Debunking breastfeeding

I don’t know about you, but I was always led to believe that breastfeeding would be easy.

Sure, it’s the most natural thing in the world. If, by natural, you mean that you have no idea what you’re doing and your baby hasn’t the foggiest either. So you’re basically just two clueless strangers, staring at each other, hoping that one of you will work it out and tell the other how to do it. Except one of you is high on post-surgery codeine and the other is a baby. 

The pressure to breastfeed is often self-driven. If anything, I was pressured more into formula-feeding because my son was premature and breastfeeding wiped him out. Basically, he needed a bit of beefing up. You know the old adage “never wake a sleeping baby”? Not relevant here, we were waking him up every two hours and force feeding him milk. 

27ml. Which took an hour and a half. And then we had to start again… half an hour later. 

It didn’t help that my little boy was whisked off to lie on a sunbed on the day he was born, so we didn’t get much practice during the first few hours. Then he was tube fed in the incubator, so he decided that was an awful lot easier than trying to forage for food himself. (It’s now almost a year later and he’d still rather lie in his ball pit than do anything else, so it’s fair to say he’s more of a “work smarter” than “work harder” type.)

Anyway, long story short, we did actually get there in the end. But it took months of feeding, pumping and formula top-ups (the dreaded “triple feed”) and it was one hell of an obstacle course. The WHO recommends exclusive breastfeeding for the first 6 months of a baby’s life, but given the lack of support, it’s little wonder that so few people make it that far. I swore blind I was giving up more times than I care to remember.

But now? I know that as long as my baby is fed, loved and looked after, it doesn’t matter whether his milk is powdered or freshly squeezed. Fed is best, breast or bottle, you do you. Nobody wins prizes for pushing through, and frankly there’s enough pressure on parents already without milk-judgement.

So whatever you choose to do, do it with pride. You’re keeping someone fed and happy. And there’s a lot to be said for that.