The Water Bottle

Somebody will hand you the giant water bottle. It happens at some point while you’re sitting on the couch with a baby latched and a shoulder you can’t move, and it’s almost always someone who loves you, a mother or a mother-in-law or a friend who did this two years ago and remembers exactly one piece of advice, you have to drink more water or your milk will dry up. The bottle is enormous. It has time markers printed down the side telling you where you should be by 10am, by noon, by the time the sun goes down, and now you have a second small demanding thing next to the first small demanding thing, both of them keeping score.

The instruction sounds true. Milk is mostly water, you are the one making the milk, so more water in should mean more milk out, and it lines up so neatly that we don’t really stop to check whether it actually works that way: It mostly doesn’t. Your body defends how much fluid it holds pretty aggressively, and it will make milk out of what it needs and route the extra water you drink straight to your bladder, which is why the main thing a gallon jug reliably produces is more trips to a bathroom. When researchers went looking for a good study showing that extra fluids raise supply, the largest review of the question turned up basically nothing usable, one small old trial, and even that one reported that telling parents to drink extra didn’t move production. Drink to thirst, which after a feed is often considerable because the same hormone that lets your milk down also makes you want to empty a lake, and let that be the whole system.

Staying hydrated is awesome; thirst is real, no argument. The reason this bothers me is that it’s a very common example of a thing that looks like support and ends up homework. The person handing it over gets to feel useful, the instruction gets passed down another generation, and the nursing parent gets one more metric to fail at when they are least equipped to be graded on anything. There’s a difference between someone being in the room and someone actually making the room easier, and the water bottle sits right on the line, because it’s a gift that turns into a chore the second it’s in your hands.

What actually helps supply is boring and hard to gift-wrap. Milk works on removal, so the more often milk comes out, the more your body makes, which means the useful thing is not a beverage, it’s time.

It’s someone taking the baby after a feed and doing the burp immediately, so you can close your eyes for forty minutes instead of standing at the counter eating a granola bar over the sink. When a partner or a parent asks me what they can do for supply, the honest answer is almost never about the person nursing at all; it’s about clearing the eight small obstacles between them and the couch so that feeding the baby is the only job they’re responsible for.

So when the water bottle appears, and it will, you can drink from it or not, fill it to the noon line or ignore the little printed guilt-marks entirely.