The great breastfeeding debacle

(Warning, this is a LONG post!)

I post this not to start a debate about which is better, but to share my story. I know breastfeeding is best. Believe me, it's been hammered into my brain since the moment I got pregnant.

Every time someone asked, they didn't say 'Will you breastfeed?' They said 'You WILL breastfeed, right?' Like anything else would be the equivalent of giving your baby vodka in a Dr. Brown's bottle.

Of course I was going to breastfeed. It's free, it's supposed to be far more convenient, and it's best for the baby. There was no question. My husband and I invested in a $300 breast pump with a trendy backpack design. We took the breastfeeding class at our hospital. We were primed and ready to go.

Until our baby came. My first breastfeeding experience was trying to put a screaming 1-hour-old baby on my breast while three-fourths of my body was numb (I had a c-section). It pretty much went downhill from there.

There would be shining moments where we thought we had it knocked. But between the anxiety of a FTM wanting to be sure my child was getting enough food, and the fact that my daughter is what "they" call an 'excited ineffective' eater, it wasn't in the cards. She would get too excited and anxious to eat properly, pulling off my breast and screaming. Thank God my husband was home the first two weeks, or she wouldn't have gotten any food at all. He would literally have to hold her arms down so I could handle her enough to eat. No lie - she had superhuman strength (more on my child's superhuman qualities later).

We struggled for the first week-and-a-half: either she was too sleepy and wouldn't wake up to eat, or she would attack me voraciously. There was no in between, and neither were optimal circumstances. Pile onto that a FTM's anxiety AND the baby blues (which were hitting me like a ton of bricks) and you have a recipe for disaster. Plus, it hurt. Yeah, they don't tell you that when they're talking about the benefits. "They" say if it hurts you're doing it wrong. But every single mom I've talked to said it hurt for them in the beginning. Now some say it gets better, but others go through pain for months before that happens. Not to scare anyone, I'm just giving the honest warning I didn't get.

But I was willing to try to get through the pain. However, the last straw came after a visit to the lactation consultant during week 2. I fed my daughter on one breast after some struggling, and the nurse weighed her. She had received a whopping 8 cc's from that breast. We switched her to the other one. She ate and we weighed her again. 4 cc's. I burst into tears. I was starving my child, I KNEW it! It was my biggest fear coming true, and all my anxiety rushed to the surface.

Even the lactation consultant was surprised. She had been so positive up until that point that we could just work on the latch. But she conceeded that we needed to supplement until my milk supply returned to full strength. So she recommended what I now consider was a modern-day torture device: the supplemental nurser.

Picture this: a syringe filled with formula attached to a small, plastic tube. The tube is taped to my breast with the end protruding right by my nipple (hey, I'm trying to paint a picture here, so it's OK to imagine my nipple). The idea is she nurses, and gets the formula, too - helping the milk supply AND getting her nourishment. Great theory, right?

Now, mind you we had to do this every two hours. It was a disaster. The tube wouldn't stay taped properly, and it would slip out of her mouth, squirting formula everywhere. Then, of course, my excited ineffective eater would pull off and scream, squirming violently the whole time. Loads of fun. It would take between 45-minutes to an hour to feed her like this, giving us an hour before we had to go through the whole ordeal again.

It was enough to make any new mom break down. But the silver lining was seeing what happened when she got her belly full of formula. She slept - mercifully she slept! Prior to that we were convinced she had colic she screamed so much.

It was after about three of those feeding and seeing her sleep from filling her belly with formula that we decided to make the switch. I agonized for days over the decision, feeling I had failed my daughter and womankind by giving up. I vowed to pump endlessly to continue to give my daughter breastmilk (that lasted for a while, but I ended up choosing sleep over pumping).

In the end, I realized that breast is best, but only if it doesn't result in a depressed, anxiety-ridden mother who resents feeding time and an angry, hungry baby. And I learned that I don't really give a rat's ass about what anyone thinks of my decision (a newfound power I have over other people's opinions) because I know it was the best thing for me. I'll never look back and regret it, because I now have a healthy, chubby baby who loves feeding time (as does her mommy).

That's not to say formula feeding is perfect, but that's a whole other post.