Don't want to breastfeed

[WelshManx]

My baby's due at the end of the year and I really don't want to breastfeed. My Mum struggled with me and tried for a couple of days before giving up and DH doesn't particularly want me to as he will be very hands on and wants to share the feeds and getting up during the night. I'm also going on holiday for a few days when the baby will be 3 months old (without the baby) so it would be unfair on her if I try to breastfeed only to change at 3 months. Apart from that, I just don't want to do it! I'm a bit of a wimp and not very good at standing my ground in certain situations and my midwife and hospital and GP are all ridiculously pro breastfeeding. I feel that they are going to 'bully' me into it and I don't know what to say to them?

I adopted DS1 as a baby, he's DH's biological child. DS2 and DD are twins. I found breastfeeding very easy and fed them for years, even DS1 had occasional feeds. If I ever have another baby, I'll FF from the get go. If you BF, your body is no longer your own. Which for me, was okay for awhile. Then I started getting sick of the clothes, the grabby little hands, the demanding. Went cold turkey. Kids did not like it, but I was fucking overjoyed to have my body back!

Do what you want OP. It is your baby and as his/her mum you decide what the best choice is.

I will have to bottle feed – as my baby has a cleft lip and palate – either expressed milk or formula (most probably, I’ll do a bit of both. But before I found that out, one thing that I was definitely worried about was how my DH would bond with the baby. Not because feeding is the only way to bond with a baby – of course it isn’t – but because of all the threads I’ve read on here about how mothers don’t feel able to leave BF babies with anyone else for several months. I think, if my DH couldn’t ever look after the baby on his own for even a few hours here and there, it would be difficult for him to feel as comfortable and bonded to the baby as I was – that just seems to be common sense to me.

I have two children who were/are breastfed. Their dad has bonded with them absolutely fine, despite not actually feeding them himself. He can easily look after them both by himself, this has always been the case. If I wanted to, I could go out and leave the little one with him between feeds, no issues at all. At the moment, DC2 is only a few weeks old so the time between feeds is not very long but I could go out for maybe 2 or 3 hours between feeds.

When we're both at home he holds the baby as much as me, and does the majority of nappy changes etc. I really don't understand why a father would need to do bottle feeds to properly bond with their children.

Mine was EBF. Has always been very close to her father, would happily have climbed over me to get to him as soon as she could move, first word was 'Daddy'. No issues with bonding at all.

I would never say 'mothers bond better with bf babies' - and it's equally nonsense to say 'fathers bond better with ff babies'.

Well, I did try my hand at sterilising when I expressed a few bottles here and there, and also when I gave follow on milk to my eldest when he went to nursery at 11months. So I probably didn't do it often enough for it to become second nature.
So I did find it a faff Elspeth.
I didn't bother expressing etc for subsequent children.

I knew I didn't want to breastfeed throughout my pregnancy and I was firm with the midwives when they asked me about it. They asked once when my dd was born if I wanted to try but I said no and that was that. From speaking to other mums it seems that if you are a firm no they accept it and move on but if you are unsure they try to convince you. I don't agree with people who say try for the first few days, if you don't want to do it don't! Good luck and do what is best for you and your baby.

Dh has bonded really well with ds (registered official Boob Fiend.) his eyes light up when his dad walks in the room.
Dh did everything for the first couple of weeks as I was out of action after a complicated Cs.
I think the parental bond is much more complex than bf or not (although bf of course is a lovely way to bond.)

You can do 50/50 parenting without having to split every individual task 50/50 as well.

Well, yeah. I'd say mine and DH's parenting is fairly 50/50, but that' the overall workload - it doesn't mean we each do exactly 50% of each individual task - making breakfast, brushing teeth, etc.

If one parent's home while the other one works then obviously the one a home will be doing more hands-on parenting during those hours, but that's not really a breastfeeding or formula thing.

It is in the newborn stage. You come home from work at 7pm and the baby is clamped to your wife's breasts literally for the rest of the night. Oh you may get to change a nappy or two and have a snuggle, but realistically you're very limited.

Whereas if the baby is FF, the mum can literally hand it over once the Dad comes in the door.

Well, I can only talk from my experience of actually doing it, but breastfeeding genuinely did not prevent egalitarian parenting in my family.

Your body, your choice, op. I breastfed after a c section and found it really easy and convenient, but if you don't want to, you don't have to. Lots of women don't want to for lots of reasons and it's great that we can bottle feed and have formula that's almost as good as breastmilk for those babies. Just tell anyone who pressures you that your reasons are personal and private, and you have considered your options carefully.

I did do all the night feeds when I had an EBF baby and was on maternity leave, yes. Then I slept in while my husband took her for a few hours in the mornings. He also had her in late evenings while I got an early night, or had a long loooooong bath. (My ff friends did most of the night feeds when they were on maternity leave, too, so I don't think that kind of arrangement is just a bf thing at all.)

You can struggle to see how it could work if you want to, I suppose? But as the person who actually experienced it, I can assure you that it worked fine.

If she was EBF how did that work? Did you express?

I found the worst cluster feeding days were over in a couple of weeks. I remember being pregnant and worrying about this and planning on expressing so my husband can do a feed and bond. Turns out they bonded just fine, he is a very involved dad and they adore each other. I did consider expressing but it was a huge faff. We did discuss introducing formula but we felt the health benefits of bf outweighed him feeding and 'bonding' a they were bonding just fine. We also didn't want to pay for formula as it's bloody expensive!

I expressed sometimes - otherwise I just handed her over after a feed.

For us we were never going to achieve 50-50 childcare as I took a year off work on maternity leave and my husband was at work all day. I wouldn't do 50-50 night feeds as he had to be up early to drive to work, where I spent a lot of time sitting (either at home or at different baby groups). It was easier for me to be sleep deprived. If we were having a dreadful night he would wake up with us but the usual feed at 2am, 5am and then morning I would do. I would have done that if she was formula fed too

Pearlman - out of curiosity, have you breastfed yourself? You seem very insistent that my experience as a breastfeeding mother doesn't meet your idea of what life is like for breastfeeding mothers.

Honestly, I was worried pre-baby that breastfeeding would prevent my husband being as involved as both of us wanted. We had plans that I'd express a lot, we'd do feeds on alternate nights, etc. In reality, it just wasn't an issue, and looking back I wish I could tell my past self not to stress about it so much.

I mixed fed for 8 weeks then went to exclusively FF, due to medication I take. I couldn't stand longer than 8 weeks without it. I shouldn't have waited that long really, took me 12 painful weeks to build it up again.

That said, FF is a total ball ache. I view it as a necessary evil. Going to London tomorrow, I need to take a thermos flask, a separate bottle of cooled boiled water, measured out powder and sterile bottles. Instead of just whipping my boob out like some of my friends are able to do. (No, I will not have access to a bottle warmer, and no, I will not make it up in advance and let it go cold. I am determined to follow guidelines to the letter.)

If you really feel you don't want to BF, don't. DD seems to be doing just fine on formula, it's me that finds it annoying.