Miriam Wasser-Interview Transcript

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MS-This is Michael Shapiro, and I’m talking to Miriam Wasser. Full disclosure, Miriam was my student at the Columbia Journalism School in 2013 very happy stuff these days.

So Miriam comes to me, and she goes, I got the story. It was unlike any other you’ve done. This was about you.

Instead of telling us what happened, why don’t you read the opening of your story

MW- I remember so clearly the first time it happened. It was December 14, 2021 and my daughter, River was six weeks old. I was home alone with her, and she had just woken up from a nap.

The afternoon light came in through her bedroom window as I carried her over to her nursing chair. I sat down and positioned her on top of a U-shaped nursing pillow, one that was patterned with gray baby elephants.

I pulled my shirt and brought to the side and brought her to my breast, just like usual, but instead of opening her mouth to latch on, she recoiled. Literally recoiled. Her tiny body tightened. Her face turned red, and she screamed, screamed and screamed and screamed. A lot of babies that young don’t produce tears yet.

I tried the other breast, then a different position. She continued to scream. Scream at me, scream at my body, scream at the sight of my breasts, breasts which were at that point, at that point, engorged and starting to leak milk.

‘Riv the milk is right here,’ I told her, the wet patch on the nursing pillow was growing larger, swallowing more baby elephants. I remembered that I wasn’t upset, surprised, sure, but it wasn’t a catastrophe, yet. I pulled her upright and cradled her head against my neck.

I whispered. She soon calmed down. Just a fluke, a weird baby thing, I thought. I laid her back down, same result, not a fluke. Unsure what to do, I called my husband, maybe try a 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.

MS-So this doesn’t stop there, no. And I’ll confess this is something that feels altogether new when I first heard about it, when you first mentioned it, new in the sense that you some women just don’t want to breastfeed, as you’ve written about. Some women have trouble doing it. They move on. They do it.

MW-Awkward topic to talk about. We can acknowledge that. I think, thank you. Yeah, that’s fine.

MS-But what happened to you?

MW-I completely, like lost my mind, for lack of a better term. I became obsessed with getting River to nurse again, and she wouldn’t. And at the same time, she was having trouble gaining weight. So there was, like this kind of medical pressure to make sure she’s eating enough. And, you know, as I write about, it was, October, November or December of 2021, so t was still kind of Covid-y. So the world’s still kind of shut down. I’m at home alone a lot, and, yeah, I just became obsessed with getting her to nurse. She wouldn’t.

And I became deeply, deeply sad, like it was all I thought about. My husband and I fought about it constantly. And we don’t fight, but we did. I was crying all the time. It just It took over my life in a way that I was surprised by. Because on the one hand, it’s breastfeeding, really, breastfeeding – “Is what you’re gonna choose to lose it over Miriam?”

And I really thought I was crazy. I thought I was like descending into some sort of psychosis. Because I didn’t know of anyone else who would ever experience this. And, you know, they, they warn you about certain things when you’re pregnant or postpartum. I was aware of postpartum depression. I was aware of postpartum anxiety, but this didn’t feel like that, because in everything else, I was fine. It was this. And I remember when I was probably a couple months into this, and this actually isn’t in the story, but I was texting with a good friend of mine from high school, and she just asked, “how are things going?”

“Well, you know, things have been a little tough. Like breastfeeding isn’t going as well as I had hoped.” Because, of course, we all sugar coat everything that we say.

And she just said, “Oh, I feel you. I had the hardest time nursing my daughter.”

And I said, “Oh, what happened? If you don’t mind me asking.” And she wrote me this really long text, and it was my story, lit was exactly what happened to me.

I said, Megan, “can I call you?” And we had a really long talk. To me, that’s the beginning of this journey, because that’s when I realized, oh my God, I am not alone in this. Like this is a thing. And I started meeting more moms. I found this breastfeeding support group. Megan introduced me to Facebook pages where women tell their stories like this, and I just started to realize that there was a whole community of women who were struggling with this.

For some of us, it was that our babies wouldn’t latch. A lot of women experience this, when their bodies don’t produce enough milk, and they’re struggling with their milk supply. And I just felt like I was reading my story over and over and over again. So eventually, yeah, I came to you and you said you could have a home here at the Delacorte Review. You should write this.

MS-I want to go back in a second, because even while you’re reporting this is still happening. So it’s not as if, okay, fine, now I know whether I’m not alone, so I’m not going to be depressed anymore or far from it. But as a story and the way you’re telling it, there’s a moment, there’s two moments, one is the moment when “I’m beginning to lose my mind” over this. And two it’s that conversation with Megan and thinking, I’m not alone. Yeah, that is what really propels the story forward. Because when you were going through this initially, how afraid were you that it’s just you. You’re the only one who’s ever gone through this.

MW-I guess if you had asked me that, like, pulled me aside and been like, Miriam, do you think you’re really the only person who’s ever experienced this? I would say absolutely not, of course, but I didn’t know of anyone who had this trouble and I was embarrassed by how important breastfeeding had become to me, because it felt like breastfeeding again, like get a real problem.

MS-You anticipated my question, because of all the many things about this that were painful. I don’t want to say what was most painful, but what were the things that hurt you the most?

MW-I thought my baby didn’t love me.

MS-What you cannot see as you’re listening to this is that as Miriam said, that I just winced.

MW- I internalized River’s rejection of nursing as a rejection of me. And as I unpack in the story, what I came to kind of realize is that breastfeeding was how I mothered at the time. You have kids. You know when babies are born they’re just kind of like little chubby lumps. They don’t do much. So if you decide to breastfeed, that’s all you do at the beginning, and your babies don’t really respond to much. And again, lliterally, that’s all you do. So it was how I knew how to mother, it was how I knew how to keep her alive, how to get her to sleep, how to comfort her. And just around the time, just before she stopped nursing, by six weeks, they’re interacting a lot more, and you’re getting little smiles. People talk about the nursing bond, and I started to feel it, And then all of a sudden, one day, it was like it was ripped out from under

MS-It’s not as if River had thought this out at the age of six weeks. You know, I’m going to have some issues with my mom, so I may as well get them on the table now. But what happened in your relationship with her?

MW-So I thought she didn’t love me, and there were days when I resented her for putting me through this. And that’s like the hardest thing in the world to say out loud and to admit, but it’s true I mean, it is an ugly emotion to to admit to.

But at some point, I also worried I was torturing her, at times.

MS-And your husband’s trying to make this okay, right?

MW-Yes, my husband is the greatest guy ever, but he didn’t understand what was happening to me and I think that that was really hard for him, too. But eventually, I should say at some point, River did start to nursing. River is very proudly four and a half as of a couple days ago. She would be very happy to tell you that.

MS-She did come back to nursing. And I have no idea why. Why? Why I got lucky? Why I got this happy ending? I don’t know why, but I guess what I would just say is we have a fantastic relationship now. I

MS- I want to move away, just for the moment, not to lose sight of it, of what happened to you. Because very at some point you begin to order the universe by being a reporter, and you begin with the conversation with Megan. But a lot of people who listen to this are writers, and they’re thinking, you know, I’m trying to figure out how to write about something that happened to me in a deeply personal way. But and how do I even think about doing that in a way that doesn’t make me think, oh, nobody’s going to care about my story. I mean, I hear this some students, both from before your time and since your time, “nobody’s going to care about my story.” I have a refrain that I always use:. This is guy, and his father dies, and his mother marries his uncle, and the uncle may or may not have had something to do with the father’s death, and he’s got a girlfriend with issues, whose father talks too much. Do you want to read that story? And they say. And I go, “Hamlet.”

I think for a lot of writers, there’s always that fear that “no one’s going to care about my story” because even though it matters so much to me, that disproportionate sense of it matters so much to me, no one else is going to care. So let’s talk about where you separate your reporter’s hat from your Miriam as mother hat. What begins to happen?

MW-Yeah, oh my gosh. I had so many thoughts on this. Okay, so for one, unlike many other stories that I have written in my life with this one, I wasn’t worried that no one would care because I met so many mothers who were going through this. I worried about plenty of other things during the process of writing this. But I was propelled by this gut feeling that this is something we need to talk about. And, I don’t know why this story isn’t there. And I said to you, like, there I spent so many nights and scrolling on online, just like looking for answers about what to do, like how to get River to nurse again, what was happening. Why? I think I oftentimes Googled depression over breastfeeding, like trying to understand what I was feeling and what was happening. And there was just very little out there.

MS- If you did it now, you’d have Claude saying, great question. Miriam

MW- Well, maybe Claude would point us to the story. That’s one of the goals.

When I, when I first came to you, when I was first writing, I was still really grieving.

MS-And grief is an important word here.

MW- River was nursing again, but I wasn’t confident in it. It was still sometimes hit or miss. I wasn’t confident yet. And I was writing these memos to you and writing these journal entries and drafts to myself that were just like dripping with anger and emotion that was it was too much. I was just writing like every little detail.

MS- And I was sharing the editing and deferring a lot to my wonderful colleague, Cissi Falligant. And Cissi, who is the world’s nicest person, would say, “oh, this poor woman.” She could feel your pain. It had not happened literally to her, which had happened to you But I think there was a certain degree of fear that we had -- is she going to be able to get past this spilling and produce a story? Because you needed to go through this.

MW-You came to Boston one day, and we got coffee. And you said, Miriam, you need to write a purge document. And I said, Michael, what’s a purge document? And you said, You need to open up a Google Doc, and you need to just write down literally everything. Some of it may end up in the story. Some of it may not, but you need to get that down on paper before you can begin to extract portions of it that are important.

So I think I spent like a week doing it. I remember this. I wrote, I believe, like 30,000 words. It was the definitive account beyond what anyone would ever in a million years want to read of what happened. And what I did is I reported my own history. And this is where I credit being a journalist, knowing how to do some of this stuff. Not that anything I did was groundbreaking, but I went through journals I had kept. I went through text messages from the time. I went through photo albums. I went through River’s medical documents, and transcribed all the notes that the pediatrician was taking.

The purge document took the form of a timeline. And I put in there random memories I had. I remember going on a walk with my friend and sort of talking about it, but sort of talking around the issue. And I just wrote everything down.

MS-I want to stay there for a second, because I remember talking about that -- you don’t know what’s going to happen a lot of times. One of the things that I’ve seen over the years as an editor and as a teacher, is that people do that and then they just they tighten up when you think that they won’t. But when it works, and I can tell from my own experience, it works because you’re stuck. Because the speed of writing is so much slower than the speed of thinking, you begin to make connections. You write a sentence and then another sentence, and that second sentence gets you thinking -- Wait a second, that reminds me of something all the way over here, and your brain is going, we have it here, in case you’re looking right at the top. No. Above that open the box. There it is.

Did that happen to you, if not literally, then metaphorically, where all of a sudden, memories would trigger other memories?

MW-Yes, memories definitely triggered other memories. I think the best thing about the purge document for me was that I came away from that feeling like, Okay I wrote down what I needed to get down. I wrote down the definitive story of River’s breastfeeding journey. No one’s ever going to read it. Knowing that no one was ever going to read it, in a sense, was liberating. I wrote it, knowing that I was going to refer back to it when I wrote the real story. That this was, this was like a reporting dump in a lot of ways. I found it really cathartic. I found it really it was hard. It was challenging. I cried a lot during it, but I did it, and then I think I was able to step back from that and say, Okay, I wrote the story I needed for my own healing. Now let me write the story that’s for a public facing audience. And I found that throughout the process of editing, first with Cissi and then with Mike Hoyt. T

MS-You were so lucky. You had Cissi and Mike Hoyt, and you were able to avoid me.

MW-I think a lot of people get very attached to what you write, and it can be hard to see someone suggest you cut this paragraph or change this phrasing. And you know, I’d like to think that in the decade plus since I’ve been a working journalist, I’ve gotten a lot chiller about that.

MS-Nobody is ever that chill about it.

MW-But with this it felt, it felt a little easier, and it felt a lot easier to cut because I knew I was writing a story for other people. I had written the story I needed. And actually, at one point, my husband, who is a brutal editor, like really, really brutal, but good, went through it and he slashed like 2000 words.

MS-Out of 30,000 you’re ahead of the game.

MW-No, no, it wasn’t. By that point. It was like 12,000. And I didn’t take all of them. I’d say I took like 80%

MS-Or else it’s an annulment,

MW- But he would be like, Miriam, no one needs to know that this happened. They just need to know that you were here. He’s so good at that . He’s not a journalist either. And so I don’t know, I think that the whole time I just had this feeling that I knew that I was writing this for other people, and I wanted it to be the best version of the story that it could be for that. I also think, and this should be said too, this story took me four years to write. nd I, you know, I put a ton of pressure on myself to try to finish it at various points of time. I remember Cissi, to her credit, several times, saying very gently “take a little more time, take a little more time.”

Because what you guys were saying to me, which I didn’t really realize at the time, was “you want to write into the wound, not from the wound.”

MS-I had to be Cissi because that’s far smaller

MW-It means you don’t want to write from a place where you’re still bleeding.

MS-It’s like playing drunk. You don’t act drunk. You act sober, trying not to be drunk.

MW-Yeah and so I needed to write into that grief, not from that grief. And that’s a really good point. And so it took a couple of years. And another thing that happened is I had another baby, and I had a very different breastfeeding experience and it helped me recognize how hard that was with River and that it doesn’t have to be that way, it shouldn’t have to be that way.

And I think one of the things that I’m most grateful for in this process is that you guys stuck with me for four years. You let me vomit on the page at the beginning, and then you were like, “All right, keep going.”

MS-Readers trust their visceral sense of what works. No non-journalist would ever use the words “nut graph” -- I think the nut graph wants to be quicker. No, only journalists talk about a paragraph as if it has feelings -- it wants to be quicker. No, I feel; it doesn’t. But what’s interesting is that writers do this all the time, and you just did it now -- we’re always criticizing ourselves for how long it took. A few months ago, I wrote on I wrote a Writerland about Kieran Desai’s amazing novel and the thing that was interesting about this novel and the attention that it got was primarily for how long it took -- 20 years and how she had written 5000 pages and goes, even Robert Caro doesn’t write that much in a volume. And in a way, what was interesting is that it became the story. But it’s like, well, who cares? It took as long as it took? Yeah, and if it took you four years, that’s how long it was going to take. I think we in journalism are always measuring time in deadlines and success in meeting them. I mean, I have colleagues who pride themselves, and it’s a really good thingn saying, I deliver on time. I deliver books on time. For those of you who’ve never written a book, there are about eight authors in the world who have ever delivered a book on time. Moses late, okay.

What was necessary about having that time to make this story succeed?

MW-Well, for one, I want to say it took me four years because I have a full-time job and two children, and, you know, a life. And I was doing, doing this in my, in my off time. I remember at one point it was while I was very pregnant with my son writing in an email to Cissi “I feel like I need to get this done before I have before I have this baby.” Like I need to end this. This is a story about River and I need to end this chapter of my life before I have another baby. And she was just like, “what if you didn’t?”

MS- I should explain to listeners that Cissi Falligant was my editor when I worked at newspapers, and I’ve been edited both by Mike Hoyt and by Cissi and they’re great, because they say things like that. Yeah, there are about six editors in the world who do that, and I work with two of them.

MW-But you know, maybe the process of having a second baby will give you a new perspective. And I was very nervous about that,and fought against it. But didn’t finish by the time I had Toby my son and, and I think that was great in hindsight. I can imagine a world where I was working on this full time from the minute we first started talking about it, and I delivered something in a couple of months. And it would have been very bloggy. It would have been this, like, I’m so sad. This is what happened to me.

You know why? I just don’t think I would have had time to interview so many people, and I talked to a lot of people for this story.

I just think it wouldn’t have had just the perspective of time a little bit. And I don’t know, maybe if I wrote the story 10 years from now, it would be even more profound. Who knows. But it just it needed a little bit of time to bake.

MS-I want to talk about the reporting, because you talk to a lot of women, tell me about those conversations, because I imagine this is not what the late Jimmy Breslin used to call asistant district attorney questions -- like, all right, age, rank, serial number, gestation period. Tell me about those conversations. How’d you find them and what you talk about?

MW-I had a lot of different conversations. Formal conversations and informal conversations. I had a lot of informal conversations with women I met, and most of those anecdotes don’t necessarily end up in the story or quotes from that, but I considered that to be part of the interview process.

But with a lot of other women were from those Facebook groups that I learned about. I wrote to the admin of it and said, Hi, my name is Miriam Wasser. I’m a reporter. This group has helped me so much in the last couple of months, and I want to write about it, but I also want to interview other women. Would it be okay if I posted a note here saying, please reach out to me if you’re willing to be interviewed. And they said, Yes, of course. And so a lot of people reached out to me, and I ended up talking to women from all over the world.

MS-And what were the kind of things you heard that really still resonate?

MW-A lot of women had really traumatic birth birthing experiences too, and that just kind of like sets you up for some failure.

MS-You just use the word failure.

MW-I shouldn’t say failure. No, no, no, no, no, no. Because I think that’s what makes this, forgive me, what makes this story, I think universal, is that half the readers of this story will you know, by nature of biology, would unlikely to breastfeed. And yet, there is something about this story that transcends just your bein a mother. This is not just a story about a young mother who struggled with this and other mothers who would fit into that. You just said the word that. It’s about failure or feeling yourself to be a failure, even though, objectively speaking, you’re not. Yeah, so staying with that you what you heard -- what stories were the stories of failure or sense of failure?

MW-Yeah, it was a lot of women feeling like they had failed. I talked to women who were in the midst of it and women who were a year out from it or more time had passed, and they told me all sorts of stories. I don’t think I had a single what I would call formal interview that was under an hour. We really talked. And I think what was helpful too is that I told them what happened to me, too. And you know, when you’re interviewing someone, you’re not really supposed to put yourself in it and to talk about your own experience. But I think that that helped them.

MS-Trust me?

MW-Oh, absolutely. Could you imagine somebody who had it was just, I’m reporting this because I’ve read about the phenomenon, and the interview subject is going, “you really don’t get this because you haven’t lived it.” This is a story when you had to talk about yourself, yeah. I mean, there, you know, how many times was I like felt like River didn’t love me, and I really questioned whether my baby loved me.

I’m curious -- did that happen to you? Did you have anything similar to that? And you know, you get lots of stories and just a lot of grief, a lot of grief, and a lot of people also saying, I’m really glad you’re writing this. I think this story needs to be out there. I’m not the first person to write about this. I did not coin the term breastfeeding grief. I don’t know exactly who did it is. It is a thing. There is an amazing book out there called Breastfeeding Grief by Amy Brown. When I came across that book, actually downloaded it as an audio book. It’s relatively short, and was on a long car ride, and I was just weeping, listening to it. It was like, this is this is me. This is my story.

So I’m not the first person to tread this ground, I will say, but it is not a topic that that gets talked enough.

MS-I can only guess what the interviews were like. But was there an arc, especially to the women who were a year out? Was there was an arc in the sense that it ended, where there was a beginning, there was an awful middle, and then at some point it ended? Or perhaps, how it ended for you?

MW-They were all in different places. I talked to one woman who was pregnant with her next child, and so both like terrified and optimistic. I talked to another woman who wasn’t sure she wanted to have other another kid after this because this was so awful. We follow each other on Facebook, and she did end up having another baby.

I talked to one woman who is quoted who was a therapist too, so, you know, very smart, she said, I am, I am at a place where I’m trying to be okay with not being okay, where I’m never gonna heal. Like I’m I’m never going to feel differently about this experience. It’s never going to be a happy memory of mine, but I’m getting to a point where I can, I can maybe be okay with the fact that that was, that existed, that that’s a traumatic time period in my life. And she said, I want to have more kids, and I honestly think that if someone could guarantee to me that this wouldn’t happen again I could let it all go right now. And honestly, we can’t guarantee that.

MS-How many of the women you spoke with encountered this reaction among people who love them, who are friends, spouses: What do you? Come on. So you feed the baby with a bottle. We move on, and we have a kid. What’s the big deal?

MW-Yeah, quite a few. Quite a few.

MS-And you wanted to throttle those people, right?

MW_Yeah. I mean, I think I will say I feel very lucky in that no one in my life approached me with that tone, right? I think everyone was very clearly aware that I was like a mess at that point. But yeah, in kinder terms, would say something because I was still pumping in bottle feeding at that point, just being like, I don’t get it, like, she’s still getting your milk. Or maybe, maybe you should just commit to the bottle feeding and give yourself a break. I couldn’t.

MS-Why couldn’t you?

MW-I was so obsessed with getting breastfeeding to work because I wanted to mother the way that I thought I wanted to mother, and wanted to feel that my baby loved me. And, you know, I’m a pretty determined person, so I think there’s an element of that too. I set my mind to it, and it was like, I’m gonna do this

I don’t know why I still to this day, I’m not entirely sure why I’m so obsessed with making it work, but it felt like it was all about mothering and love, and that was broken, and I needed to fix that.

MS-You know, you had mentioned earlier that there are certain phenomenon of associated with pregnancy and the early days of being a parent that you can anticipate, like, okay, I get what’s going on here now, postpartum anxiety, depression, a host of things. You know, if you have a C section, recovering from that episiotomy, recovering all these things that are catalogable and recognizable, but there’s an expression in boxing, forgive me, the punch that knocks you out is the one you don’t see coming.

MW-And I think that also so there’s this concept of birth trauma, which is in the last maybe, like 10 to 15 years it’s become a recognized phenomenon whereby women have births that are traumatic, and it’s often situations where it could be as simple as an unplanned C section, it could also be something where their doctors just didn’t tell them what was happening, And they felt totally lost and totally lost and totally out of control. And like I can see so easily how birth could become a traumatic experience. I

MS-For millennia women died.

MW-And so it, I think, in having coined this term, and then having it become something that’s like sort of ubiquitous in the birth world. It has helped doctors and midwives and nurses recognize that like, oh, it matters how we talk to women about the experiences that they’re having. You know, there are therapists who specialize in some of this stuff, because it is, it is such a common thing.

I was shocked, and I still am shocked that breastfeeding grief is just not one of those things. I don’t have any statistics about how many women this affects, but based on my anecdotal interviews and life experience I think it’s quite a bit. And so I want this to be something that helps women who are struggling. I want this to be something that helps partners who are struggling. When my husband read this for the first time he was like, Oh, I think I get it now. I want it to be something that pediatricians read because maybe you talk to a mother who you’re suggesting switch to a bottle in a different way.

Maybe you consider how she wants to feed her baby.

I want it to be something that that maybe even that women are aware can happen before they start doing anything, and not to scare you, not scare anyone off from breastfeeding, but just to know that, if things go wrong, it’s okay.

MS-You just put your finger on something important, which is, again, the story is focused on one thing, which is about breastfeeding grief. But in the course of our conversation you use terms that are universally applicable. It is I think that this is the power of the story. We all in life experience the punch that we don’t see coming. And I should have known better. I should have been aware. I didn’t know this. It’s not just to say falling out of the building and landing on us. Okay, it’s, it’s something that happens to us, which when the safe falls out of and hits you in the head, that’s a bad ending, but this is one of those in between things. It’s not a death, it’s not a catastrophic injury, it’s not a catastrophic loss. It’s one of those things that happens in life where part of you thinks I can handle this well, more to the point I should handle it, and because I can’t, the words you used was, I failed. I failed, and my baby doesn’t love me. And I think that it’s, it’s a story about what we do to ourselves needlessly. No, needlessly is not the right word, because you need you experience grief. I can’t say, oh, Miriam, come on. There’s a bottle. You couldn’t do that. You had to go through this thing. What’s interesting, though, is that as you describe all these things leading up to the writing, the writing couldn’t happen any sooner than it did. By the time you sat down to write. Write, I’m putting that in air quotes. Was it harder or easier than you would have thought?

MW-I never sat down and d said, like, today I begin this essay.

MS- It’s like, in the movies. It’s always like The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald, right? And it’s like nobody ever does that. They just start on page one and they cross it out a million times. No one ever writes the title and their name.

MW-There was a time period where I really had, I had a draft where the stories of other women were much more prominent, and it was almost like this, like back and forth between, like, my story, and then like a little vignette of someone else.

MS-That sounds like something you do for school,

MW-I think it was the exact amount of difficulty I thought it would be. What is interesting is that I was very close to finishing and I knew I just needed to end it, and I didn’t know what to do, and so I just wrote an ending, and I sent it to Cissi and said, I’m not sure about this. And she said, I actually I like it. And I said, Okay, I guess.

Weeks went by and I just kept being like, I don’t think this is right. This is not the ending I want. This is not the note I want to end on. And in the process of writing this story, I shared it with a few people. I shared it with a couple lactation consultants and a pediatrician. I know, I know that’s taboo. You’re not supposed to.

MS-We’re not getting into any super ego. It’s just that the more people you show it to, the more opinions you’ll get. And you don’t want an ending or a story edited by a committee.

MW-True, but in this case, the lactation consultants and the physician were just looking at the medical aspects of it and had very helpful comments. But I did share it with two friends, one of whom is a journalist, and the other is a fiction writer. And both of them came back to me and said, the ending is not right. And I said, I know, and so that took me a very long time to figure out what the ending was, because I had originally written this thing about how, like, I was okay and like, it was just this. happy ending and just wasn’t really true to the experience.

MS-It is interesting, because I think that I’ve certainly seen this for myself, and certainly with writers I’ve worked with students and people have written for the Review is that the process of writing is creating order in the universe. But the problem for you here is that your universe was chaotic. It made sense. I have this beautiful baby. I have a happy marriage. My baby is healthy, and I’m cracking up, and the universe, as a result, is small. It feels like it’s just bursting apart. And to try to try to put that into words. There was no way you could have done the story in less time, and there was no way you couldn’t come to the end of the story and feel that the ending was wrong.

MW-Just to go back to something you were saying, I tried so many times to explain what I was feeling and explain why I thought I was so distraught about this, and try to make sense of it all and what I landed on, and where I think a lot of the story ends up being is kind of just like description., I can’t put into words how awful it felt to have my baby scream at my body, but I can tell you what it looked like, and I can tell you where we were. I can describe to you how in the moment I would, like lose my peripheral vision, and the world would just get really narrow.

MS- I’m gonna ask you to read something more.

MW-I’ve thought a lot about why breastfeeding mattered so much to me. At first, after the problem started, I struggled to explain it. There are instances when people in my life, people who loved me, asked me why I cared so much, or why I was driving myself crazy trying to get River to nurse again. Usually all I could muster was some jumble of because of the nutrition and antibodies, but also the bonding, and I don’t know it’s all just so much. I’m a bad mother. I’m a bad mother. I am so sad. I’m a bad mother. Later I got defensive. I imagined there were critics out there just waiting to pick apart the reasons I had for wanting to nurse. I had combative conversations with these pretend people in my head or on the pages of my journal. For months, my feelings about breastfeeding and River’s refusal to do it were a big, raw wound. It’s hard to look back on anything I wrote during that period, because all I see is a woman wearing milk stained sweat pants, sitting on the floor and crying. I’m no longer that woman, thankfully, and a big part of moving forward has been talking to other women who went through something similar.

MS-Are you glad you wrote the story? I don’t mean just for helping other women. I mean for you.

MW-Yeah.

MS-Why?

MW-I never committed to a project this big and delivered so I am. I am trying to just be proud of myself for setting out to do something that was really hard and completing it.

And, you know I’ve had a tumultuous relationship with writing a you know. And as I’m sure so many writers do, and I am full of self-doubt all the time and, and so getting something on the page that I felt was ready to be published is really big for me. I wonder sometimes, if I hadn’t written it, would I still sort of be that woman, in a way, because I think, I think getting to the place where I am now is one. I guess time obviously does matter River did start to nurse again. So I have often thought, like, Would I be able to write this if she hadn’t?

Toby had the normal level of problems, I would say. And I was so anxious about this during pregnancy. I’m feel bad for my husband.

MS-Can we say your husband is a saint?

MW-He is, he is. You know that a lot of times when babies are born, they apparently just like, don’t eat for the first 24 hours. They’re too sleepy. And Toby was one. No one told me that, okay, but Toby was like that, and I was freaking out in the hospital bed, and all the doctors were like, This is normal. This is normal. Breastfeeding is really hard, and every baby is different, and it’s this is another thing that I feel like doesn’t get talked about enough. It feels like it should be natural, and it’s just not like you have to learn how to do it, and your baby has to learn.

There were little moments with him where I would feel like things were going awry and I would just descend into darkness. And I think you know the fact that it didn’t happen with River until she was six weeks old. I didn’t like ever trust that things were actually okay with Toby until he was much older.

MS-You’ve now been through this crucible for lack of a better term, both in terms of the experience, but also in terms of making sense of it through writing. I have to think that there are people listening to our conversation going -- this sounds really scary, but what advice would you offer them?

MW-You talk often about writers needing to write stories, and you do a lot of Writerlands where you interview people about why they needed to write a story. And I’ve done a story for you I’m sure I answered a question about why I needed to write this story.

MS-But Visit To The Bunny Planet was a very different story than Breastfeeding Grief.

MW-This was a story about the like dark world of rabbit breeding.

MS-You don’t want to know reader. Check it out.

MW-I have never before had the experience of needing to write a story the way I needed to write this.

And so I think if you are are questioning and you feel like you need to write it, then write it. And I don’t know, maybe, hopefully, there’s a market for it. I don’t, I don’t know what the what the advice is, but I guess just trust your gut on that. Like if you find something interesting and important, then it is your job as a journalist, as a writer, to make other people think it is as well.

MS-Miriam, it’s a great story. Thank you. Thank you for letting us be at home.