How to Cry Over Spilled Milk

Step one: Hurt your back

Step two: Aggravate the injury by continuing to pick up your kid. Lift him. Hug him. Feed him. Change him. Bend and twist to get him in the car. What else can you do?

Step three: Sleep less. Between the injured back and the growing kid you're back to sleeping in 2 hour chunks. Only this time you also have to go to work and make dinner and walk the dog and on and on.

Step four: Stare at the clock. Count down the minutes until your husband gets home. Hate him a little for being at a bar in Japan while you're at home weighing the pros and cons of sacrificing half an hour of potential sleep to soak in an epsom salt bath. Yearn for a hug and his calm reassurance that this, too, will pass. Settle for the email he sent when he was trying to wake up and you were trying to fall asleep because that 12-hour time difference is killer.

Step five: Wonder if you can convince someone else to come over to the house and take care of the kid overnight so you can rest. But you'd still have to get up to feed him, so you might as well be the one to lift him out of the crib, too. Besides, you're too tired to do anything other than snap at them for failing to help in exactly the right way, and that just leads to guilt and shame and less sleep. Better to power through.

Step six: Pump less than usual and worry about it. Worry about your kid getting enough food at daycare. Worry about whether this is just normal ebb and flow or a sign of your milk drying up. Worry if it's stress or lack of sleep or the Tylenol you're taking. Worry about switching your kid to formula, the hows and the whens. Turn to the internet for advice only to find page after page of mothers imploring you to keep trying to breastfeed which does nothing to alleviate your stress. Or your insomnia. Or your back pain. Decide to table the decision until his doctor's appointment next week.

Step seven: Knock over a bottle of breast milk and watch the three precious ounces spill out and disappear in the crack between the stove and the counter. Wonder how you're going to clean it up. Wonder how you're going to replace it before daycare tomorrow. Wonder how you're going to make it through two more days before your husband gets back.

Step eight: Find the silver lining. You punched through the writer's block.