Here I go again, bitching and whining about my boobs. I can’t help it, they look so damned drained!  As most of the moms out their can attest, boobs after pregnancy and breast-feeding just don’t look the same.  Prior to my pregnancy I was a proud B-cup sized member of the Itty, Bitty, Titty Committee who lived by the motto that “anything more than a handful is a waste”.  Although my breasts were small I cherished them, they were firm, perky, and sat high upon my chest. After giving birth to my beautiful son my breasts took on a completely different form it was something that no amount of the prolific reading I did about breast feeding could prepare me for: engorgement.

 Engorgement is when the breasts swell because of increased milk production. I experienced this about three days after giving birth when I woke up and noticed that overnight my breasts had swelled up to over three times their normal size and were as solid as two basketballs! Although they looked good enough to grace the pages of Penthouse magazine they were painful and extremely sensitive to touch. They hurt if I touched them, they hurt if I didn't touch them. They hurt if I had a bra with wire, a bra with no wire or no bra at all.  My midwife told me to let my son drain the milk from them but my nipples were so hard and distended that even my cherubic little son couldn’t get his mouth around them. And so the struggles with breast feeding began…

 Over the first few weeks after giving birth I had to put up with an endless succession of overeager midwives and nurses manhandling my breasts, shoving my baby’s head onto my nipple, squeezing and prodding my boobs, lifting and molding my breasts. After about two weeks of this they gave up and recommended me to a breast feeding expert, Dr. Newman, who smugly told me that he had never met a mother and baby he couldn’t help. After two weeks of trying to get my son to become a boob-man and latch on to my breasts the doctor gave up on us and told me to buy some formula.

As I got my son adjusted to the formula I tried to mentally prepare myself for having them shrink back to their original B-cup sized. Once they went back down to a B I horridly had to watch in stunned disbelief as they kept getting smaller & smaller until they shrank to an A. But they weren’t just any old A cup breasts, they were A cup breasts that used to be a DD meaning that the elasticity wore out so that the fat in my breasts may have gone down but the skin didn’t shrink, making them look as if someone let the air out of them. Is this really fair? Isn’t there like an Extreme Makeover: Droopy Breasts Edition show that I could go on? Until then I guess I’ll just roll my breasts back up into a ball and put on a bra.