Morning Llama Farmer - I so admire women like you who kept at it - you can have your badge back now.
I think I would have done if other things had been calmer but all my births seem to have coincided with deaths and disasters. Someone asked if my family had a 'one in, one out' policy. Nice! I gave birth to two of them with no pain relief at home and am the sort of person who passes out before admitting anything hurts so the pain I could have got through if my head had been up to it but we had so many other things going on. I was dealing with mum's Alzheimer's and cancer, my auntie's alcoholism (both died, my auntie in a horrible way) and the terminal illnesses of my in laws over the same time so the whole idea of giving yourself time to snuggle up and get bf established was fantasy for me. Hard to do when you're out combing the streets for your mum and clearing up what looked like a murder scene.
I must say the bf support available when I looked for it with my first child was fantastic but the more holistic support for someone who wasn't able to let everything else go wasn't there - and how could it be really? I don't expect that to be provided, but I did feel some of the very well meaning women I spoke to re the feeding were so focussed on bf that they were deaf to my particular circumstances. An NCT counsellor who knew the whole deal still said 'I'm afraid with bf only the strong survive' which upset me and pissed off DH who wanted to ring her and shout about 'how dare she suggest I lacked strength' etc. Another said 'get other people to look after your mum for a few weeks, that's what they are for'. ??!! All got very fraught with that kind of thing going on.
That's when I first felt it was a breast VERSUS bottle thing - ideally these people should have been trying to help the whole situation of the bf woman (me). In the end the pressure to bf no matter what felt so immense I believed it was an all or nothing thing and stopped. Each time, seeing what healthy children we have I felt less bad about it, but still an approach which focussed more on successful FEEDING in a way that worked for me and less on the method would have helped me continue - for eg if someone had said I could introduce a bottle after the first 6 weeks (ish) so I could be with my mum, or that if I needed to switch to ff it would be OK but give bf one more day...and then another day etc I would have felt less under the hammer about it. But the message was 'exclusive feeding for the first 6 months if the aim'. (Some people were great and despite their personal conviction about bf were brilliant about the realities of how unpredictable the demands on me were in those days - both in time and emotional endurance.) I know other women do it in all sorts of appalling conditions so this isn't a sob story but an explanation of what might have been done differently. I imagine many other women feel the same.
Should this have been a new thread?!