My home became devoted to the cause of increasing my breast milk. I have eaten bags of lactation cookies. I have consumed more oatmeal in more recipes than I could have imagined. I have even tried to drink Guinness, which I’ve never enjoyed. I have taken supplements and prescribed myself an anti-nausea medication that has the side effect of increasing the hormone responsible for milk production. And I make milk. I breastfeed. But in the past months it has become clear that for whatever reason, I will never make enough milk to meet my child’s needs. And I know, rationally, that this had nothing to do with love, that supplementing with formula is more than OK. But still.

The symbolism here is almost too clear. For all the pressure I have felt as a doctor or a writer, there is nothing that compares with the expectations placed on mothers. We are supposed to fall in love with our babies immediately, to experience motherhood as a transcendent state. We are told to breastfeed for up to two years, as though that is a reasonable thing to expect, as though everyone’s lives and bodies can accommodate such a mandate. If we feel ambivalence, about breastfeeding or about the ways our babies have changed our lives, we are not to admit it.

But that is not the only way to be a mother. For those of us making the complicated decision to have a child later in life, there is inevitably something lost even for all that is gained. There is unimaginable joy and with it, the alternate life we will not live. I increasingly believe that it is possible to recognize that and to love even more strongly for the knowledge.

It has been three months and despite my fears, the ambivalence of my pregnancy has given way to a love that is so overwhelming it sometimes makes me want to cry. When I see my daughter’s little clothes around the house or she smiles at me or splashes her feet in the bath, she breaks my heart open. She is so small and so vulnerable.

And at night, when she wakes up, there is no more thrashing and flailing. I place her under my chest, her warm body close to my heart as it was for so many months, and she feeds. I feel her own chest rise and fall, listen to the sound of her breathing and watch her little toes wiggle in delight. I know that the milk might not fill her, and so she will have formula later. I am OK with this; there is value here that cannot be measured in ounces. And knowing that I am not the sole source of her nutrition is what allows me to relax, to take these moments with my baby for what they are. Not exactly as I expected, nothing ever is — not family, not motherhood — but something beautiful.