I have a friend who has an abundance of breastmilk.

Here in Switzerland, there does not exist a breastmilk bank where I can gain access to another woman’s milk to give to my boy. If there was, I’d do it.

My friend has so much milk that she has to insert special cups into her bra to collect all her excess as it drips out throughout the day. If she absentmindedly bends over to get something off the ground throughout the day, it all tips out. She doesn’t have the inclination to freeze it at the moment, as she thinks that by the time she uses it in a bottle, the frozen milk will be too old. And donating milk here is so ridiculously complex it is not really a possibility.

So I am considering asking my friend if I can have her excess milk.

This stirs up so many odd feelings for me. I have such an inexplicably strong desire to be the sole one that sustains my baby. It defies all logic and is so far from rational, in the same way that an arachnaphobe’s fear can also be entirely irrational (for example, I have such a strong physical response to large hairy spiders, but small, fragile-looking and poisonous — potentially deadly — ones simply make my heart race a little). Would this friend then be a particularly special person in my little boy’s life because she provided the milk that allowed him to grow? But I don’t feel this way when it comes to the formula he gets… Why?!  Could I manage to do this without feeling like a failure in some way?

And I don’t want her to feel obligated in any way, to feel bad if it is an odd situation for her in some way, or if it makes her new life as a mother any more complicated.

There are so many emotions connected to this, and it seems I can’t articulate it very well.

I might just ask her, revealing all my irrational thoughts surrounding it too. I might just share this with her.

(Edit: Here is my later post where I managed to fill my freezer with another mother’s breastmilk!)