(Disclaimer: I’m not a doctor or nurse, nor do I possess magical healing powers. The following is not a substitute for advice from your healthcare provider. It’s opinion and before you apply any of it to your life you should print this blog post out, take it to your doctor, and make sure I’m not completely full of crap.)
(Warning: There is a brief mention of blood and bodily injury that could possibly creep you out a little. Also, this post discusses breastfeeding and will therefore obviously discuss breasts. If that offends you- please leave my blog and return when you’ve matured.)
This is the 1st post of a 3-part series. Stay tuned for parts 2 and 3.
MJ is 4 months old now, and he has been formula-fed for 3 of those. Actually probably closer to 3 and a half, if I’m honest. I had this beautiful picture in my head of how breastfeeding was going to go for us. I had the pamphlets and was a Facebook member of the local LLL group. I owned a breastfeeding pillow, 2 nursing bras, 2 nursing tanks, 3 different types of nipple cream, and I had “lactation stations” set up throughout the apartment full of bottled water and healthy snacks. I read the books, I studied positions, I had a Pinterest board stocked full of recipes to help increase my milk supply. A Pinterest board! I was prepared. Then, MJ arrived, and plans had to change.
We had a lot of the same struggles that many moms have with their babies. My cesarean kept me from being able to move like I had planned, he had to have phototherapy while in the hospital, I had blood patches performed twice for the spinal headache I got from the epidural, both of which required 12-24 hours of flat-on-your-back bedrest. He was dehydrated in hospital and we supplemented with formula. None of my nurses had ever breastfed, and therefore had no idea how to help me. The closest thing to advice I got was when I, frantic and crying because I had just fished a piece of my own nipple out of my infant son’s blood-filled mouth, made D go and ask them what to do. The nurse looked up from her paperwork for .7 seconds and said, “That’s normal.”
I met with a lactation consultant the week after being discharged and rented the best breast pump money can buy. At this point, due to flat nipples on my end and a disinterest in nursing on my son’s, they said the best case scenario for us would be to continue trying to nurse, but focus on pumping. It wasn’t expected for MJ to ever be able to exclusively nurse. I danced the exhausting dance every pumping mom does.
Pumping sounds fairly simple when you think about it. Instead of the baby getting the milk directly from you, you attach the mechanical milking machine and then give it to your beaming bundle of joy via bottle. What no one told me to expect, however, was that babies will rarely be hungry the same time you pump. So instead of what I had imagined (pump, feed baby, both of us sleep) it looked like (pump, put away pumping supplies and walk towards bed, hear baby wake up, feed baby, start walking towards bed again, hear pumping alarm go off, repeat.) It was exhausting, but I figured hey, this won’t last forever. I just have to tough it out for a month and things will mellow out.
The LC had me pumping, then nursing MJ at the end when he wasn’t starving (and consequently screaming his fool head off.) In the three weeks I breastfed, the damage to my nipples never fully healed. They didn’t have time to. So nursing, and pumping, hurt from beginning to end and every minute in between. I had plugged ducts twice, and at the end of week 3 it turned into full-blown mastitis. I started on antibiotics, healed the infection, only to then get thrush. In my nipples. Yeah, that’s a thing.
At this point. I sat down, bawling my eyes out to D, and said “I’m done.”
When I was initially planning on breastfeeding, I had only ever planned to make it to the 6 month mark. Before getting pregnant, I was taking 2 medications for pain that I had stopped while TTC. One of them has had zero to no studies conducted on how much passes through breast milk and how much is safe for newborns. I was willing to wait to start those medications again if it meant giving my baby the best start, but at the end of that first month, I knew I was finished.
Now, here’s the thing. Nothing I experienced is uncommon. Lack of education and support, difficulty breastfeeding after surgery, flat or inverted nipples, nipple confusion, and nipple trauma are things that many a woman have dealt with. (To be clear, I’m not saying those things are normal or that they should be expected. Breastfeeding may be uncomfortable at first, but it should never seriously hurt. If it does, please, please see a Lactation Consultant and get some guidance. I promise there are hundreds of newfangled products and time-tested tricks you may not have heard of yet!) My point is that for all the “breast is best” and “eat local” t-shirts you see, the fact remains that currently in the US, less than 40% of mothers are exclusively breastfeeding at 3 months. Which means the large majority of little ones are going to be getting formula at some point in their life.
Hospitals and local communities are working very hard to increase that number and it is rising as the years go by. That’s awesome. I don’t know a single person who would argue that.
But do you know what isn’t getting any better? Information and resources for those who don’t breastfeed. When I first decided to make the switch completely, I found nothing. At least, nothing that wasn’t funded by Enfamil or Similac. My hospital didn’t offer information on formula feeding. Why? Because they don’t want to encourage it. Which, if I’m honest, irritates the living heck out of me. With over half of our country’s mothers giving their babies formula, there is an appalling lack of information available, which leaves mothers relying on life experience from their mothers and their mothers’ mothers. My mother is a genius, don’t get me wrong. But our understanding of babies and their needs, as well as our ability to create formula that is closer to breast milk than it ever has been makes advice from 50 years ago irrelevant and possibly dangerous. I’ve been told (not by my mother, thankfully)
-to water the formula down to make it last longer
-to widen the nipple and add rice cereal as soon as we get home from the hospital so the baby will sleep longer
-to add (insert magical herb) to solve (some problem that never applied to us in the first place)
-to start solids at 8 weeks because formula fed babies need to eat more
-to prop the bottle on pillows during feeding times so that I can multitask
In case you were wondering, all of that is bad advice. But, I didn’t know that at first. I had no idea how to weed out the gems from the constant stream of well-meant dirt I was receiving.
So, in hopes of saving someone from the 3 days of panicked Googling and intermittent crying that I muddled through, I decided to write up a mini-series. My next post will be a list of resources I’ve found, and the following will be a few ways to make the absolute best of your formula-feeding journey.
Because whatever you’re reason for formula-feeding, you deserve to have the facts and tools necessary to make it an enjoyable experience.
If you formula fed, what is one thing you’d say to a new mother just getting started? Leave it in the comments!
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