Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a contender for superwoman of the year.
In recent edition of ‘Having It All’ in NY Magazine‘ Amanda Kill writes about being a mother of two who runs her own law firm and who spent seven months ‘breastfeeding’ a baby who wasn’t hers.
Amanda told reporter Juno DelMelo that she has always been a hard worker.
“With both births, I worked until I drove myself to the hospital to have the baby. One of our partners decided to leave right after my first daughter, Lilana, was born, so I was waddling back into the office a week after my C–section.”
After she had her second daughter, Amanda says she took 10 weeks off work.
“Moms like to be judge-y and say, ‘You deserved to take that time completely off!’ But it wouldn’t have worked for me. We don’t have a formal maternity-leave policy, and I share the profits, so if I don’t bill for months, that impacts my income and bonus,” she explained.
Amanda didn’t want to hire a nanny, and instead chose to rely on family and child care to look after er children.
She explained that this arrangement, “forces me to stop work and pick them up by six. I know myself, and I know that if we had a nanny, I would have slipped into a ‘sure, I can stay for that meeting’ mind-set.”
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Amanda says the despite her hectic routine, she adores motherhood and credits her feelings for a healthy work/life balance.
“I feel almost guilty that I love everything about being a mom. I even volunteer with a hospital, calling new moms in their first 12 weeks. I don’t mean to sound superior or anything — there have been stressful times — but the overarching experience has been great.”
After returning to work, Amanda knew that she wanted to keep providing her daughter with breast milk and says that she was lucky because breastfeeding always worked well for her. She started pumping at work and noticed quickly that the freezer was filling up, fast. Rather than let the milk go to waste, Amanda decided to start donating breastmilk to NICU babies once she was done with nursing her daughter.
Seeing how much assistance she was able to give to babies through her milk donation, Amanda says she started giving it to others.
Many women are donating their excess breast milk. Image: istock
She told NY Magazine, "After I had Genevieve, I met a mom who’d adopted a boy named Harvest, and I fed him until he was 7 months old. Now a friend with epilepsy is about to give birth, and she can’t breastfeed because of her medications, so I’ve agreed to feed her baby for a few months. I was planning to breastfeed Genevieve, who turned 1 in July, until she was 2 anyway."
Pumping, as many nursing mothers can attest to, can get tiresome. And Amanda is no different.
"I’m kind of sick of pumping, but I can do it pretty quickly. I pump in five to ten minutes, whereas some moms have to pump for an hour."
Amanda says that despite her busy life, pumping for other people's babies has just fit in to her schedule.
"I store a lot of the milk at work because we have a large freezer there. The office is used to my donations. My partner, who’s 56, will shout, 'Your milk person’s here!' He’s gotten used to it."