The Adventures of Left Boob and Right Boob
By: J Li
Tags: Breastfeeding

One of the coolest things one has after having a baby, in addition to the actual baby, is Boobs. I actually write about this way less than I naturally want to, but it feels like there’s always something exciting going on in Boobs-world.

I’ve starting thinking of them like a quirky, crime-fighting duo: Left Boob and Right Boob have unique personalities with nothing in common, but they work together through all manner of adventures and mishaps in order to seek justice and feed this baby.

Left Boob is the cautious, shy one: it’s much more reserved and makes less milk. It needs to be reassured at least twice a day that we really are still feeding a baby here (by means of contact with the actual baby rather than a pump), otherwise it’s prone to want to back off and make less. But it also has a consistent, gentle, adaptive flow and a pleasant latch, so it’s always my daughter’s favorite boob-of-comfort, and sometimes the only one she’ll accept on a bad day.

Right Boob is bold, guileless, and incredibly gung-ho. It only has two states: off and full-tilt. I think of it as the outgoing one. It makes almost twice as much as Left Boob, and can be counted on to merrily and blindly output milk at maximum velocity no matter what’s going on. When the baby is really hungry, this is great. When she’s fussy or stuffed up or uncomfortable, she quickly gets intimidated by the firehose and then spills everywhere.

Together, they switch off based on their specialties to get the job done.

Left Boob and Right Boob: The TV Show

If you haven’t done it before, it is difficult to adequately express just how complicated breastfeeding can be. I have produced 5-figure events with fewer moving pieces than a week of breastfeeding a new baby.

In the first season of The Adventures of Left Boob and Right Boob, the baby was born and we had to learn how to feed her. There were challenges around being underweight and having to learn boobs and bottles at the same time. A nice traditional story with classic obstacles, which culminated in getting really minor surgery to fix a tongue tie and enable her to eat a lot more. Dahdah! There was even a mouthful of blood to indicate that it was the climactic action sequence.

The second season was about business travel, going back to work, and the ongoing dire threat of Running Out of Supply always around the corner. At climax, the baby got sick for several weeks and everything Boobs did seemed to upset her, until we figured out that it was because she was allergic to an unexpected ingredient in my diet (coconuts).

In the third season, just as everything seemed calm, a new challenge was introduced: teeth.

At the time, I felt that this was a sort of unfair plotline, like the showrunners ran out of ideas and were trying too hard. It was certainly not adequately foreshadowed in any of the previous adventures.

Not to mention, the baby has always been the mission: what do you mean it’s now the villain? This did not feel like a plausible twist! :(

But perhaps in response to critical fan feedback, the teeth storyline disappeared a few weeks later, as abruptly as it came, never to be referred to again. Thank goodness.

Instead, there was a rush to fill the plot gap by re-introducing the previous threat, but with overkill: after a full season of struggling against it, Left Boob & Right Boob finally fell irreconcilably behind supply. In the conclusion, we made the adjustment to supplemental donor milk and found a neighbor who gave us an entire freezer of several hundred ounces.

As the fourth and final season, the theme was Solids. We were nominally weaning, but the same baby seemed to make a small adult’s worth of food spatially coexist with her normal amount of milk. Where does it all go?

As the final season progressed, we saw Left Boob and Right Boob getting ready to retire, dreaming about their future in normal bras, and packing away the pumping supplies.

Then in the series finale, on the cusp of retirement, we’re hit by a region-wide heat wave. Distracted, the baby has a bad fall, there’s blood and crying everywhere, and no clotting in sight due to the heat.

On the edge of retirement, Left Boob & Right Boob have to valiantly return for one last job!

Future Adventures?

In conclusion, boobs are great! Sometimes I look in the mirror and am surprised that they don’t visually have all the color, personality, and excitement I’ve subscribed to them.

We fully anticipate a reboot of The Adventures of Left Boob and Right Boob in a few years. Part of me really wonders whether they’re going to have the same quirky personalities we’ve grown to known and love when that happens, or whether the new showrunners (same network!) will somehow give us a completely different Left Boob & Right Boob next time around.