Breastfeeding is shit

[Sleepybunny]

If I hear another militant mum or lactivist spouting anymore crap about the supposed wonders of breastfeeding, I cannot be held responsible for my actions.

So to counter the NCT hollier than thou, boob knitting, lentil weaving, baby wearing, baby-led organic carrot buying hippies, here is a list of all the reasons why breast feeding sucks monkey dick.

1. it hurts, screw the pillow fort I've just created, positioning is hard.

2. cracked bleedy nips? Wonderful, that's just the sort of refreshing shit, all hormonal postpartem women are after.

3. When the baby blues are at their peak, make sure your chosen feeding method, takes ages and can only be performed by you. No sharing those parental responsibilities now, buy your DP an Xbox in advance.

4. mastitis? Nah that's not even a thing. Your newborn will be an eczema-free nobel prize laureate. So whatever.

5. The best cure for PND is to have a screamy newborn cluster feed the fuck out of your nips while you cry into a pillow.

6. The Syrian refugee crisis can be solved by rubbing breast milk on it.

Feel free to add your own pearls of wisdom. I'm 7 days in and feeling so good about my feeding choices that I regularly wake before my baby to do celebratory squat thrusts.

Oh op, I feel your pain, I really do. It's bloody hard isn't it?

I write this sitting in my own pillow fort, wrestling my squirming, incredibly strong ds as he grinds his adorable sharp gums onto my poor poor abused nipples for the ninth week. I'm sore, no one seems to be able to tell me why his latch is shit, I've got nipple thrush and they just told me to get daktacort but that's got hydrocortisone in it so wtf if he gets it in his eyes and why won't they give me flucanozole when I begged for it..

See? I've totally lost the ability even to punctuate.

It is tough. I will say that I've had only support on this board though, despite several sanctimommy type encounters in real life that would have had me going down for murder if I wasn't so tired I couldn't be arsed to kill anyone.

go easy on yourself. It's good your dh is so supportive. I apologised to mine yesterda for only using the imperative to him for the last nine weeks ;)

So don't bf if you don't want to.

I bottle fed (expressed milk and formula) my first cos he couldn't latch and am bf my second. Finding this time round loads easier, no faffing with steriliser/kettle/powder, no worrying about taking enough or making up feeds when out and no getting up at night since I feed him lying down in my bed and doze if I'm too tired to want to sit up and try and get him back in his cot. I'm getting much more sleep than I did in the early days with ds1 and maybe because of that I'm much more emotionally together this time round, I didn't cope well with having a newborn the first time even with dh off for loads longer and helping more.

Hi all,
We're relieved to see peace has broken out on all sides!

(It has, hasn't it?)

Op I think I love you for posting this

I struggled with dd it was pretty much forced onto me 'you will breastfeed' I refused as it was stressing me and dd out.

this time round I told the midwife straight away I was bottle feeding and the horror on her face was funny. Bit peeved that they don't cater for bottle feeding at the hospital but hey ho I'll manage.

Give him a bottle! I couldn't get on with it. Lovely idea in theory but we've evolved as far as concerned, bottles re so much easier x

It's really hard going for the first 6 weeks. A few months in its piss easy though

I FF two from birth by choice and they turned out fine. To me the great thing about FF is that someone else can feed the baby.

I'm cackling away at the the idea of unicorn tears. Now would those be boiled and cooled down for sterility?

When expressing for dd1. I didn't find the sterilizing a faff, just another thing that had to be done. I suppose in the sleep induced haze I didn't think about it too much.
Hope things will be more relaxed this time. I'm already getting more
Sleep than I did with dd1. So that's a plus.

huffle that's horrible that they don't cater for FF at your hospital. Can you sterilize things? Would seem crazy not to support mums. Newborns are hard enough without adding that kind of drama.

Having said that I don't think I was asked on the postnatal ward about my feeding choices. It was assumed BFing. Other ladies (who had just had sections and were immobile) had to buzz and ask for formula. I thought that seemed a bit harsh. Unless they assume you bring your own?

You can get "starter packs" of ready made formula which would be ideal for using in hospital if you're formula feeding. They come with single use teats that you just screw onto the bottle. They're not the cheapest, but assuming you're not going to be in hospital long they'd be the easiest thing - no washing, sterilising, powder or hot water needed.

I've not read the whole thread (because I'm not interested) but bravo OP! This made me laugh a lot.

OP I laughed like a drain at your first post, it was very funny but then I do have a sense of humour

I know where you're coming from. It never got better for me, just progressively worse for 4 weeks of toe-curling, screaming agony. Switching to formula made motherhood pleasurable for me.

I hated bfing. I was shit at it. I bf ds1 till he was six months, ds2 till he was about four months and dd not at all. I couldn't face it again. I had mastitis with ds1 - really fucking painful. I had thrush of both nipples with ds2 - had to bite down on the handle of a wooden spoon to latch on it was that agonising...and I'm not a jessie by any means. Plus both boys lost so much weight I was sitting there trapped like a full-time milking machine trying to get their weight up. By the time dd came along just 13 months after ds2, I was done with that. Formula feeding was BLISS compared.

I have never cried so much in my life as when I was bfing. I cried with pain, exhaustion, cabin fever, frustration, boredom and finally guilt because I hated it.
I do think breast is best and all that, but not when it's driving you to despair.

You are massively Unlucky. I am not a lentil wearing yoghurt knitting anything and I'm 11 weeks in and breastfeeding is a doddle. Am I supposed to apologise? Nothing about it is awful.

I hope they're organic unicorn tears...

I wish it had gone like that for me...truly I do. I hadn't anticipated any problems with it, being of a lentil-knitting persuasion anyway. I thought it most natural thing in the world and that I'd get the hang of things eventually. I was very sad that I never did. I'm not going to lie though, I enjoyed dd's infancy a lot more owing to bottle feeding her.

It's VERY unfair to new Mums to just give them 'upsides' breastfeeding without an honest view of feeding as a whole - how you feed your baby has zero to do with the type of Mum that you are and the sort of person your child grows up to be.

Formula is the best thing ever in my opinion, breastfeeding was agony for me and my lo was miserable. I laugh now when I think of all the lunatics going on to me about how great breastfeeding was and the problem was tongue tie/ my technique/ fast letdown or one of the million other reasons about how I was just doing it wrong.

They're hardly lunatics, if they found breastfeeding enjoyable and/or straightforward. And if you mention to people that you're having difficulties with something, they will tend to offer suggestions or advice.

CultureSucksDownWorlds, I met LOTS and lots of lovely people along the way, who were helpful, (of course!) but I really did meet some people with nutty/ judging/ dogmatic ideas.

Advice about how 'great' breastfeeding is to a struggling mother is cruel if you don't give balanced advice about what is actually going to create a happy family and child - which is a mother coping.

I just feel it's important to be honest about the sort of crazy dogma (like the OP is writing about) that you meet around bf - I've never come across anything like it. Sorry for forgetting to mention all the lovely advice I've had along the way!

I think HCPs are afraid of focussing on how hard breastfeeding can be, ante-natally, because they don't want to put people off. Then it will come as a nasty surprise how difficult it can be. And lots of people lack the ability to understand that just because they found something easy doesn't mean it is.

I went to a fantastic ante-natal breastfeeding workshop. It had all the usual stuff like positioning, advantages of breastfeeding etc, but the part which I found really helpful was the bit where the counsellor giving the talk went through the most common times when mothers stop breastfeeding and the reasons why they stop, and then talked about the sort of help that could be given if you experienced any of those problems. I walked away with the very useful message not that breastfeeding would be problem-free, but that most problems could be sorted out with the right help.

That sounds fantastic Jasper I went to a breastfeeding workshop when I was pregnant with my first and unfortunately had the opposite experience!
After watching beautiful videos of babies instinctively latching hours after birth, on of the other ladies asked about the difficulties and potential things that could go wrong. She answered the only thing that can go wrong is mastitis and you should just feed though it anyway, so not worth talking about!

I'll never forget those classes! I think it was the teachers first class and she obviously had a good experiencd feeding her own.

I totally get you OP. It went on like that for months for me with all 3 dc. God knows why I did it! I did have lovely people supporting and advising so it could have been worse...

Skiptonlass Try downloading the breastfeeding network leaflet on thrush and show the gp the recommended treatment.