Have you ever felt compelled to eat a bar of soap?
Bizarre maternity experiences no one ever told me about
While I was pregnant, I felt this very intense urge to soak a sponge in bleach and shove it into my mouth. One whiff of dish detergent would make me drool. “A small bite of this soap surely won’t hurt, it’s organic”, I thought every time I was in the shower. I never gave in to my quirky desires, but of course I googled ”Why do I feel like chewing on a dirty cloth”, and was surprised to find out that apparently what I felt is a real condition, and it sounds like it was named after a Pokemon.
Pica is described as a disorder which makes people — usually pregnant women and children — crave and “eat items that have no nutritional value.” This can include dirt, laundry soap, paint, matches, the unused remainder of a cigarette, hair!!! The name actually comes from the latin word for Magpie, “a bird known to eat nearly anything.” How very peculiar, right? Such a great name though. The explanation for this condition makes sense: it usually means a deficiency in zinc, iron or other nutrients — which is why you sometimes see children eat dirt. “Your unusual cravings may be a sign that your body is trying to replenish low nutrient levels.” Reader, if you’ve felt anything like this, please do share! I have yet to meet someone who has had these urges too.
While I was breastfeeding my second child, I experienced something else that I had never heard about. I only recently realised that there is a name for what I felt since Haley Nahman mentioned it in her newsletter, Maybe, Baby. I’ve always enjoyed Haley’s writing, but now I’m enjoying it even more since she’s been sharing her struggles after recently having a baby — and if there’s one thing that makes me feel better about myself is knowing that other people are having a hard time too, especially if they’re people whose success I feel slightly jealous of. The other day she confessed, “This week I’ve been cycling through bouts of hormonal fatigue and depression, struggling to write this newsletter, unable to string my thoughts together, let alone the sentences”, which made me feel less guilty about my lack of what is considered “productivity”.
What I felt whilst breastfeeding was something called “Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex”, or D-MER for those in the know (where are all my D-MER mammas at?). A medical study concluded that it is “an abrupt emotional "drop" that occurs in some women just before milk release and continues for not more than a few minutes. The brief negative feelngs range in severity from wistfulness to self-loathing”. In my case I felt a deep, unexplainable sadness and it lasted for like a minute or so. I remember trying to explain it to my mum, “It’s this feeling of doom, loneliness and emptiness. For a few seconds I forget who I am. Everything loses meaning. It’s like maybe something in my unconscious is triggered by the act of breastfeeding”. My mum, who had no idea what I was talking but is always up for discussing anything related to sadness and our unconscious, quickly agreed “Yes, that must be it. Perhaps it’s your inner child manifesting itself since I didn’t breastfeed you?”.
At some point I noticed that it happened more often with my left boob, so I decided to only breastfeed Fausto with my right one. This meant that eventually my left boob gave up producing milk and completely deflated while my right boob was filling up double capacity, which made me look like someone who Diane Arbus would surely have loved to photograph.
A friend of mine actually did photograph my breasts in full-freak mode, after we had been on an 11-hour flight to São Paulo without my baby, during which I didn’t pump because I was too ecstatic about spending the next 11 hours watching in-flight entertainment and eating everything they placed in front of me. When we landed I immediately regretted my decision, since my right boob was bulging out of my bra and felt like it had been filled with cement, while the other just lay there lost, with no purpose left. I will probably regret this later, but to finish today’s newsletter in the the most classy manner, here is the picture she took of me:
Thanks for reading.
x Isabel
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