The breast police are going to cart me away this week. Maybe I'll wake up and find them on the doorstep with my morning tea, and they'll take me away to the station where LLL meetings are mandatory and little pamphlets are required reading on the benefits of breastfeeding and how my child is going to be traumatized and permanently emotionally scarred by my lack of this basic maternal instinct.

I just don't want to breastfeed.

It's not that I've had a bad experience so far. The handful of times (three) that I've put the baby to the boob, it's been a relatively innocuous thing. She's latched somewhat, suckled a bit, fallen asleep more. Given her preemie state, and that she's just now really getting mature enough to have the suckle reflexes, that's fine. I'm just all squicky at a person making wet, fleshy contact with my boob. Because once upon a nightmare, the husband of a friend of mine showed up on my doorstep in the middle of the day when he was supposed to be at work, and the compromise I made to get him out the door without anything worse happening was that he kissed my breasts. No one had ever done that wet, sensualistic type of thing before, and I didn't like it, and the fact that I didn't want to have to do it didn't help any.

And I'll be damned if I'm going to let my daughter trigger a semi-hysterical reaction from me doing what comes naturally to her and what should be a wonderful bonding experience for the both of us.

I'm so fucking tired of this shit. I'm tired of having been screwed over by the people I was supposed to be able to trust. I'm tired of having to deal with this fucked up crap while I'm living my happily ever after, while I'm embracing my new role as wife and mother. While I'm learning to deal with a premature daughter who is still in the hospital indefinately, who I'm only now a month after her birth learning not to be afraid to love. I can't fear to love her. Even if my nightmares hold her dying... in my arms, before my eyes, while I'm somewhere else entirely.

So I'm going to run away from this flashback. I'm not going to face this trigger. I'll spend hours and hours with a breast pump to give my girl the benefits that come with her mother's milk. And I'll gladly feed her with a bottle and face the breast police when they come to accuse me. I'll hold her to my skin in kangaroo care, and I'll do that happily for hours and hours at a time. But I'm never going to hold her to my nipple to feed again.

When I held her, I loved her. And the old screaming was rising in my head as I didn't want to hear the ghosts of the past. These things must remain apart. I do not want to see them in the same reality. Ever.