Well. Breastfeeding was hard. Much harder than I thought.

As a woman you believe it to be a natural process, and that it is instinctual for both your body and your baby to feed and to in turn be fed. You take the ability to do it for granted. I looked forward to this beautiful & relaxing process and thought it was my special gift as a woman and my natural right as a future mother, to be able to feed my own child with my body.

And like a jerk, I had smugly assumed that it would be easy.

And of course it can be…it just wasn’t that way for me. For me, it was one of the hardest things I have ever done.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I am a control freak. I like to go in to something knowing as much as I can. I took the breastfeeding classes with ABA and read up in detail about how to go about feeding my child once he was born. I was sure that I knew exactly what to do and never thought for a second that my body would let me down.

When my baby was placed on my chest after birth, we had some beautiful skin to skin time as planned, and I gave him the opportunity to find my breast on his own to begin to feed himself- this process is called “baby led attachment” and comes about from a babies natural instinct to find food to survive as soon as born.

Unfortunately my milk hadn’t come in, so the midwives showed me how to hand express to stimulate my milk supply and get the colostrum flowing for my baby.

Now, I should have known in the lead up to birth that something was awry for me. My breasts hadn’t remotely changed during pregnancy, however lumps would appear from 20 weeks on-wards, before they disappeared again. My doctor assured me that it was just fibrous breast tissue and to keep an eye on it, however after my baby was born these lumps got worse and worse.

For the 3 days after birth that I was in the hospital, every single midwife that attended me day and night would question me about these lumps worriedly whilst they tried to help my baby latch on (unsuccessfully) and then again as they helped me hand express colostrum for my baby. Each midwife and even the 2 lactation consultants that attended me in the hospital advised these lumps should be checked further, before also commenting that I may need to use a nipple shield for breastfeeding.

Two days before I left the hospital, I was struggling with hand expressing as my breasts were getting sore from trying to squeeze colostrum out, so one midwife showed me how to use the pump. She stated that I would need to start frequently doing it to get my milk to come in and to have enough supply to feed my baby. She advised that at the same time I should press as hard as I could on those lumps to get them out.

I pressed on those lumps like my life depended on it and found myself crying quietly on the other side of my curtain after each feed so as to not disturb my roommate, as my breasts grew increasingly tender and painful.

My poor body was sore and broken from the operation to deliver my baby. I was exhausted, my poor sweet baby was screaming as he wasn’t getting enough food from me and was therefore starving, and now my breasts were hurting beyond belief as I desperately pushed down on them with all of my strength in the hopes that they would produce milk to feed my child and also in the hopes that I could get rid of those damn lumps.

I also struggled with my baby latching on. We were unable to get the correct position for him to breastfeed, and no matter where I tried to position my baby, it just wasn’t working. He would painfully suck at my breasts then break off in frustration when he couldn’t get the right mouthful.

Again I was subjected to multiple comments from midwives about using a nipple shield to help, and I kept waiting for more information on this, but it wasn’t until I broke down in front of my husband, my final midwife and a visiting lactation consultant the hour before I was due to go home, that I got any more information and assistance on what these were and how to use them.

Once I got home I struggled further.

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I tried and tried to re-position my baby for pain free attachment however if the positioning was even 2 millimeters out it would hurt like hell. This led to me crying in pain and frustration, and my baby crying in desperate hunger as we just could not form the right attachment together. I was so relieved after every feed that it was over, but would straight away begin dreading the next one.

And as a further slap in the face, my supply was so pitifully low that I was only producing about one quarter of what my baby required to grow per feed. My husband sat patiently by my side through the day and the night whilst I struggled, ready to take over and formula feed our son whilst I expressed in the useless attempt to increase my supply. This led to growing feelings of shame, anger and intense disappointment that I couldn’t do what I was born to do. I couldn’t feed my own child. I felt a failure and I had barely begun.

Not many people know this about me, however for many years now I have suffered from diagnosed depression and anxiety. I am proud to say that with a lot of help, support, and a hell of a lot of hard work, that I have been healthy and happy for just over 12 months now. However my experiences and failures from breastfeeding was pushing me closer and closer to the edge of falling back into that black hole that I had struggled with for so long.

I found myself on a roller coaster ride which I was having trouble coping with. A rare successful five minute feed would give me the highest of highs, whilst the more common painful feeds would drag me down to the lowest of lows.

I was overwhelmed by the pain and feelings of frustration and dread that accompanied the feeds. I was also overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of visitors that would come to our house, many of whom would want to sit with me to keep me company whilst I tried to feed my son, when all I wanted was to be alone in my failures. I was broken by the knowledge that I needed to provide my son with so much more milk than I was producing and that the only way to increase my supply was to resort to medication, and even then there was no guarantee that it would work.

I know that stress is a contributing factor with low supply however my early experiences showed me that breastfeeding for me was a source of anxiety, not the wonderful bonding experience that I had imagined and dreamt of. I could not switch off that inner voice in my head that kept whispering this isn’t going to work is it? I couldn’t help but reinforce my negative external experiences with my negative internal thinking.

I was also surrounded by women who seemed to be able to do it with relative ease.

One of my closest & dearest friends was able to successfully breastfeed from the second her baby was born with such ease and joy, whilst I was filled with such sadness and longing. Seeing it in the hospital for the first time knocked me down so hard that I could barely speak and had to claim extreme tiredness as an excuse for not being able to talk with my dear friend and her family like I normally would. I grieved for what I could not do.

Please don’t get me wrong, I was so happy & thrilled for my friend, for her beautiful baby and the fact that they didn’t have to go through what I was going through. But at the same time I envied them so much. My sadness was for me and my baby alone. For my sense of failure and my all encompassing yearning to be able to feed my child with the same ease, comfort and happiness that she was so luckily experiencing.

My decision to stop breastfeeding completely was because of these feelings. I wanted to fully enjoy this time with my newborn son and yet was so consumed by not being able to feed him as nature intended that this early time with him was tainted.

Although I loved my baby so deeply, more than I could ever have possibly imagined, how was I supposed to make him happy when I was filled with such shame and resentment at the world for something that I could not do??

After much thought and discussion with my husband and doctor, the decision was made to stop feeding. My supply had been so low that what little milk there was, was gone in 2 days. No pain, no fever. Gone.

I had made the decision to stop breastfeeding for my own health and mental well-being, I had stopped for my son so I could love him the way that he deserved, and I stopped for my husband so he could get back the woman he married. I stopped the negativity spiral that I had been caught in, and I set myself free.

And whilst I felt an innate sense of loss, and I still do to this day, I felt like a great weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I could now concentrate on giving my child pure love and joy untainted by anything else, and could feel happiness again in the smallest of things. I knew that this decision was the right one for all of us.

New mothers and mums-to-be are constantly told that breast is best. Breast may be best but I found that the pressure that is unknowingly placed on women to feed their own babies rather than formula feed is huge.  Damn any haters who may judge how I feed my child and damn this mothers guilt because of it.

My son has been formula fed now for almost three and a half months, since he was three weeks old. He is the happiest, healthiest, most loving and caring baby boy in this world, and the bond that he and I share is incredible and unshakable regardless of how he is fed.

Bottle feeding does not take anything away from him and it does not make me any less of a mother because of it.

I am a great mother because I made the choice and did the best thing for both my family and for my state of mind. I naturally wish that it could have been otherwise, but I know that I chose the right path, and would choose it again in a heartbeat.

 

 

 

Do you have a breastfeeding or bottle feeding experience you would like to share? Leave a comment below!