Hopefully my last post on breast feeding ever

I’m putting this out there because I think there’s so much coverage of what a lovely experience breast feeding can be, and on the occasions that you do hear the other side, people tend to write about how it was hard at first, but they’re glad they kept going. Or else someone writes something like “breasts are for my husband, not my baby” and things spin off in another direction entirely.

As you probably recall, I hated breast feeding. I had my share of real problems– cracked and bleeding nipples, bacterial and yeast infections, and a near constant supply of blocked ducts, all of which I found unbelievably painful. I gave it up at four weeks, but plenty of people have persevered through those things and worse.

The truth is that I’ve never liked the idea of breast feeding, long before I had a baby. I never anticipated that this activity would bring me closer to my child. I didn’t want to be physically tied in that way. Seeing my sister hooked up to a pump was such a dehumanizing vision, I never wanted to do it. When people talked about their breasts being left saggy and deflated when they stopped, I wanted to avoid that. (Not that I did avoid that!) When my OB, told of the pain at my two week follow-up, mentioned that it took a while for calluses to build up, I was horrified by the idea of calluses on my nipples. (Does this really happen?) On demand feeding, letting a baby use my nipple as a pacifier, or being unable to sleep without it in his mouth disgusted me. The idea of breast feeding an older baby, much less a toddler, one who was aware of and specifically interested in my breasts, skeeved me out. While I always intended to give it a try, I never intended to do it beyond three or, at the outside, six months.

Even though I pay lip service to breast is best, I actually believe it makes only a fractional difference. Gatito (knock on wood) is a healthy, sturdy boy, and I have no reason to believe he won’t be smart, too. If he weren’t healthy and smart, I doubt breast feeding would have done much unless maybe he was allergic to formula. I had always wondered about whether or not studies claiming breast milk make babies smarter or healthier accounted for factors like parents’ intelligence, health, socioeconomic class, etc., when I read about them in the paper, but I never looked too deeply. Then I read this, the first study that I’ve personally seen that looks specifically at those factors, and what do you know? According to this, sure, breast fed babies have higher IQs, but that’s because breast feeding moms skew higher!

All of the recent news coverage and, of course, my blog contact with new moms, have meant that even when I moved on to formula (happily, oh so happily), it still nags at me. And here’s the thing that nags the most: Whenever people write about it, they usually give some sub-segment of the population an “out”. Most people say something along the lines of not wanting to make people who couldn’t breast feed feel badly. The people to whom these articles and posts refer, are most often those who could not produce enough milk or who had to take some serious drugs.

Never ever ever do I hear people get an “out” simply for not liking it, for being miserable. (I did get that kind of support in my comments here at the time, as well as in real life– I just don’t see this kind of support available publicly.) In a recent email conversation with
another blogger* who, for the record, successfully breast fed her child, she described the public push for breast feeding nomatterwhat as anti-woman, despite the fact that it’s perpetuated most by women. And boy did that hit home with me, because that is just how it feels. Like a woman is supposed to trade her happiness and sanity and give
herself entirely over to her child.

That makes me mad because, as any of my regular readers know, nobody could love or care for her child more than I do for Gatito. I have happily scarified dinners and movies with my husband and my friends, sleeping in on the weekends, and my financial security for this child, and I will continue to do this and much more for the rest of my life. But I’m still a person, too, and my happiness still matters, too, and breast feeding made me miserable. No woman should need more of an “out” than that.

*I don’t know if she would want to be identified, so I’m leaving the reference anonymous unless she tells me otherwise.