It’s 9.10am on a Thursday and a new email just popped up in my inbox.
“Why do so many women give up breastfeeding?”
I’ve written before about my experience with breastfeeding when I had my firstborn and how it felt like I was set up to fail.
Hundreds of women emailed me to tell me they had the same experience and felt like they had failed, too.
Messaging like the above doesn’t help.
Nearly three years on from the traumatising experience of trying to breastfeed but ultimately deciding to bottle-feed, I thought I had moved on.
It was a bad experience, yes, but it was in the past.
When I had my second baby nine months ago, I chose to bottle-feed from the start. I didn’t have it in me to try again after the damage it caused the first time around.
Choosing to bottle-feed felt like putting my mental health first, rather than succumbing to societal pressure again.
I proudly spouted the benefits of bottle feeding and how it worked for us.
However, it turns out there is part of me that still feels like I failed.
When a friend recently had a baby and breastfeeding happened quite quickly and naturally for her, I felt this feeling of sadness creeping in.
Maybe I should have tried harder, I thought.
Maybe I shouldn’t have “given up”.
Supplied
Both my kids are happy and healthy and were bottle-fed. But parents are always made to feel like they’re doing something wrong.
But as my husband reminded me as I confided in him about this, I didn’t “give up”.
I didn’t have a choice.
Traumatic births with both kids, and various other factors, meant breastfeeding just wasn’t an option for our family.
But “breast is best” messaging and people asking if I breastfed made me feel like less of a mother.
Pressure on mums, especially new mums, is huge. Not just when it comes to feeding, either.
There’s always an opinion on how you should be doing things, always someone telling you a better way.
For me, even now, it feels like I’m constantly getting bombarded with messaging that I’m doing everything wrong.
TikTok and Instagram are filled with videos telling parents what they’re doing is incorrect.
Don’t yell, give your kid choices, don’t force them to say please and thank you, make sure you’ve got a certain type of car seat, it should only take three days to potty-train, don’t say no, set boundaries, avoid screentime, and on and on it goes.
It is exhausting and overwhelming.
For me, consuming so many different parenting opinions and approaches has stopped me from trusting my gut.
I can be so consumed in the moment of doing the “right thing” that I second guess every decision I make.
Guilt takes over about the decision I end up making and whether it will have a lasting effect on my children.
When I voiced these concerns to a counsellor I spoke with during the early weeks of mothering my second baby, she told me just to focus on my attachment to my kids.
If I had a good attachment to my children, the rest would follow.
It’s maybe a bit oversimplified and hippy dippy for me personally, but it has actually helped.
It’s helped in the moments where I am feeling frozen with indecision over the right path to take.
I remember her words and try to just concentrate on the child in front of me and try to zone out all those other opinions.
That means focussing on what is the best decision for that little face in front of me right now, and not what is the best decision to please those internet trolls.
That’s the advice I would rather have seen in my inbox at 9.10am on a Thursday.
