I thought feeding my baby would be a solo act (or at least, a duet). Me, her… and a pump. Or a bottle. Or maybe a boob, if it worked out.
What I didn’t expect—what no one told me—was that feeding a baby, especially in those raw early days, is the result of a constellation of kindnesses.
Some grand, but most small and specific. And while the pump and the bottles and the sore nipples were part of it, so were the people: the ones who made space for me to feed, in every sense of the word.
In January 2025, I was eight months pregnant, and our city was on fire. We packed and readied our go bag for residential evacuation before we packed and readied our go bag for hospital delivery. We are among the lucky ones who continued the new year with our house and neighborhood intact, a fact for which we will forever be grateful.
Also forever: how the start of my mothering journey is linked with that moment in time.
Because this experience seeded a mantra I carried with me from those scary late days of pregnancy to now when I face moments of overwhelm as a mother. When the problem feels too big, try small. More specifically, extend (or accept) a kindness somewhere in close proximity.
I’m certainly not the first to think it. Or the first to share it. But life is a circle of remembering and forgetting. So, perhaps revisiting this idea together is not such a waste of our time.
With our city on fire (and some might say, our country, too), the refrain of the times seems to be: what can we do? How do we meaningfully contribute when it all feels so…flammable?
In that particular disaster, many people went small. With little kindnesses everywhere. A contributed item to a family’s wish list of needed replacements. A donation to a friend’s (or a stranger’s) GoFundMe. An invitation into your home. Volunteering at someone else’s.
I know, I know it. I can hear the eye rolls. But these kindnesses. They matter. To someone. Each time.
What moved me so in my various endeavors to feed this baby girl were the simplicity and specificity of the kindnesses from those around me. These weren’t grand gestures. But they mattered very much. To me. Each time.
Our Daughter’s Arrival
While I wouldn’t liken it to the energy of a major disaster, baby girl did arrive with…drama. Do they ever not? In the ninth inning, after an induction and many hours immobile in a hospital bed at Cedar’s Sinai, it was go time. Not only because I was fully dilated but also because I had developed an infection called chorioamnionitis. This is an infection of the amniotic sac and surrounding membranes, and is considered so critical that I had that baby stat. It also meant both baby girl and I needed antibiotics (me for sure, her as a precaution).
Fine for me, but seeing your seconds old baby girl whisked away so an IV port could be placed in her arm? Less fine. There were a lot of cooks in the kitchen around the whole matter—a pediatric doctor, a variety of nurses. They said a lot of words I couldn’t digest at the time; pieces of audio bounced around my fuzzy post-partum brain “NICU,” “unlikely but possible infection,” “we should act now.”
But boy was that girl—my girl— a force of strength. She was hardly bothered by the bulky bandage wrapped around her tiny arm and hand like a miniature boxing glove. I was a mess, she was a 6 lbs, 11 ounces angel.
When we finally arrived home (the complications required a few extra nights stay for monitoring), everyone was happy, ultimately healthy, and relieved. Exhausted by the ordeal but healthy…
..until I landed in the ER two days later.
I’m not sure overwhelmed quite does it justice. My right leg was about three times the size of the left and with a history of blood clots in my maternal family line, to the emergency room I went. My milk hadn’t come in yet and per the lactation consultant’s instructions, I was pumping every three hours to encourage its arrival. So there I was, my dear friend Jen on my left, my Spectra S2 on my right and back at the same hospital I’d delivered at just days earlier.
But the thing is, when I find myself relaying the story, the marquee moments are not ones of fear. Rather, to me, the most interesting parts of my story are the ones centered on kindness. The ER nurse who finagled me a place to pump and passed along adult diapers (IYKYK). The friends who rallied to support my husband and sat by my side—for eight hours!—while I waited to be seen. These strangers and friends were the living embodiment of that post-fire refrain I’d had in my head. That small kindnesses matter.
Acts of Kindness For This Nursing Mother
Here, I share a list of specific kindnesses I encountered in simply trying to feed our new girl. I share these in the hope that doing so may beget more hope. I dare to presume that beneath the crusty harshness of the world around us right now, there are many humans to whom kindnesses come easy. Triteness be damned.
Thank you to the young woman who gave me her place in the North Hollywood urgent care waiting line. You overheard me tell the receptionist I was three days postpartum, worried I had a blood clot and couldn’t sit the 24 hour (!) wait time because I needed to go home and feed my baby. (The receptionist had really told me the wait time was 2 to 4 hours, but on day three postpartum, all conversations sound like they’re happening under water–or like the dialogue between Johnny Depp and Benicio Del Toro in “Fear in Loathing in Las Vegas.”)
Thank you to the staffer at the Cedars-Sinai emergency room who, as we further investigated that potential blood clot, snuck me into the back and crafted a makeshift private pumping station from curtains on wheels and a rolling stool nabbed from the phlebotomy station. As I sat next to that array of medical machinery I could not name in the back of your cold ER, crying to the woosh woosh of my Spectra S2, you slipped me a blanket and extra absorbent adult diapers through the curtain.
Thank you to the Auntie Jens, my dearest friends. One of whom accompanied me to the ER and stayed the full eight hours (!). The other who morally supported my husband at home, ran our laundry and regularly called to assure me, “Babygirl Claire is fed and doing great.”
Thank you to the woman at the Nashville International Airport breastfeeding her babe beneath a blanket while eating BBQ at the brewhouse. She had no idea, but as I hemmed and hawed about whether or not to give it a public go myself, seeing her lead the way gave me the courage to join. Does this count as a kindness? Quietly reinforcing a healthy and beneficial norm? Yes, it does.
Thank you to my husband’s friend’s wife, whom I hadn’t yet met but who nonetheless sent her husband with frozen bricks of bone broth anytime he stopped by. When I did meet her in person and gave thanks, she responded, “Of course. This is what we do for each other.”
Thank you again to Auntie Jen, who drove my car to our first real outing in the world, a family brunch at her mom’s house, so I could simultaneously feed baby girl en route. I performed a gymnastic feat in the backseat that day—pumping from one side, bottle-feeding from the other. I felt like a sleep-deprived dairy cow performing cirque du soleil.
All these kindnesses (and the dozens more that surround us every day, often unseen) are the low hum of a quiet societal engine.
One that is still running well despite what we see across our splintered media portals and in their comments sections. Like Mr. Rodgers in a well-worn Toyota Corolla, waving hello from the driver-side window. They say, “Hey, neighbor, I see you.”
These kindnesses are the community raising its littlest members by showing, not telling, how we can be. They feed us in the ways that matter. Sometimes literally.
It’s National Breastfeeding Month, and I can’t help but think that this is what it’s really about—not just the milk itself, or how it’s delivered, but the web of support that makes feeding a baby possible.
Whether you’re nursing, pumping, combo feeding or formula feeding, every parent deserves a world where small kindnesses are instinctive and abundant.
