Abstract
Amanda Bumgarner knows about babies. As a pediatric nurse in Richmond, VA, she's spent her working life consoling sleep-deprived parents, administering shots to screaming infants, and tenderly attending to the needs of fragile premature babies, often in the most heartbreaking and dire circumstances. When she gave birth to a little girl of her own, she wasn't expecting any surprises but two weeks into motherhood, she knew something wasn't right. At first, it was the tears-she couldn't get through a single day without crying. Then it was the debilitating anxiety-the overwhelming panic that once overcame her when her best friend, herself a mother and infant nurse, held her baby. She recognized that her feelings were far from rational. "How do you turn those things off?" she wondered, far too often. Breastfeeding was also a problem. "My daughter wouldn't latch without just destroying me," she said. "I was feeling like a failure, because this is supposed to be the most natural thing ever."
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