Aside from that i felt that i couldnt leave the house, or be apart from thebaby for 5 mins.. if i wanted to go out she’d cry for a feed and id be an hour late becuse it took her that long to feed. then id have an hour before she wanted to eat again.I felt that people were constantly waiting for me.I hated the idea of having to expose myself in public to feed her.

i had so much milk id wake up in the night soaked, and had to sleep on towels that id change in the night,and i spent a fortune on breast pads. Yet when i tried to pump for some bizarre reason id only get a couple of ounces.

It was so painful i would cry out in pain every time she latched on, for six weeks. midwives would watch and tell me i was doing it right so it shouldnt hurt, but it was agony. My nipples bled so that when she threw up it was pink with my blood.

What with the uterine cramps and lack of sleep, its a miracle i made it to 6 weeks.I was miserable, depressed and going crazy. When i put her on the bottle it was like the sun came out again.im sad that i didnt stick it out longer, but it just the worst thing ever.if i have another child im sure i will try againbut just thinking about it makes me want to cry. i would never judge a woman for bottle feeding and i look at breast feeding mothers and just wonder how the heck they do it. For anyone who judges a woman for her choices, you dont know their reasons unless you have walked in their shoes.

With all due respect to the Breastfeeding Stasi out there, surely the most important thing is that the baby is happy, growing and cared for by a loving mother?? No?
If mother is so frickin miserable because breastfeeding for her is a nightmare (even atfer help, counselling etc), what the hell kind of use is she going to be to the baby. Also, does all this ranting against bottle feeding mean that you’re not supposed to express milk and feed?
For Pete’s sake….

With my first son there were issues in the hospital and I didn’t get help there. Instead I felt pushed and a little battered by some of the nurses who made me feel judged because I wasn’t getting it and he was getting a bottle at times. I pumped milk for six weeks for him and then switched to formula (I really have a hard time viewing it as the evil thing so many other women apparently think it is).

This time I was determined to bf my daughter. I got a lot of great help in the hospital and was successful in feeding her. But I really hate it. Every so often she has days where she eats really close together and all day and night long. I know these are probably growth spurts, but it can feel like all I do is breastfeed. I am a large breasted woman and have to have at least one hand involved to make sure my breast doesn’t smother her as it gets soft. I also have to sit up to do it (so no laying down to feed). I don’t believe in co-sleeping like the lactation consultant suggested. Not only do I think that it can and does cause a danger to a baby, it is also a hard habit to break and we have no interest in having our children sleep with us. Our baby sleeps in her bassinet about three feet from our bed, but having to sit up to feed her means it is a big deal for me.

It’s been four weeks and I have committed to do this till she is at least six months old. I have to say though…I had to buy nursing bras, nursing tops, a pump (if I ever wanted to leave), and a boppy. I got a lot of great deals, but I spent more to breastfeed my daughter for the next six months then I would have if I had bought formula (which kinda makes the its expensive thing a line of bull). Sure I didn’t have to have those things, but I definitely would have gone crazy without them.

I do have an issue with breastfeeding in public. I just am not very comfortable with it and not yet skilled. With the large breasts I have to hold it for her and not seeing her is hard, but there is no way I am doing it without a cover!

I also don’t think that it is a bonding experience for all women. I bonded easier with my son because I wasn’t so tired and didn’t feel like he was robbing me of as much sleep. Sore nipples isn’t always because of latch issues. I haven’t had sore nipples past the time I was all engorged while my milk was coming in. But this past day and a half with her eating so much has made them sore. She hasn’t changed her latch, we haven’t changed positions, she has just been sucking on them a lot!

Anyway…I suppose I went on too long (tad bit therapeutic to let it all out).

Sure, BF has all the benefits, but mom has to be well and happy for child to be the same. Viva the Formula.

Breastfeeding is the best food for babies, hands down, no argument there. Breast milk is supposed to have benefits on neurological development, visual acuity, and even long-term cardiovascular health.

However…not for one second do I believe that breastfeeding alone should be the number one hallmark of a “good mother”. Here is my story…

I didn’t breastfeed my first. My son didn’t latch well from the start, and my nipples were sore something terrible. I had severe PPD and depression from prior to pregnancy. I decided it was most important that my son had an emotionally healthy mother. Everyone and their uncle (or aunt, I should say) criticized me for not breastfeeding. Comments were varied, ranging from subtle to “You shouldn’t have the right to have children” and “You should have given him up for adoption”.

A whole ward of moms had given birth at around the same time my son was born – needless to say they were all breastfeeding. Funny thing was, my son was the biggest and strongest of all those babies. He was visually the most alert and physically fastest developing. He walked and climbed while all the breastfeed babies were still crawling. He stayed in the 99th percentile until he reached about 13 months, from then it has been 98th on everything. He is five years old, and he has been sick three times in his life, two-day colds with a slight fever.

With my second son, I wanted to breastfeed for real, and had a personal consultant for the last three months of pregnancy through the first six months postpartum. My second son latched on like heaven. I had to learn virtually nothing – the consultant’s advice and patronizing comments were in vain. My son did it all by himself. In the first week, he gained 9 oz. I had great milk supply. My nipples weren’t sore. Everything went fine.

However, my second son has had health problems my first never had. His overall build and constitution are and have been much more fragile. He had staphylococcal and ear infections in the first few months. He also has food allergies and asthma. Though he seems to be quicker to catch on to language, this difference is due to personality and aptitude rather than a raised IQ via breastmilk.

Don’t get me wrong, I still believe that breastmilk greatly benefitted my son, and the bonding was wonderful. But fact is my older is still in many regards the stronger child, even though he hasn’t been breastfeed or at least only a few days.

Also, and this is even funnier, I lost more weight faster after giving birth to my first son not breastfeeding. I actually lost weight slower and even kept some on while breastfeeding, though I generally always had an easy time keeping weight off.

My BIL and SIL adopted a baby boy a while ago. My SIL formula-fed him all the way. He is now 2 1/2, and both physically and cognitively ahead of his peers. He’s hardly ever sick. Never could you tell that he was formula fed only. And only recently, a health care professional mentioned how “unusually bright and precocious” my children were, and how she can tell that they must have been breastfeed exclusively for longer than a year. I just have to chuckle at these comments…

To me, there are many contradictions in the way bf is advertised. There is no question about the benefits of breastmilk – it was designed to be the best food for babies.
But I really dislike the way breastfeeding is being promoted. It’s “bf or else”. This rigid attitude says a lot more about women as mothers than their choice to breastfeed. I think it is the insecure mothers who tend to latch on to rigid mental maps on child raising.

i am exclusively pumping due to latch problems. my baby is 3 months old. i’ve had people stare at me too when i whip out his bottle. i am just *waiting* for someone to have the nerve to comment or ask me about the bottle. i will promptly reply that though it is none of their business, it IS breastmilk in the bottle.

shame on LF for trying to make women who don’t breastfeed feel guilty. don’t you think we’ve tried it all?? i’ve seen FOUR lactation consultants with no success. i have tried to breastfeed for 12 weeks but finally accepted exclusive pumping because it is taking an emotional toll on me and my son and frankly i don’t want to create a negative feeding relationship with him. he’s getting his nutrition. you don’t get a special mommy award for breastfeeding you know. you’re telling me i’m not a good mother or that i don’t know the meaning of sacrifice?? i PUMP at least 6 times a day and will do so as long as i can. i can assure you it’s a lot more work than breastfeeding. it takes commitment and dedication but i do it a) because i am fortunate to have enough milk despite the latching problems and b) because i believe breastmilk is best and not giving it to him just because pumping is a burden is not fair to my son. so please don’t JUDGE when you see a woman with a bottle in her hand. you don’t know what’s in the bottle. and you don’t know what she has been through.

i was a student homebirth midwife for three years, and i’m a doula now and certified lactation educator working toward becoming an IBCLC. i’m also in graduate school to become a naturopathic doctor because i want to attend homebirths and do well-woman care from a holistic perspective – and offering breastfeeding help will be an enormous part of that work.

but i didn’t breastfeed either of my children.

you’ll never meet a bigger lactivist than me. before i had children, i gave women dirty looks if i saw them bottle-feeding. you might say that i was in desperate need of a humbling experience.

the reasons why i couldn’t breastfeed are legion. i can’t point to any one thing and say, that’s why. the nightmarish experiences of trying to nurse my two children are the #1 reason why i don’t want to have more kids.

now when i look at a woman bottle-feeding, i don’t make assumptions. i don’t assume that she doesn’t care about her child. i wonder if she has PCOS, or if she’s on a medication that can’t be mixed with breastmilk (some DO exist), or if she’s painfully shy and cannot stand the thought of someone seeing parts of her body that are normally hidden, or if she had a terrible experience like mine and is sitting there in terror wondering if someone is looking at her in judgment – the way i do when i have to feed my daughter with a bottle in public. i don’t even assume that it’s formula in the bottle – how are we to know?

the formula industry is predatory and formula is a poor substitute for breastmilk and nursing (two separate entities). nevertheless, i am so grateful to have formula available to me, because, alas, i do not live in a rural african village and nobody is going to breastfeed my baby if i cannot. formula lets my child survive and thrive. that doesn’t mean i don’t hate using it to the pit of my core.

i also went way far out of my way to find women who were willing to pump for me. my daughter is almost a year old and has had breastmilk every day of her life – mine up until 2 months when pumping no longer worked, and various friends and donors after that. obtaining donor milk might not be condoned by LLL, but i don’t really give a crap. as long as the mother is free of TB or AIDS, i’ll take her milk, and that’s even with my very high personal standards of diet and lifestyle. this is because i realize that milk even from a mother who has bronchitis or eats nothing but count chocula cereal is vastly superior to formula. my daughter is incredibly blessed to have so many women willing to sacrifice for her by pumping, whether it was once or every day for a few months. most women do not have such opportunities if they are unable to breastfeed.

one thing that has been very important for me to realize is that breastfeeding and nursing may go hand-in-hand by default most of the time, but they can occur exclusively of the other. it’s possible for a woman to breastfeed without really nursing because she’s not connecting with her child. and it’s possible to nurse while feeding with a bottle because i feed her skin-to-skin, i look her in the eye, i connect with her. i credit this effort when i realize how vastly more attached my daughter is than my son was when i couldn’t get over what not-breastfeeding meant to me and essentially abandoned him emotionally.

women who condemn other women for “flashing” themselves, sacrificing unnecessarily, or having saggy, unattractive breasts do great harm to both mothers and babies. and women who feel that they cannot give even once inch, one ounce of credence to the reality that some mothers and babies cannot breastfeed, and that their hearts break because of it, do just as much damage and cause the greatest amount of pain to mothers like me – mothers who desperately wanted to nurse exclusively, on-demand, well beyond the first year, and nevertheless could not and count the experience among the worst in their lives.

i understand that many women feel they cannot acknowledge that truth – much less the truth that some women and babies truly cannot breastfeed – because they fear that it will make bottle-feeding even more acceptable in this culture than it already is and mothers and babies will suffer more than they already have. but it’s ok, guys, really. i don’t support breastfeeding any less because i couldn’t do it myself. my breastfeeding advice is not questioned because i didn’t do it myself. nobody who knows me doubts that my commitment was authentic. it’s ok to say, a very few women and babies cannot breastfeed no matter what support and advice they receive, and in such cases, the emphasis should be on replicating the breastfeeding experience as much as possible and obtaining the highest-quality substitutes available. it’s possible to proclaim that truth and still be a lactivist. i know it, because i do, and i am.