Love Can Come in Bottles, Too.
How can we be all those things?
Well, we believe that breastfeeding our babies is an incredible gift, but that sometimes it simply doesn't happen the way we planned.
We are not here to encourage or discourage any particular choice parents make on how to nourish their babies. We are here to support the ones who struggled or are struggling to breastfeed and are facing the guilt that often comes along with deciding to stop breastfeeding.
We have both experienced this personally, and have gone through all the guilt alone, so we wanted to start this tumblr to post encouragement and to answer your questions and concerns as you make this sometimes difficult and traumatic transition.
We want you to bottle-feed without fear of judgement, and without guilt. You are doing the best that you can do for your baby given your particular circumstances. Be assured that the love and care you take in making this sometimes agonizing decision shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that love can come in bottles, too.
“Are you “that mom”? You know the one that quit breastfeeding after only two weeks because you were just “too lazy” to stick with it. Nobody really knows what was going on behind the scenes – the baby that wouldn’t latch, the pumping, your baby’s constant crying, your own tears shed from trying to make things work. The only thing they know is that you are giving your baby – oh no – dare we say it… formula.”
Failure. Guilt. Ashamed. Bad Mother. Struggling. Not the best for my baby. Can’t even provide for my own child. Devastated. Those were all thoughts that ran through my head as I struggled, fought, and lost in attempting to exclusively breastfeed my daughter. My whole pregnancy I was prepared to exclusively breastfeed. I shunned the formula samples that came in the mail and immediately gave them away once they arrived at my door. I was thrilled and excited to be able to provide my daughter’s nutrition once she was born! I was training to be a birth doula and had gone over breastfeeding information in my classes and was filled with the expectation that even if it’s hard it will work eventually, that I just needed to stick with it. Unfortunately life doesn’t always work out how you plan.
It turns out, I had Dysphoric Milk Ejection Reflex, a hormonal reflex that occurs with the letdown of breastmilk. It is also known as D-MER and I will refer to it as such throughout this post.
Let’s face it, having trouble breastfeeding can be a downer. But is it also a red flag that you are at risk for postpartum depression? Yes, say researchers from the University of North Carolina whose recent study of over 2,500 new moms found that women who admit they don’t like to breastfeed–or who experience breastfeeding difficulties during the first few weeks after birth–have much higher rates of postpartum depression than moms for whom breastfeeding comes easy.
Dear Mama,
It’s me, your child. The one who wakes you up at 3 a.m. because my stomach is the size of a golf ball or being held five times tonight isn’t quite enough. The one who finds it hilarious to dump oatmeal all over the floor and your hair if I can manage it. The one whose diapers tempt you to contact your country’s military research department because that smell is a good candidate for the next devastating non-lethal weapon. Put down the Dr. Sears tome, the iPhone on that sanctimommy blog, the e-reader with that book about breastfeeding being a womanly art on screen. Do I have your attention? Good.
Mothers today, she says, are experiencing more pressure, guilt and anxiety than ever before. Motherhood has become a “tyrannical state”, in which women have become “slaves to l’enfant roi” - the child-king. They are pressured to run their pregnancies like dietary boot camps, made to feel guilty unless they insist on natural childbirth, and are filled with anxiety about their ability to breastfeed. They are directed to allow nothing non-organic to pass their baby’s lips or touch its skin, and encouraged to regard external childcare as an unforgivable sin. Any hint of personal choice is lost before the onslaught of directives and rules. “Thirty years ago, we lived our pregnancies with insouciance and lightness,” Badinter has remarked. “Today, to be pregnant seems not far from entering into a religious order.”
“Over the past months I’ve realized that the ‘best’ that I can give her isn’t always what can be written down on paper or put in a category like natural birth, breastfeeding, co-sleeping, etc. The best that I can give her is an emotionally stable and content mother.”
I say all this to let you know that if you are going through a similar experience, you are not alone. If you or a new mom you know has had or is having these kinds of thoughts or having a hard time bonding with your new baby, I sincerely urge you to ask for help. Speak up. People are there to help, I promise.
Please don’t suffer in silence.
There is no shame in admitting you need help and seeking out the necessary treatments to make you a happier, healthier woman and mother. The sooner mama gets better, the sooner everything gets better.
The whole breastfeeding “debate,” such as it is, is a tempest in a sippy cup. Arguing about which scientific studies prove what — even if one side someday clearly “wins” — is an academic exercise, utterly divorced from women’s real, everyday experience. Because we don’t read the Journal of the American Medical Association to decide whether, or how long, to breast-feed. We consider our bodies: Are we physically able to nurse in the first place? Or are we plagued, as I was with my first child, by plugged ducts and serious mastitis? We consider the child: Did we, luck of the draw, get one who just says no to latching? We consider our workplace: How long is our maternity leave? Where can we pump when we go back?
“So many devoted moms think that no matter what they do for their children, it’s not enough — and our culture plays into that insecurity,” says Susan Douglas, Ph.D., coauthor of The Mommy Myth: The Idealization of Motherhood and How It Has Undermined All Women. But you can end the self-flagellation. Here, the top reasons that new moms feel guilty, and what you can do to get beyond it.
