writing this story, I eventually realized I was trying to create the piece I wish I had found online during all of those late nights -- the piece that made me feel less alone. It’s also a piece I hope can help partners, family members and friends of women who are struggling. And I hope it starts a conversation about one reality of the breastfeeding story that right now isn’t talked about enough.
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Nothing good ever came from writers punishing themselves. We know writing is hard. We’re here to show that it doesn’t have to be torture.