A guy once charmed me on our first date by griping about an upcoming cruise he was taking with friends. His disdainful critique of what seemed to be a pleasant vacation tickled me.

After we'd been seeing each other for a month, I learned the cruise was actually no laughing matter. Every day he'd give me a report on the rising sea level of his dread. You’d think he had been charged with a crime, and the sentence passed down by the judge was this all-inclusive trip to the tropics. 

If you're confused why he agreed to go, I was too. So was he. 

It wasn’t a bachelor party or a 30th birthday celebration or some other invitation laden with social obligation. No, his friends asked if he wanted to join them on their vacation, and he agreed. He thought it had sounded fun at the time, but his feelings soon morphed and turned on each other. There was some part of him still in touch with this initial optimism, but that part was drowned out by his distaste for too much forced fun and intimacy. He eventually confessed to me that his mom had forbidden him from mentioning the cruise because even she was tired of hearing him perseverate – the conversational equivalent of treading water. 

When I look back at our short-lived relationship, I always return to this cruise quandary as it so clearly revealed our incompatibility. Because me and ambivalence? I don't know her. I applied early decision to college. After only a couple weeks of knowing each other, I asked my husband, “Should we just run away and get married and have babies?” I’ve always prided myself on my ability to order off a menu in less than 20 seconds. I refuse to let a decision spin me in circles or turn me to stone. 

Motherhood has bucked me off this high horse. These days I am often stuck between two competing impulses. As I write this, I can hear my baby crying in the other room. This cry (he is very tired and he wants to sleep, but he doesn't know how because he is a baby) is a normal step in his nap ritual, which my husband is facilitating right now. I am fighting the instinct to go comfort him. I am also grateful that it's not my turn to deal with his tears right now. These two feelings arm wrestle inside of me, equally strong, perfectly matched. 

I know I'm not alone in this. If you search the social media trend "Top 5 Horror Movies," you'll see a lot of videos from moms. Many of them follow the same pattern:

I jumped on this trend with my own version:

In all of the education on birth and postpartum I did while pregnant, breastfeeding was treated like a footnote. Do you want to see a midwife or an OBGYN? Do you want to give birth at a hospital or at home? Do you want an epidural? Oh, and do you plan to breastfeed? 

Labor lasts a day (two or three, if you're unlucky). Breastfeeding lasts for months. Potentially years. Breastfeeding is relentless. Even if everything goes well (your baby latches consistently and your supply matches their demands), breastfeeding entails mental, emotional, and physical labor around the clock. 

Personally, I rank the physical labor as the most difficult to endure. I found the sensation of having milk sucked out of my nipples initially painful and now uncomfortable, so having to do it multiple times a day for months has been less than ideal. I'm embarrassed to write this. I fear you’ll think there's something wrong with me for experiencing breastfeeding as strange. I mean, biologically, it’s the furthest thing from strange. It's completely normal. Mundane even.

Perhaps you're not judging me, but you might wonder: if you don't like it, why don't you just stop?

First, weaning is hard. At five months postpartum, I'm down to one night feed, and the process of getting my boobs to this point took the same amount of planning and effort as training for a marathon. If I push the endurance of my boobs too much too fast, they get injured (clogged ducts, which can lead to mastitis). It's not as simple as "just stop". Even if I nailed the physical process, then I would need to contend with the mental load of juggling my weaning schedule and a new feeding routine for my baby. 

Second, when I seriously consider stopping, an amorphous sadness rises in me. I cannot identify what bums me out about the thought. I don't enjoy the physical act of breastfeeding, and I don't consider it particularly bonding. My son drank formula for the first week of his life, and feeding him via bottle didn't dampen my fiery attachment to him. 

And yet, there is my mysterious grief.

I have spent many therapy sessions circling this ambivalence, determined to defeat it. I want to understand it, so I can overcome it. This is the formula I’ve used all my adult life: Identify problem → Take action to solve problem → Feel better. 

During all this rumination on ambivalence, I remembered reading Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in college. When prompted by our professor to share our analysis, my fellow students and I were basically like: these old-timey people are sooo scandalized by Mr. Hyde's antics. 

One day, seemingly fed up by our shallow interpretations, our professor dropped a new one: Stevenson wasn't condemning Mr. Hyde's behavior. Rather, he was condemning Dr. Jekyll’s attempt to deny his dark impulses by splitting himself in two. Disowning our shadow selves, he suggested, was a form of violence, and violence begets violence.

I was relieved to find that Lucy Jones addresses ambivalence in Matrescence (the quintessential text of my early motherhood): "According to psychoanalysts such as Parker, maternal cruelty may be the result of unmanageable ambivalence. When unreconciled feelings of love and hate go unaddressed, they can intensify, and then explode into helplessness and violence."

Like my professor suggested in his analysis of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hydes, Jones proposes there are dire consequences to denying mothers' internal conflicts. 

"The assumption that ambivalence is abnormal has also affected the direction, framing and focus of science," Jones writes. "[It] boxes maternal ambivalence into the study of 'the odd' (psychoanalysis), rather than the study of 'the natural' (evolutionary biology)."

Did you know that normally one breast produces more milk than the other? I didn't learn this until I started nursing. I can't help but project a story onto my boobs; one is much more committed to this new milk production job than the other. Even my mammary glands are at odds. One boob in, one boob out.

Now that I'm figuring out how to embrace my ambivalence, I've become aware that much of my discomfort lies with how my indecisiveness makes me come off. Do I seem weak-willed or oblivious complaining about doing something I could technically stop doing? 

Several weeks ago, a friend texted me asking if I had figured out a solution to my breastfeeding ambivalence. The impulse to lie – tell her I planned to wean or claim I turned a corner and started disliking breastfeeding less – swelled inside my chest. Instead, I let out a long breath and wrote her the truth.

"No, I've just stuck with BFing lolol I've talked it over with my therapist and I think I've just come to terms with the fact that I feel very ambivalent about the whole situation. Like, I do want to continue but I also want to still complain about it. Probably a combo that makes me an extremely annoying person to be friends with right now."

(Please note my gratuitous "lolol")

Maybe I need to give up my impulse to be palatable and simply let myself be the dull conversation partner. Excising this part of myself may result in something much more distasteful.