5 Secrets to Breast Pump Success

You might get a better let-down if you don't think of the baby while you pump.

The way most experts tell it, you practically need to meditate your way into a good let-down at the pump. Visualize the baby, they say. Look at a picture of the baby. Smell something that smells like the baby. Call your care provider and check on the baby. Baby baby baby. Here's me, back at work my first week. Baby is at nursery school, and I miss her something fierce. I have 2,700 unread e-mails. I'm hooked up to the pump, looking at a picture of the baby, clutching her kitty-cat PJs and imagining her three miles away, playing with toys I didn't pick out, snuggling someone else. This is supposed to make me feel relaxed? The milk dribbled out. Maybe I wasn't smelling hard enough. I inhaled deeply, thinking milky thoughts, rivers of milk, fountains of milk, waterfalls of milk. Nothing.

Well, I figured, might as well just enjoy the next 10 minutes. I picked up The New Yorker magazine and started reading. I completely forgot about the baby, forgot about the 2,700 unread emails, and just got immersed in reading. The next time I looked down at the pump? Geysers of milk. It must work for some women to think about their babies while they pump, but for me, what works best is to think about whatever I normally think about while I'm nursing the baby. Maybe this makes me an inattentive mom. But it makes me an inattentive mom holding four more ounces of white gold.