My friend Lori recently stumbled upon an article about one woman’s decision not to breastfeed her baby because the process was disruptive to her fun bags.
Under the headline “I formula fed. So what?”, Kathryn Blundell says in this month’s Mother & Baby that she bottlefed her child from birth because “I wanted my body back. (And some wine)… I also wanted to give my boobs at least a chance to stay on my chest rather than dangling around my stomach.”
She goes on to say: “They’re part of my sexuality, too – not just breasts, but fun bags. And when you have that attitude (and I admit I made no attempt to change it), seeing your teeny, tiny, innocent baby latching on where only a lover has been before feels, well, a little creepy.”
She concedes that “there are all the studies that show [breastfeeding] reduces the risk of breast cancer for you, and stomach upsets and allergies for your baby. But even the convenience and supposed health benefits of breast milk couldn’t induce me to stick my nipple in a bawling baby’s mouth.”
I highly recommend reading Lori’s take on this, including the empowerment and feminity that she experienced during the two years she breastfed her daughter.
A mutual friend (and mommy like Lori and me) Kill Truck offered her opinion on the subject. She formula fed her two sons after much difficulty with latching (all moms know exactly what I’m talking about. If you’re not a mom and have made it this far-congratulations.).
I did one of each. When Thing 1 was born, I felt like I HAD to breastfeed her. Leif has severe allergies, and I had been led to believe by the La Leche crowd that formula might as well be arsenic, so the thought to formula feed never even crossed my mind.
Thing 1 came into the world sunny-side up, which if you don’t know, makes for a very painful labor once the epidural wears off. Or, as my 18 year old brother said at the time, “Not quite as painful as tearing your ACL.”
She came out 9lbs and 5oz. And she came out screaming. She screamed so much that the maternity nurses said, “Wow, that baby cries a lot.”
Anyway, back to the breastfeeding. It went really well in the hospital. She latched right away, and it was the only time she wasn’t crying. It was nice.
It wasn’t until we’d been doing it a few days that it started to hurt. Really hurt. Hurt like my nipples were going to fall off. Hurt like I wished my nipples would fall off. Every two hours (or less!), I would cuddle and feed my daughter as my toes curled into the carpet and tears streaked my cheeks. We tried to give her bottles of expressed milk, but she wouldn’t take them.
And believe me, we tried. At two months old, she went without eating for ten hours rather than take a sip from a bottle. We tried spooning the milk into her mouth, but she spit it out.
For the record, Thing 1 is still this stubborn. A couple of months ago, she gave up a trip to Disneyland because she didn’t want to eat half a cup of oatmeal. Yeah.
Around four months, the pain finally stopped. Lactation consultants chalked it up to a voracious appetite. She was correctly latched; she just sucked like a Dyson. I continued to breastfeed her until her first birthday, and I wept with relief that it was over.
I really wish I had enjoyed breastfeeding. I was worried that I was a terrible mom because I didn’t like it. I felt guilty every time I resented my sweet but colicky baby over the pain she was causing me both physically and emotionally.
I was also about 50 pounds overweight, and NOTHING I did could nudge the weight off of my ass. As a still somewhat recovering bulimic, this was not a good time in my life, to say the least. Once I quit breastfeeding, I shed 20 pounds in a month, without changing a single thing about my diet or exercise.
People often ask me why there’s a four and half year age gap between my kids. Because it took that long to recover from Thing 1’s infancy.
For the record, aside from her stubbornness, she is the most engaging, delightful, and simply joyful kid I’ve ever been around. Her teachers always make note of her enthusiasm for life, and this last year she was affectionately nick-named Sunshine.
Anyway, short story long, I did not enjoy the breastfeeding experience, and I felt like both a success as a woman for sticking it out, and a failure as a mother for not loving it.
Fast-forward a few years to Thing 2. Before getting pregnant, I promised Leif that I would try my best to breastfeed, but I was dreading it. It was really important to him though, and I love him, so I thought I’d give it a whirl again. Besides, I’d heard that the second kid is always much easier.
Plus, we decided that Leif would give her a nightly bottle from birth, and if she didn’t want it, she didn’t eat. After Thing 1, crying babies don’t exactly bother us much anymore.
A few weeks into, I knew I couldn’t go a year. Thing 2 nursed for almost two months, and then nursed at night only for another month after that. At three months, she was completely formula fed.
Leif was not on board with the decision. But being a loving (and incredibly smart) husband, he reluctantly supported me.
Until one night when he got his fun bags back.
Then he was a happy man.
As for me? I’m happy I made the decision to formula feed. I snuggled close to my little girl while I fed her a bottle, able to gaze into her pure blue eyes rather than watch the clock on the wall, wondering how much longer. I actually felt closer to her once we started bottle-feeding than I had when we had been breastfeeding.
But my decision was not based on feeling weirded out by an innocent baby touching my breasts. In fact, that’s the part I loved about it – that God designed us women to be, as Lori says, “Life-giving nurturers.” For that reason, I wish it had worked out for us. It just didn’t.
And that’s fine. All moms needs to make their own decision, and to make someone else feel weird or inferior for their decisions is just plain rude.
Ms. Fun-Bags and her still-perky-because-they-weren’t-stretched-out-by-breastfeeding-breasts can suck it.
