Liquid Gold

For the last four months, I've been squirreling away breast milk into the freezer for the proverbial rainy day. It all started with my decision during the twins' first month to feed them formula milk for the last feed of the night. Because I was going to skip that feed, I would express during the duration of the feed and store the milk.

It slowly became an addiction to express and see how much I could actually produce. Admittedly, there were times where I wished I no longer had to express. My day is broken up into 4-5 hour blocks and whatever I plan to do in a day is limited by whether it could be completed within this stipulated time frame. Even if I didn't have a kid sleeping with me at night, I still had to wake up to empty the breasts. So many times, I've wanted to give up, telling myself that 4 months is enough and I was too tired to do this but guilt (once again, rearing its ugly head) has always gotten the better of me.

Now, thanks to my doggedness, I have a freezer full of frozen milk and some spill over in the family freezer downstairs. I face the happy dilemma of trying to squeeze more milk into the freezer while trying to keep the freezer door open for as little time as possible. It's gotten to the point where I'm tempted to freeze milk in the work fridge. The milk in the freezer doesn't get cleared all that quickly if I'm at home because I'm there to provide fresh milk for the twins. At times, I insist on just using frozen milk just so that we can get rid of the earlier date packets.

All of this makes me feel like a hamster that's running very quickly but not getting anywhere because it's running on a wheel. I thaw milk to use to clear space to put more milk into the freezer and the cycle repeats. My sister-in-law had suggested sometime back that I could donate some of my milk to mothers with little or no milk. I wasn't really aware of such a thing occurring (especially in Singapore) until she told me so.

So I finally decided to put an ad up on the Singapore Motherhood forum that I occasionally go to. I did get some replies but some of the responses made it feel like it really wasn't worth my while especially since I was doing to help other mothers and more importantly their babies. On my part, I saw it as I was doing something good. But when you get descended upon by what seems like a pack of wolves, you begin to wonder if it's a good idea. I understood that these mommies wanted to know how old the milk was and it doesn't hurt to be careful but this was done with the subtlety of a bull. I got asked extremely rudely to provide a list of food I ate in general, I was asked about my hygenie practices, whether I had HIV (?!), how I stored the milk, whether I had slept around etc. Like I said, I get that they need to be cautious, I would be as well, but if I had HIV? Or if I slept around? Seriously? How do they think that they are not offending anyone? Through this experiment, I also discovered that Singaporeans have no sense of humour because my reply to one of the questions was " I don't drink, smoke or do drugs" and the reply was "Good, I'm glad, otherwise I won't want your milk".

Anyway, I think I will still give away some of the packets. Because the freezer is so full and I tried to shove more packets into it, I had a packet inevitably blow up on me. Well, not literally but the packet leaked into the ice tray and I had lost 160ml of milk that way. Of course, an insensitive person would just say that since I have so much, no sweat, no big loss. But such a person will get a swift and hard kick in the shins for saying that. I have an inherent fear though, that if I gave away some of the milk, I would be in a position where I would suddenly need milk but not have any. But then I think to myself, at the beginning, I had no idea if I would be able to produce enough for my twins and by God's grace, I did and here, I just have to trust that I will still produce enough even if I give away some.

It sure beats having it explode in the fridge or having to deal with suggestions of selling it for profit.

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