What's It Gonna Be? Wire or Fur?

Yesterday I was telling a friend about Harry Harlow's famous (or infamous, if you're an animal rights activist) research on primate development. I explained to her that Harlow was intrigued with love. He started the Primate Research Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison at a time when behaviorism was in its heyday. The behaviorists maintained that there was no such thing as love, that "love" was actually conditioning: We love Mother because she gives us food. What appeared to be some transcendent state of mind and heart was, according to the behaviorists, merely attachment motivated by base physical drives such as hunger, thirst, and the need for warmth.

Harlow believed that love was something more than conditioning. He set up experiments to test the effects of removing baby monkeys from their mothers (cruel, I know). He constructed surrogate mothers of wire and fur. The wire mothers had milk; the fur mothers did not. If "love" were merely instrumental, the babies should have spent most of their time feeding at the wire monkey. Instead, they spent almost all of their time with the fur monkey, even when they were hungry. Only when the hunger became extreme did they move to the wire monkey, and then only long enough to feed. When the fur monkey had food, they never visited the wire monkey.

As I was describing this research I had something of an epiphany. I realized that this crazy treadmill I'm on -- feed, pump, pump, take herbs to boost milk supply, pump, feed, fret about not producing enough breast milk, leave the baby in the swingy chair to pump some more -- is causing me to shed my fur. People keep telling me to leave behind the pump and just nurse around the clock for a week to boost my supply, but I have a history of depression, and sleeplessness has kept me skating on the surface of it since my daughter's birth. I'm afraid to cut back on what little sleep I'm getting for fear it'll plunge me into the depths of a deep, black emptiness. And what if I have to keep nursing like that to keep up my supply? In short, I fear that going to the extremes necessary for me to give my daughter an all-milk diet will turn me into that catatonic wire monkey: The milk's there, but the love isn't.

I told my friend this and she said that's why she gave up pumping altogether. By three months she found it absurd that she was nursing her child and then setting him down to go pump when she could have been holding and loving him. My friend said to hell with it, tossed the pump, nursed until she was empty and then supplemented with formula until her child was content. A few weeks later she transitioned to formula exclusively and hasn't looked back. She knew what was needed to save her sanity and to maximize her opportunity to build a close, loving relationship with her child.

I think I'm going to have to make a choice soon. When that time comes, I know what I have to do. I choose to be the fur monkey.