I Never Planned To Breastfeed My Adopted Baby. I Ended Up Going To Extreme Lengths To Do So.

We got The Call at 6 a.m. on New Year’s Day. A birth mom had chosen us. Our son was waiting for us to pick him up — how fast could we get to the hospital?

My husband and I had been searching for a baby to adopt for eight months, and in that time, I’d read every adoption book, article and how-to guide I could find. When I learned that you could induce lactation to breastfeed your adopted baby, I rolled my eyes thinking to myself, “Good Lord, just give the kid a bottle.”

I wasn’t one of those moms who thought of breastfeeding as The Correct Choice. I knew formula was a good option and had used it to supplement breast milk with my older biological kids — Jack and Kate, then 5 and 3.

But one evening, during Henry’s first week home, I sat in the rocker in our bedroom to give him his bottle and snuggle him, and I felt disconnected. When you nurse a baby, you’re skin-to-skin — obviously mouth-to-breast, but also tummy-to-torso. Feeding him from a bottle, something was missing. I realized in the rocking chair that, for me, breastfeeding was part of mothering. Just as I was loyal to our bedtime routine and a specific swaddling style with all of my babies, breastfeeding was part of how I took care . How I bonded. How I loved.

I breastfed Jack and Kate until they were 6 months old. It was time-consuming, inconvenient and sometimes painful. At one point I had a case of mastitis that made me sick enough to be scared. The dates I circled on the calendar as my breastfeeding finish lines with them were days of unapologetic relief.

And yet.

Breastfeeding was also one of the most gratifying things I’d ever done. Knowing my body supplied everything my baby needed felt both powerful and exquisitely tender. Breastfeedingland was a