We Need to Talk About Boob Math (& Why Men Will Never Get It)

A recent piece in The New York Times touts baby formula as the secret to marriage equality. I read it for the first time while groggily nursing my 1-year-old at 5 a.m. as my husband snored beside us. I was tired. I was in the dark. But I’d never felt so seen.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve loved the bonding experience of breastfeeding both my first-born son (now 8), followed by my current baby. But I’ve also long-noticed the wildly uneven physical and mental load that comes from it, even with a participatory partner.

The part that gets me is something I refer to as ‘boob math.’ After all, it’s not just the time-consuming hours spent, baby in arms, estimating the calories they consume. It’s the zillions of calculations that follow, clocking everything from milk quantities (fresh and frozen) to fluctuating daycare volumes to how often the flanges need to get washed. And it all adds up to invisible labor my spouse doesn’t even register.

To be fair, it’s not dad (or mom’s) fault. “So many partners feel lost in how to help, but when they ask, moms are limited in what they can really outsource,” says Melissa Kotlen, R.N., an international board-certified lactation consultant and the clinical liaison manager for lactation and maternal health at Mom Cozy. “When they ask for a way to participate, a lot of times, the response is: ‘Oh, OK…can you pass me my water bottle?’” It’s not about being a control freak, it’s just truly hard to think of what else with a feeding system that exclusively depends on the mom.

This is where the math comes in. Somewhat surprisingly, getting into a groove with nursing isn’t the hardest part, Kotlen says. It’s the logistics. In my case, that included noting baby’s wake windows, feed times and the volume of available pumped milk. It was also the time spent cleaning and cataloging pump parts, pumping during the work day and estimating milk amounts for both daycare and dad-administered bottles. All told, it’s a lot to keep track of.

In fact, Lauren Spigel, a senior research specialist at Ariadne Labs and PhD candidate in the Department of Maternal and Child Health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, made a valiant effort to track the invisible load of breastfeeding her daughter for the first year of life, which she chronicled in a piece for the Huffington Post. For this, she logged every nursing session, pumping session and daycare communication about feeding.

The result? Her calculations illuminated the fact that, on average, she spent over three hours a day nursing her daughter. The amount of time didn’t reduce after maternity leave either—she still spent over two and a half hours daily keeping up her supply and ensuring her child could eat. She also notably points out that her data couldn’t capture the amount of time she spent planning for all the elements of nursing and pumping, not to mention the time lost to the stress of keeping up.

In other words, we as mothers are often reluctant to quantify our physical and mental load. But when you put it all together, it really adds up, and in a way men will never understand. In the case of my own husband, I know he does want to help. But it’s part biological—and mainly societal—that he truly can’t comprehend the sheer volume of nursing logistics on my plate. (Unfortunately, this only serves to extend mom’s invisibility: “Who can we rely on most? Ourselves,” Kotlen says.)

My son is now 15 months; I’m actively in the process of weaning. I’m sad about it, but I’m also ready—ready to say goodbye to this physical toll on my body, but also the mental one on my time and energy. After all, until my husband learns to wash and air dry pump parts and to calculate the thaw-time of milk in a fridge—without being asked—it will never be an equal operation.