Breastfeeding grief

[TruffleNoir]

Does breastfeeding grief ever go away? I feel like a year on I'm still reminded that I couldn't do it. I know I made the best decision for me at the time but I keep wishing I had just powered through and maybe it would have got easier like my friends have told me. I'm doing fine until a friend talks about them breastfeeding and I just get a pang of jealousy and feel down for a few hours afterwards :'( just feel like why didn't I keep going or even try combination feeding to get me through? Why did it have to be one or the other :'( I really regret it.

@headspin10

Really sorry, this sounds horrible

Another experience is I breastfed my 3rd daughter till 13 months but her latch was never good, the start was a nightmare and I don't know why I persisted. Even at a year I would still dread it as it never felt right (though it had been totally fine with my other children) I felt incredibly uncomfortable (almost couldn't bear it) and I think it affected our bonding

It was only when a friend (kindly) said "Don't you think she picks up on how you feel? Why are you still doing it?" At which point we stopped and it was just such a relief.

@headspin10 thank you for your input that really helps.

I'm sorry it wasn't comfortable and it was something you'd dread. I understand why you'd persist though I really do get it. I'm glad it was a relief when you stopped though and you feel like you've got a proper bond again xx

It’s pretty common, as you can see, for women to feel like this.

With my first I wanted to switch so many times but I kept going because I’d digested everything on kellymom and even the word formula is fucking criminal on there 😂you probably get the most I have no doubt you’ve read that website.

By the time my second rolled around I knew it literally made no difference to anyone at all other than me when I chose to introduce dairy to my child.. that’s essentially what it is, so at 1 month as soon as I first felt like I wanted to switch I did. I didn’t argue with myself like I had the first time.

This isn’t relevant to you and your journey but I’m telling you because when I knew and had seen that it makes no difference, it took the load off and I switched guilt free and got my titties back 🥲.

In 20 years time it won’t be such a thing.
I’ve never asked anyone, ever, until I started breastfeeding. Now I don’t I don’t ask. It’s odd.

Youre set up to feel like a total failure as a mother its awful
I went through 5 months of triple feeding hell before the baby latched - i used to get so sad at any well meaning facebook group posts about the benefits, and how wonderful it is, thinking i would never know... I remember reading one post about how the mouth hits the nipple and your body would produce antibodies and wasnt that amazing ? Crushed ,because we were stuck on nipple shields and that would never happen.
If i could go back and not to torture myself ...
hugs.

If it helps, and ignore if not, coming at it from the other perspective: I kept going with BFing. And I really regret it.

We had a really tough time, severe milk delay which led to my baby being readmitted with dehydration. She only narrowly avoided brain damage. My milk didn't come in properly for weeks. All the problems gave me severe PND. I was bullied at BFing support for using formula. There was vast amounts of pressure from HCPs and extended family to keep BFing and it just made me more and more miserable. At 12 weeks I put my foot down and limited BFs to 3-4 a day because I could no longer cope with waking up and knowing I'd have to do it a zillion times per day. I secretly hoped my milk would dry up with so few feeds so I could stop and just bottle feed but it didn't. I didn't bond with my baby for months. I kept thinking the 'lovely snuggly feeling' I'd been told to expect to happen with BFing would start.

It never did. I BF to 3.5 years in the end. By nine months it was 'boring chore' rather than outright loathing at every feed. I eventually bonded with my baby thru bottle feeding, which I really enjoyed as I could engage with her properly during feeds.

I really regret BFing her though. It wrecked the first half of my maternity leave. But BFing promotion had put so much pressure on to do it, and really bigged up the benefits - it turned out there is little benefit for a term baby in a developed country and certainly not worth all the angst and problems it caused.

So, you don't know what would have happened if you hadn't stopped. Not everyone finds it's amazing. Don't regret it on the basis of what BFIng promotion says - a lot of it is hyperbole!

Ah thank you for your replies. I'm in tears reading them but I think in a good way. It's a relief to start to think that I'm not such a failure after all. I honestly appreciate all your replies.

@FTEngineerM yes I did all my KellyMom reading before she was born and was in breastfeeding groups feeling like I was gaining all the knowledge I needed to be successful! You've made a very good point about in the future we won't be discussing it. For a while I was totally fine with it but I definitely still get triggered when people I know have newborns or sometimes even when I hear about them being pregnant

@Mamabananananana I feel your pain slightly with the triple feeding as I was doing this for a while after the first couple of weeks when we realised she wasn't gaining any weight. It was so tough I applaud you for doing that for five months! The well meaning supportive posts can sometimes be worse for me than people that are anti formula I find.

@RidingMyBike I'm so sorry to hear you regret pushing through it. I actually understand what you mean about bonding with bottle feeding as I definitely feel like I still had the bond when bottle feeding. I need to remember this as a big positive to my time feeding. 3.5 years is good going honestly well done for getting through that. I'm just sorry it wasn't the experience you had expected.

@TruffleNoir you haven't failed in the slightest! You've been set up to fail by the people who set you up with all the expectations of what BFing would be like. What I found after all I went thru was that it's so so variable - problems like low milk supply and milk delay are common (the 90+ yo ladies at my church who had their babies before formula was widely available knew the dangers - women now don't get told about it). And increasingly so because of the type of women who are now having babies (older, more medical conditions that affect supply etc). There's a wide spectrum (as in everything natural) of levels of supply - some easily produce enough to donate their 'extra', others make just enough for one baby, others don't make enough. This is well known in lactating animals but gets ignored in humans. It's absolutely criminal at the BFing class I did that the midwife/IBCLC encouraged us to donate our 'extra' to NICU but failed to mention that several of us (statistically) wouldn't make enough.

Not everyone enjoys BFIng, despite what the promotion says. I have one friend who EBF three children relatively easily, but saw it as a convenient way to get milk into them, rather than something that was 'magical' etc. There is no evidence BFing helps with bonding - you bond with your baby doing something you enjoy together. For some that might be BFing, for others it'll be bottles or snuggles or baths etc.

When I was going through the process of working thru what happened to us I wrote to maternity to complain about what went wrong (midwives denying signs of dehydration and being anti-formula) and how poor the content of the BFing class was. That helped as I hope it helped others. I also found this chart, which would have made no end of difference if I'd seen it antenatally, and realised how much I'd been set up to fail (I can tick off about a third of this list):
fedisbest.org/resources-for-parents/know-risks-delayed-onset-full-breast-milk-supply/