There’s no "Just": A Breastfeeding Story

When I was pregnant it seemed obvious that I would breastfeed. It turned out to be much more complicated than that.

First, a caveat: This essay is about my experience with breastfeeding. It is not meant to serve as a comprehensive summary of what breastfeeding is like for everyone.

I was inspired to write this piece after reading this essay about colic, which vividly describes the frustration of caring for a baby who screams and cries inconsolably for hours. I was moved by the author’s honesty and my goal here is the same: to write the kind of essay I wish I had found when I was struggling.

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A scene from postpartum life

It’s 3am and I’m dangling myself off the edge of our couch, desperately squeezing the manual breast pump lever, praying through tears that the rock hard lump on my left breast will soften soon.

The hot shower had not worked, nor had the expensive heated massagers I’d purchased the week before. Or the epsom salt soaks. Or reducing saturated fat in my diet or adding probiotics, or the dozens of other things I had tried over the past few months. At least not entirely, because here we are again.

It started the day before, with the usual pattern: a strange sharp pain that felt like someone had lost a sewing needle somewhere behind my left nipple, followed by a white, milk filled blister and a hard, swollen lump. The blisters — known by the deceptively cute name “milk blebs” — first appeared shortly after we returned home from the hospital with our newborn daughter. Blebs are considered a common breastfeeding complication; If you're lucky, the blockage is just a thick bit of milk you can break up in the shower. If you're unlucky (like me), skin grows over the blister and you have to break through the surface to release the ever-growing pressure of a backed-up milk duct. This is exactly as painful as it sounds. If it gets bad enough you can get a doctor to poke it with a hot needle, but most people try DIY home solutions first for obvious reasons.  If you can’t manage to clear it, there are serious risks: it can progress to mastitis (a breast infection) or turn into an abscess that requires surgery to resolve.

No pressure, though — I chuckled to myself as I squeezed the lever of the pump, wincing in pain.

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When I was pregnant it seemed obvious that I would breastfeed. Like most clinics, my obstetrician's office was filled with flyers and pamphlets extolling the virtues of exclusive breastfeeding. My childbirth class devoted two evening sessions to breastfeeding, and provided a page of resources for nursing mothers. I read these articles and absorbed the message that breastfeeding was natural and the best choice for babies.

But I was no zealot. I said that I "planned" to breastfeed and that formula would be fine too, if for some reason things didn't go as expected.

Famous last words.

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My first real experience with breastfeeding was, as it is for most people, in the hospital. Moments after Alice was born they placed her in my arms, where she rooted and latched onto my chest immediately. She's doing great! The delivery nurses exclaimed. I was relieved that things seemed to be going well right away.

I knew to expect a visit from a hospital lactation consultant once I was moved into recovery. Hospitals employ these professional breastfeeding experts to offer guidance and support to new mothers. I assumed their advice would be fairly straightforward.

The first lactation consultant who came to my room walked in and stood over my bed for a moment before asking curtly, “When was the last time you fed your baby?”

I struggled to find the words, I had given birth at two in the morning after 26 hours of labor and felt like I had been nursing her constantly since then. Was it hours or minutes? What time was it even? What day? The hospital had kicked my husband out for the night, stating that due to space they had to double up rooms and couldn't allow spouses to room in with other patients. We argued and argued with them, demanding an explanation for this ridiculous policy. But there was no budging, and I was left alone to figure things out for the majority of those early morning hours. Nurses wandered in and out of my room, frazzled and short tempered from the Covid-related staffing shortage.

The consultant didn’t wait for a response. 

“You need to feed her regularly,” she said, her tone full of judgment.

There was a whiteboard in the room to log feedings but only the first nurse on shift had used it, and now it seemed like maybe I should've been doing that. The shame was white-hot; I was already making mistakes.

The consultant then asked me what feeding position I preferred. I said I didn’t really know. I was still nervous about the best way to handle this impossibly tiny baby. My hands shook uncontrollably when I had to move her from the plastic bassinet to the bed, my wrist still throbbing in pain from the port that stuck awkwardly out of my hand. The consultant came over and scooped Alice up swiftly and expertly, and positioned her in what she called the football hold. It looked very confusing. I knew from technical jobs that sometimes you need to do things yourself to really learn them, so I asked her if I could try to get her into the same position. She let me try this and I struggled, unable to mentally reverse what I’d seen her hands do.

"Why don’t we try this position instead", she said. Once again she scooped up Alice and turned her around. She settled her into position and adjusted her mouth. "That looks good," she said. "She has a good latch." She told me to keep nursing her on demand and left.

No less than five different lactation experts marched into my room in the next 24 hours. Each one contradicted what the previous one had said — different suggested positions for me or the baby, different advice on timing (both “let her nurse on demand” to “you should stop her if it’s unproductive and going too long”), different descriptions of what hunger would look like. I was hurting and tired and growing more frustrated by the minute. I dreaded their visits.

By late morning a painful red blister had begun to develop on my left nipple. The consultant of the hour came in and announced that I needed to “address her latch” otherwise it would worsen and lead to breast infections.

“It shouldn’t ever be painful,” she said.

“I mean it’s always a little painful,” I said, minimizing the sharp, arresting pain I felt whenever Alice started nursing.

“Well then something's wrong,” said the consultant. She pulled Alice off of me, resulting in immediate wailing and screaming. She then roughly shoved her back onto my chest into yet another new position. The wailing and screaming worsened — I felt a deep protective instinct and pushed her hand away. "This isn't helping," I said.  She looked annoyed and left, and I went back to the previous position, still frustrated but relieved to be left alone. At least Alice was eating and happy, I told myself.

The blister worsened and the next expert who came in wondered aloud why I wasn’t trying the “easiest” position, and scooped Alice up and placed her belly-down on my stomach, where she latched right away. This too was painful but the consultant announced that the latch looked "perfect" and that I should just keep nursing her like that. The position felt precarious, though, and I was nervous Alice could roll down my side.

At some point I asked one of these people how I would know if Alice was eating enough, and she chuckled. "All new mothers worry their child isn't getting enough. Just keep nursing her regularly and your supply will keep up."

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The first night at home was a blur. Nursing sessions bled into one another in a near continuous sequence.

While I knew that newborns should feed every two to three hours, I didn’t know the countdown started at the beginning of a session, not the end. It took Alice over an hour to eat so by the time we soothed her to sleep it was basically time to feed her again.

I slept in minute spans, at the end of our bed, and woke up staring into her crib. The next morning I had a phone consult with yet another lactation consultant — this one through my health insurance — who assured me this was normal. “Newborns cluster feed,” she said. “Just count your diapers.”

Again my concerns about whether or not she was eating enough were addressed as a problem of my own postnatal anxiety. “All new moms worry about that,” she said.

Our first pediatrician appointment was later that day. We packed up Alice in her car seat along with a c-shaped nursing pillow. I was relieved that we left on time, and didn't fall asleep and miss our appointment. I'd never — not even when I worked a third shift job — operated on this little sleep before.

The clinic was well organized and friendly. The first nurse delighted at Alice’s tiny face — “How sweet she is!” — before placing her on a scale to be weighed. I assumed this would result in just another interesting tidbit for my baby book: weight at first appointment.

A serious look passed over the nurse's face. “Well,” she said delicately, "she's lost a bit more weight than we like to see. We’ll have the doctor come right in and have a look.”

My heart sank a million miles through the floor. I struggled to understand the words. How much weight? What did this mean?

I googled the weight she had  entered on the computer screen on my phone. The amount she lost was a lot — too much, by any standard.

The pediatrician came in swiftly and assured us not to worry —  which I did not believe but appreciated nonetheless. She held a monitor to Alice’s forehead to test for jaundice. At this point I could feel my soul leaving my body and floating somewhere else. The rest of me was completely numb. 

The doctor was kind and matter of fact. “She’s not jaundiced, so that’s good. Sometimes milk doesn’t come in right away,” she said. “Does it feel like yours has?” 

I felt immediate shame. "I’m not sure," I said.

I wanted to scream. No one said to check, or how. I just kept being told to look at her position, ensure a good latch, and make sure I woke her up every few hours to eat. I had pushed away my own intuition with the reassurance of a bunch of people I didn’t even know — how had I been so stupid?

I felt like a stranger in a strange land. Breastfeeding was so mystical and confusing, far from the "basic" or "natural" process I expected. One of the most stymying things about it is that you do not actually see what or how much your baby eats. It's a bit like being given cans of invisible food to feed a puppy. Have they even had a single bite? How do you know? If you use a breast pump you could see what your milk looks like, but I had been discouraged from using such gadgetry too early by the lactation contact from the insurance company. 

“It's better to wait on pumping until breastfeeding is well established," she had said. "Those first few weeks, just keep nursing on demand and trust your body.”

And yet here we were because of my untrustworthy body.

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At the end of the appointment the pediatrician took out a vial of ready made formula and showed us how to feed Alice with it using a plastic syringe. “Just offer it after you nurse her. We need to get her energy up a bit and carry through until your milk comes in,” she said, “and you’ll have to come in every few days so we can check her weight and make sure things are going well. But I’m sure they will be.” She was warm and reassuring but all I felt was grief — already we had a  failure on record as parents. And it wasn't like we had picked the wrong diapers or toys — this was food, the most basic of needs. Tears welled up and poured over my face, over my mask, down into my lap. The pediatrician comforted us, again saying that everything would be okay, and we left for home.

I wept inconsolably on the whole drive, holding the box of formula in my shaking hands, unable to escape from the horrible feeling that I had starved my own daughter.

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Once home, I was surprised to find how strongly I reacted to the idea of using formula. The old me, the one who breezily said I would try breastfeeding and "see how it goes" was replaced by a dogmatist — and even worse, a failing one. I heard the pushiest lactation advocate in my head at all times: Breast milk is pure and perfect, the ideal nutrition. Formula is "less than" at best, junk food at worst. I hated that we had to rely on it. Why couldn’t it just be possible to feed her by myself?

Every time I made her formula, I felt like a fraud.

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You might think this sort of reaction is the result of an avalanche of postpartum hormones, but I didn't make up these ideas — they were threaded through nearly every article I read, and in the advice of experts: lactation consultants, midwives, and even nurses. And you'll get it from the public, too — I'll never forget the gut-punch of shame I felt when I heard that an acquaintance was surprised that I was "giving her bottles." Before becoming a mother I thought breastfeeding was simply one of many choices parents made, and that people stopped (or started) because they wanted to. Once I was in the trenches it was all so, so different— I couldn’t believe how hard it was, how deep and difficult the emotions around it could be, how powerless I felt, and how desperately I wanted to continue even when things were going poorly. 

Above all, I was surprised at how little this reality was acknowledged, especially by professionals and advocates. Sure, they admitted there might be challenges, but according to them every challenge has a solution, and every solution starts with the same word:

Just.

As in, if things hurt you can "just" adjust the baby's latch.

If your nipples are raw from your baby's poor latch you can "just" use a breast pump instead.

If the baby can't latch you can "just" see a pediatric dentist and find out if they have a tongue tie, or a lip tie, or other similar issue.

If your supply is low you can "just" nurse more, then use the breast pump, then feed your baby a bottle. (This is known as triple feeding, and it is a serious commitment to an almost unreal amount of additional work, on top of caring for a newborn.)

If something else isn't working you can "just" meet with a lactation consultant who can quickly figure out what's wrong (and it will probably be something you're doing wrong)

If you still have trouble you can "just" drink one of those lactation teas, or eat oatmeal, or brewer's yeast.

And so on. 

Now nearly five months into what has turned out to be (with great effort) mostly exclusive breastfeeding, I've learned something important about hard things and it is this:

Most of the time there is no just. 

“Just” implies that every problem has an answer — a perfect solution that will make a hard thing easy.

And usually with hard things there are only imperfect answers. Guesses. Things that help a little bit, or help sometimes, or help her but not me. 

I should know — over these months I have managed to push past problem after problem, improving this or that pain point just enough to be able to continue, but not enough to take away the "hard." No matter what gadget I buy, trick I try, or variable I change, nursing remains exhausting and occupying, and it never got easy or fast (though fortunately it did stop being painful). And yet I am still here, doing it. 

And I’m glad I can but I can’t help but wonder: why does no one say how hard it is?

Perhaps advocates of exclusive breastfeeding approach their field with such intense zeal because they remember when formula was recommended to mothers as the best choice for babies, and like soldiers after the end of the war, they just can't give up the fight. And maybe they avoid admitting how common it is to have significant challenges because they think if people knew the truth no one would do it. It reminds me of how gynecologists minimize pain in order to not "frighten" you. I've lost track of how many excruciatingly painful pregnancy and fertility related procedures I had that were introduced as a “little pinch." 

But no matter what they think, it doesn't work. It never works. The element of surprise doesn't increase our resilience for hard things. Only knowledge and wisdom do.

So in that spirit, I’ve jotted down some thoughts that might be helpful to someone who is walking a similar path as me. I include them below for those who find this essay in hopes of  advice or guidance, with the disclaimer that different things work for different people. Take what you will and leave the rest.

What didn’t work

Trust

This is big in the lactation community. See: “Trust your body,” "As long as you feed often your baby is getting enough,“ “Your body will produce exactly what your baby needs,” and other similar feel-good assurances handed to concerned mothers.

The problem with these platitudes is not always and not everyone. And for those who fall into the "not everyone" camp, who discover that things can go wrong only when they do go wrong, the feelings of betrayal and anger can run very deep. It is still something I grapple with, even now.

Most advice for how to tell if a baby is feeding successfully

While Alice gained her birth weight back in a reasonable amount of time, she ended up being a thin baby. And not babycenter-forum-post-asking-if-my-40th-percentile-baby-is-too-thin thin — like, actually very thin. Single digit percentile thin. While likely genetic, it's the kind of thin that lives close to the edge of too thin, not gaining enough weight, and the frightening term "failure to thrive." Well-meaning friends have told me not to worry, but they don't understand that you can't put something like this entirely out of your mind. Since she’s healthy and alert, I'm told it's probably fine, but that one word — probably — means staying  just the tiniest bit watchful, the tiniest bit concerned. Especially with how she's eating.

The lactation experts provided a variety of ways to be sure she was eating well, however most of the "signs" provided were vague or unreliable.

For example, I was told to "just listen for a swallow sound." For countless feedings, I bent my head down, shushed my pets, and held my ear against her head in silent focus. And I'd hear... nothing. And panic. It turns out my daughter is often nearly silent while eating. Until she spat up creamy milk a few minutes later, I'd be convinced she had eaten nothing. So that one was out right away. 

Another suggestion I received was to look for a change in breast fullness. This too was unreliable. I could only perceive a difference during overnight feedings, not regular daytime ones.

I was also told to look for a clear pattern of eating — e.g., discrete, efficient sessions lasting for 15-30 minutes with hours in between. Alice often nursed for much longer spells, or would fall asleep quickly and nurse again when she awoke in my arms. I have since come to realize (mainly by reading accounts by other breastfeeding people, not from experts) that this falls under the realm of normal: feeding sessions can go long or blend with sleep because babies nurse not just for food but also comfort. It’s not always possible to tell the difference, so "nursing" ends up being a much bigger time commitment than the on-paper estimates you hear.

And this is one of the major challenges of breastfeeding — how it becomes your complete priority. You might spend hours and hours trapped in place, willingly deferring bathroom breaks, sitting with your dead phone in your hand, because your child is comfortably suckling in your lap. 

It gave me more of an understanding of the book “The Giving Tree” than I ever had as a young, childless feminist.

Lastly, I was told to count "heavy" wet diapers to assess if a baby is eating enough. Cody and I logged this diligently, happy to have something solid to rely on. It felt like the closest thing to a scientific answer. (It would've been nice if someone had offered to do a weighted feed — this is where they use an ultra precise scale to weigh how much a baby actually consumes — but given the ongoing pandemic I'm not sure if I would've wanted to spend any extra time in a medical office, anyway.)

This worked the best out of anything with one big exception: "heavy" was never defined. At some point I panicked that Alice's diapers weren't heavy enough to count. Finally I found a thread on reddit from someone saying to measure out a specific amount of water into a clean diaper in order to feel what 'heavy' should be. Three tablespoons for newborns, four to six for older babies. I'm not sure why this sort of specificity isn't standard advice given while you are still in the hospital. It would've helped us a lot.

Also, even though she mostly refuses it, I’ve continued to offer my daughter formula. This has helped me ensure that she’s not going hungry.

Most Experts

This is controversial but the lactation professionals I worked with were at best neutrally unhelpful and at worst actively harmful. I joked early on that the only consistency in the field appears to be high confidence in their own advice. I think my experience would have been much better if there was more humility among experts, and they could admit when they were offering folksy heuristics as opposed to established fact. It would’ve been easier to discard bad advice.

I had a much better experience with our pediatrician, who understood my goal to breastfeed but provided practical, clear advice for when things didn't go as planned.

They still couldn’t make things easy, though.

Just use the breast pump 

This was probably the most unexpected thing about breastfeeding for me. I assumed pumping to be a 1:1 replacement for nursing. My insurance company sent a top of the line hospital grade pump and I tried it out a few weeks postpartum and got… basically nothing. Of course this was terrifying before I learned that 1) pumping never works as well as a baby and 2) it just doesn’t work for some people. For me it was more the second one. I got some nominal success with a few tricks — pumping early in the morning, covering the device so I wasn’t looking at the output, watching baby crying videos… but it wasn’t  great and never seemed like a viable way to create a stash or even enough for a single bottle. Not unless I wanted to be strapped to the pump every hour of the day when I wasn’t feeding the baby or cleaning bottles and pump parts.

(I should note, people actually do this. Sometimes for a very long time. It's a whole other layer of “hard.”)

I stopped using the pump after a few weeks, but that was largely possible because of a husband who acted as a true equal partner and an extended maternity leave I had through the State. In general, that additional leave played a huge role in being able to continue breastfeeding. That's probably one of the larger takeaways here — the absolute necessity of having an appropriate amount of time to devote to an endeavor like this. If I had to go back to work at six or eight weeks postpartum, none of this would've been possible.

Things I wish I knew 

It’s a major investment

I stumbled on an article early on that included a list of the positive effects of breastfeeding. This was on a major health information website — not some fringe blog. In addition to the usual health benefits (for babies and mothers) there was a paragraph about the relative ease and cheapness of exclusive breastfeeding versus formula feeding. No bottles to wash and sanitize!  No water and formula to schlep with you! Nothing extra to buy! Just button down your shirt and feed the baby anywhere. Flit off to the beach, you freewheeling mama…!

(I’m paraphrasing but they really did mention going to the beach.)

I thought back to that article about a month after having Alice and laughed out loud. Nothing could’ve prepared me for the intensity of breastfeeding. Time-wise I probably spend half of my day engaged in nursing or tasks related to it. It's also objectively expensive, even if you try to go minimalist. Most people try to pump and create a stash of stored milk, which requires an assortment of pump parts, bottles, and accessories. Then there’s clothing. Almost nothing of my original or maternity wardrobe worked for round the clock nursing. It took a few tries to figure out what clothing was comfortable, functional and warm enough. I bought about twice what I ended up actually wearing. Then when I started developing the blebs I had to ditch all the regular nursing bras I bought and buy camisole tops instead since the bras were digging in and making the blisters worse. (The classic "just" advice here is "just don't wear a bra!" which really doesn’t work when you're dripping milk throughout the day.) 

I tried many costly “solutions” for the blebs, too —electric massagers, nipple creams, and different kinds of pumps. Most didn't work well, and I hated buying so much junk, but few things motivate impulse purchases like the threat of a raging breast infection.

Pain is normal especially in the beginning

This one came from my pediatrician, who was the first and only person to acknowledge that breastfeeding is usually initially painful, and that this is normal and expected. I wasted a lot of time fussing with latch and position early on believing that this pain was my fault. The pediatrician said, watching me wince as I fed Alice in their office, “It’s usually pretty painful for the first few weeks. Your body has to get used to it and your baby has to learn to do it, and that can cause pain until you both adjust. Often it will just get better on its own.” 

She was right. It improved by itself, with time. (The searing back pain did, too. No special nursing pillow — and I bought them all — helped. Just time.)

Advice on inflammation conditions (blebs, mastitis, etc.) is usually bad

This I learned the hard way. It’s now been many weeks since that last terrible bleb that had me upside-down on our couch. After months of struggling, I believe I have finally figured out how to avoid them.

Most advice for these conditions that you’ll find online involves attempting to clear the blockage via aggressive means like massage or the enthusiastic use of a breast pump. I deeply feared that the blebs would reduce my supply so I followed this advice to a T. For months. 

It hurt and they got worse.

In doing research online, I found that some doctors now recommend the opposite approach — instead, treat your inflamed breast like a sprained ankle. Use it gently. Don’t over nurse on that side. Apply ice and take Tylenol. Don’t massage it — that will only make the inflammation worse. In my desperation I tried this instead and it has worked for me, though I know the opposite approach has worked for others. 

I suppose my takeaway here is that breastfeeding is not settled science: If something isn’t working for you despite all your efforts —   if it’s making things worse, not better — try something different. 

Avoid dogmatism and doomsaying 

Formula is really okay. Really. Really.

It took me a long time to feel this way. Given that I myself was formula fed this is somewhat ironic. But I had fully absorbed the “breast is best” message and that supplementing with formula was a slippery slope to losing your milk supply and relying completely on formula… the inferior choice for quitters!

To be blunt, I think this is all bullshit. At no time in history has this kind of dogmatism actually been practiced. Before formula there were wet nurses, and sisters, and friends who helped feed babies. There was also animal milk (yes, people did this too). Maybe this means that fewer people provided all the food their babies ate. Maybe it means more people used these techniques infrequently and that milk supply is more resilient than we're told. I don't know. But what I do know is this: it has probably always been pretty hard, and having problems is not unique to modern times or due to the mere existence of formula.

And given these realities I’m very grateful for formula. Even if supplementation meant that I never would make enough breast milk (which I am suspicious of, anyway)… I still would have done it because my daughter was hungry and needed to eat. If at any point I felt I could not continue breastfeeding — and with the blebs, I came close — I would have switched to formula because there is literally nothing wrong with it.  

Nourishing your child is what being a mother is about. 

A friend recently observed, with amusement, that the lactation consultants I worked with would likely call me a "success story." She's right — they would. But I'm still rather mixed on the entire experience. Breastfeeding is not for everyone and not everyone can do it, no matter how hard they try. If I had it to do over I would've taken a much more moderate approach. I wouldn't have let myself struggle so much over such a singular pursuit. Giving up on the idea that every part of parenting needs to be just so was the actual "hard thing" I needed to embrace.

I realize this most deeply when I see the love that shines from my daughter's eyes at her father — a person who never breastfed her, not even once.

So if all this is so hard why did I do it? Why am I still doing it?

Because nursing comforts my daughter like nothing else. Because it is special to be able to produce food out of thin air. Because it won’t be forever. 

Because I’ve come this far and I still want to. And because so far I still can.

But it’s a balance, and if I had a baby that wasn’t deeply comforted by nursing, or I developed infections, or if my life became complicated in ways that precluded such extreme focus… well, I would’ve made a different choice. Maybe I should’ve. As primal as it seemed to me originally, I can now admit that eating is only a very small part of caring for another person. The intense pressure surrounding breastfeeding — and the conspiracy of silence around how difficult it can be — only serves to steal joy from the experience of motherhood.

I sit on my couch now tapping out edits to this essay on my phone, my daughter dozing off against my chest. I think back to the spring of 2021. I had just completed an extensive set of fertility tests through a major IVF clinic. The reproductive endocrinologist called to discuss results.

She said what I already knew from the blood tests and sonograms: There was no magic bullet for why I kept losing pregnancies. Good news but not exactly good news — I was yearning for an answer, something that gave us a path forward. “Would IVF help us?” we asked. Unusually honest, the reproductive endocrinologist said that recurrent loss patients were tough cases. “IVF is really best suited for people who have trouble getting pregnant. We could genetically test your embryos, but people lose pregnancies with genetically perfect embryos, too. It wouldn’t be a guarantee.”

And in that moment I gave up the hope that anything would be easy, that my next pregnancy would be a sure thing. 

"We could certainly pursue IVF if that's what you'd like to do now. But if you want to, you can try on your own again, and if you're not pregnant in six months, we could regroup and talk next steps," she said. 

After the call I walked out onto my deck. It was a warm spring day — birds were singing from the newly leafed trees. The sun shone down over the lake. I thought about nature and how it could be both beautiful and cruel — I had recently seen a fledgling hop happily in the yard only to be swooped up by a passing bird of prey. 

I knew I might lose another pregnancy, have yet another thing die inside me. And I knew even if by some miracle things went well I'd never be able to relax, never have an easy or fun pregnancy, never feel like I could trust or have faith that everything would work out. I knew I'd be having a baby in a pandemic — that the first faces she saw would be in masks. That her babyhood would happen against the backdrop of viruses and vaccines and uncertainty. That the world wouldn't be perfect and neither would I.

I knew, no matter what, it was going to be hard, and messy. And I did it anyway.