I Couldn’t Have A Baby, But My Wife Could. So I Induced Lactation To Nurse Our Son.

I got pregnant the first time we tried — with an intrauterine insemination at our doctor’s office. My wife brought home pizza and Martinelli’s. I took a photo of the digital pee test that shouted “Pregnant,” called my mom and my sister to share the news, and started a secret baby-focused Pinterest page.

The spotting started almost immediately, and the nurse called on Memorial Day to say my blood tests showed dropping hormone levels, a nonviable pregnancy. We waited three months before trying again, still hopeful. Yet month after month, the tests came back negative. Three years later, after IVF, a miscarriage, and too many tears, we made a new plan. I would start the IVF process again, and my wife would start getting IUIs. Whoever got pregnant first was having our baby.

My wife was pregnant within a month.

When she first raised the idea of shared nursing, I resisted. My body had firmly refused to get or stay pregnant. Mothering was clearly not in its lexicon. Perhaps it was time I got the message. Besides, I told her, after she had done the work of carrying a baby around for nine months and then pushing it out with the strength of her own body, she deserved the bond of breastfeeding. I did not.

“But you tried for years. Of course you deserve it,” she argued. “And anyway, I want the help.” We’d talked to so many of our female friends in hetero relationships who felt overwhelmed by breastfeeding. Having someone to take a few of the middle-of-the-night nursing sessions? Sign me up.

If it had been me, I don’t think I would have been willing to share. As wrapped up as I was in the shame of infertility and the insatiable desire to create life, I knew I would have held tightly to that connection between mother and baby. But my wife was either more generous or more afraid of being solely responsible for the sustenance of a tiny human being. Or both.

So, we agreed I would try.

Inducing lactation requires three things: starting birth control six months before the baby is due, taking a medication called domperidone for six months before and throughout breastfeeding, and then stopping birth control and pumping every three hours for the six weeks leading up to the due date.

At the appointed time, I started pumping. I never could quite manage the recommended eight times a day; the demands of work and the seduction of sleep capped me at seven. I read chick lit as I pumped. A city girl running from a failed affair fell in love with a shy country boy kept me company while I winced through the early pain, when nothing but air filled the bottles. In the days right before our son was born, I read about a French bookstore owner on a journey to find his last love while drops of milk fell from my nipples.

Domperidone, a gastrointestinal medication that can cause lactation as a side effect, is not approved for sale in the United States. Though it is available for sale in most other countries, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned it in 2004 because of cardiac impacts in severely ill patients who were given the drug intravenously. A rule follower by nature, I had some apprehension about acquiring the drug. Through a Facebook group for queer nongestational parents, I’d learned where to order it and was assured that placing the online order for a product that bore a different name would result in domperidone showing up on my doorstep. I imagined a SWAT team arriving alongside it, guns extended as they grabbed the packages and brought me in for questioning.

Then I thought of a tiny baby snuggled against my body, being comforted by my milk.

I visited my doctor, hopeful that she’d agree the ban was unreasonable and prescribe it anyway. Of course, in weighing my ability to breastfeed against her medical license, she didn’t accommodate. “There are herbs you can take,” she told me. “And start the pumping routine as soon as possible. It may work. It may not. Think of it as an experiment.”

“An experiment?” I exclaimed later to my wife. “If I’m going to do all this, I want it to work. I want to be able to feed our son. I don’t want an experiment.”

I called a local lactation consultant, who said exactly what I wanted to hear — she felt the ban on the drug in its pill form was irrational; she recommended domperidone to lots of mothers with low milk supply, and I should absolutely go for it. I placed my order that night.

I was sitting at my desk the next day when my cellphone rang from a number I didn’t recognize. On the other end of the scratchy line, a woman yelled at me, “Tell your bank approve charge. You place order. Bank not approve. You tell them approve. We do it again.”

My hands shook as I hung up. I was sure that I had just provided our credit card information to a scam operation, that our identities were being stolen by someone in a foreign country at that very moment. Perhaps I was too anxious, wanted this too badly. Then I thought of a tiny baby snuggled against my body, being comforted by my milk.

I called the credit card company. “Yeah, you’ve got two charges here for $138.10. One’s for electronics and one’s for clothing,” the man said.

I scrambled for how to respond. The whole thing sounded wildly suspicious to me. I thought the man on the phone must be suspicious, too. After he hung up, he would probably call the authorities to let them know about the shady international transactions. I told him I wanted the charge to go through. “Clothing or electronics?” he asked. “Or both?”

“Um,” I hesitated. “Electronics?”

The charge went through, and a month later, a rubber-banded bundle of blister packs with little yellow pills showed up in my mailbox.

Later, I discovered a Canadian seller with slightly less intrigue, and the pills arrived faster and still in the original boxes, providing me a bit more peace of mind.

“I know this appointment is supposed to be about you,” my wife’s OB-GYN said at one of her monthly visits. “But,” and she turned toward me, her eyes lit with excitement, “I really want to hear about this.”

I explained the birth control and the pumping and the shady domperidone purchases.

“And? Are you getting any milk?”

When I told her I was pumping between 1 and 2 ounces at every pumping session, her eyes got big. “Well, that’s enough to feed a newborn!”

In the weeks before our son was born, I should have been afraid of the sleepless nights and the constant decision-making, but instead I obsessed over whether people would see me as his mother, whether he would, whether I would.

The interest continued at the hospital. I assumed that since we were in Burlington, Vermont, where lesbians abound, the doctors and nurses would have encountered a lesbian nongestational parent who was breastfeeding, but I was wrong. Nurses entered our room and made straight for me as I held an impossibly tiny little creature up to my breast. They peered closely, making suggestions for how to hold the baby and what to look for to make sure he was drinking. I suspected they all secretly wanted to see for themselves.

I felt like a science experiment — but the good kind, where the volcano shoots higher than anyone expected.

In the beginning, we were interchangeable. A boob was a boob was a boob. Latching was not quite as easy with my wife, but she and our son developed a system as they spent their days together those first three months while I was out at work. When I got home, he was happy to switch things up and nurse from me until bedtime.

Eventually he developed preferences. Once my wife went back to work, we tried to change the routine and have her feed him in the evenings. Before bed, he would cry and push against her with all the force his little body could muster. I went into the other room, tried to disappear, be silent so that he wouldn’t know I was there.

“He wants you,” she would say with a clenched jaw and tears in her eyes as she handed him over.

“I’m so sorry,” I’d whisper.

We talked to the doctor, our lactation consultant, a different lactation consultant, other co-nursing moms on a Facebook group — no one knew how to cure him of preference. I cringed as the doctor told us that babies often identify one parent as the “comfort” parent. I glanced over at my wife, who had a similarly pained expression on her face. “Not that the other parent is chopped liver,” the doctor hedged. “They’re just usually the fun one. Besides, this won’t be the last time what he wants and what you want conflict. This is good training for the future.”

Throughout my wife’s pregnancy, I’d been stung by friends or acquaintances who congratulated only my wife, looked only at her when speaking about the baby or our future as parents. Her growing belly was a constant physical reminder that she would be forever connected to our child in a way I never could be, and the comments of others seemed to broadcast my deep fear — that I was irrelevant in all this. In the weeks before our son was born, I should have been afraid of the sleepless nights and the constant decision-making, but instead I obsessed over whether people would see me as his mother, whether he would, whether I would.

In the hospital a few hours after my wife gave birth, the nurses prepared to move us from labor and delivery to the Mother-Baby Unit. It was 2 or 3 in the morning, and the unit was full. They were going to have to put us in one of the shared rooms. For safety reasons, the nurse told me apologetically, only the mother and baby could stay in the room overnight.

I looked at her, my mouth agape. My son was mere hours old, and I was going to have to be separated from him. And from my wife, who had just done the hardest thing I’d ever seen and would have to spend the rest of the night without me.

“Is there any way…?” I asked, letting the question trail off. I couldn’t wrap my head around what they were saying.

“I’m not comfortable with that,” my wife said.

“Well,” the nurse said, scrunching up her forehead in thought. “You are breastfeeding.” My son was, in fact, attempting to attach himself to my breast at that moment. “Let me see what I can do,” she said as she left the room.

As she walked us to the new unit, the nurse told me, rather conspiratorially, that partners are not normally allowed to stay in shared rooms overnight, but she’d told them I needed to stay because I was also feeding our newborn baby. “There’s only a chair for you to sleep in,” she told me.

“Not a problem,” I assured her. “Thank you.”

I hated to think of the fathers and mothers sent away in the first hours of their babies’ lives. Sitting in that chair next to my wife’s bed, watching my son’s tiny chest rising and falling, I saw that breastfeeding made me a mother in other people’s eyes, whether I birthed him or not.

The truth is this: I became his mother the moment I saw the faint pink line on the pregnancy test. I was his mother while I massaged my pregnant wife’s swollen calves each night, and I was his mother when my alarm went off at 4 a.m. and I shuffled to the sofa and pulled out my pump. I was always his mother, but breastfeeding created a tangible way for me — and others — to see my place in our new little family.

Katie Taylor is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Vermont, where she shares a home with her wife, two kids, and an unruly dog. You can find her on Instagram @ktaylorwriter.