6 Things I Wish I Had Known About Breastfeeding (.)(.)
Before attempting to feed a baby human with my breasts!
On May 5th, 2022, Romy Ocean Rey was born. 8 months later on January 5th, 2023, I pumped my last few ounces of breastmilk.
In many ways, the 8 months of breastfeeding were more physically, emotionally, and mentally challenging than the prior 9 months of pregnancy. This is in large part due to the fact of how underprepared women are for the breastfeeding journey.
We’re underprepared because breastfeeding is not explained to us compared to the thousands of books on the pregnancy journey. Breastfeeding is a different experience for everyone, sometimes regretful and sometimes very wonderful. Every mama on this planet has a unique breastfeeding story. I once met a woman who told me she breastfed her son til he was 4.5 years old (like Game of Thrones style!). And I know a few French women who popped a pill at the hospital so their breastmilk wouldn’t even “come in”. They feel they’ve already taken 9 months off of wine and unpasteurized cheese so why would they endure another day?
Also tonight, while telling my husband about this post, I realized that men barely pay attention to the ups and downs of breastfeeding (other than thinking about another human being competing for their woman’s boob time)! So breastfeeding, like many aspects of motherhood, can be a lonely journey. So, in case you were wondering: here are the 6 things I wish I had known about breastfeeding before feeding a baby with my breasts!
1. COLOSTRUM
Despite having two doulas and lots of mama friends, no one told me about colostrum. In the first few days of being a mama, our nipples basically only eke out tiny dribbles of golden, magical goo. Expecting squirt guns for titties shooting out white milk, I thought my boobs were broken! Googling from the hospital bed, I learned that they were probably not broken. But still, after about 24 hours on Earth and little Colostrum dribbles, Romy was screaming! And we thought, it must be from hunger! So on day 2 of Romy’s life, the hospital gave her a bottle of formula. And just like that, my dreams of solely feeding Romy breastmilk were dashed.
Day one of mama life, and I already felt like a failure. I sobbed and sobbed. Later, my doula told me that the hospital should’ve offered me a pump so I could pump out the colostrum for Romy. (I started pumping it out using the Willow Go pump as you can see in the photo above!) It’s very possible this dynamic led us to giving her formula every time I didn’t think I was producing enough milk in those early days, which then might’ve led to me not producing enough milk, and that therefore led to Romy being a both breastfed and formula fed baby. Key words are FED and HEALTHY baby. And that’s all that matters!
2. FORMULA vs. BREASTMILK vs. COMBO FEEDING
The internet is ablaze with making women feel horrible about feeding your child formula, which is a stark pendulum swing from just decades ago when global corporations (eh hem, Nestle) were telling women to feed their baby only formula, not breastmilk.
When Romy was born and we needed to give her formula, my best friend said to me,
“Courtney, do you really think your diet is so perfect that she’s getting everything she needs from you? Isn’t it awesome to give her your breastmilk with all the magical antibodies and a high quality formula too?”
Whether this is true or not, it made sense to me and I went with it mentally. And I am very glad I did. It is A LOT of pressure to solely feed your child breastmilk, especially for working moms (and dads!). The fact that Romy would drink both breastmilk and formula meant that if I was on a conference call and there was no pumped milk in the fridge, that someone else could feed her.
There was also a scenario when Romy was about 5 months old when I made a last minute decision to travel to a conference without her. I hadn’t pumped and stored any milk prior to making this decision so it would’ve been impossible for me to go if formula wasn’t an option.
Side note: Romy was born during a formula shortage in the United States that still gives me anxiety to this day. Thankfully, Romy was born in Lisbon where I had easy access to HIPP and HOLLE — the two hippy European brands that a lot of well off American women have been shipping to the States during the shortage. I am very lucky to have access to formula and the money to pay for it to support the combo feeding approach we took.
So in summary, it does not need to be an either/or scenario with breastmilk and formula, it can be the best of both worlds!
3. PUMPING AND POWER PUMPING AND PUMPING SOME MORE
One effect of giving your baby formula is that you may end up producing less milk than your baby will need an an entire day. This is because breastmilk supposedly works on a supply and demand basis. So if you’re giving your baby 1 bottle of formula and 5 bottles of breast milk out of 6 bottles total, then the next day your body will probably only make enough for 5 bottles again. If you want to then switch to feeding your baby 6 bottles, you need to “power pump” as in aggressively pump your breasts every 2–3 hours (sometimes pausing for 20 minutes and then pumping again for 20 in just one hour) to increase supply. Pumping will undoubtedly make you feel like a cow. (Also, it will likely make you feel very empathetic to all the cows locked into the dairy industry. Ditch the dairy and drink plant-based milks instead!)
4. CHOOSING A BREASTPUMP
The three things I spent a ridiculous amount of time researching while pregnant were: choosing a stroller, baby monitor, and breast pump. A breast pump is arguably the most important for the early days.
I made the mistake of choosing the Willow Go — which is the equivalent of a travel stroller for my first breast pump. This may have contributed to decreasing my supply in the early days.
In a flurry to find the right pump to increase my supply but that didn’t have me tied to sitting down at a table or near a plug like a Spectra or massive Medela, I went with the Medela Freestyle Flex Pump, which charges using USB-C (same as your MacBook). This is a great pump because you can move around with it but… it does still make you look like a cow.
If I were to do it all over again, I would probably get the Elvie instead of the Willow Go so that I have a discreet pumping option in addition to the Medela Freestyle Flex Pump (n.b. that the Elvie is twice the price). The last thing I’ll say here is that if you want to exclusively breastfeed and pump vs. combo feed with formula, you really need to make A LOT of milk. In this scenario, you should probably look at getting one of the super strong pumps by Spectra or Medela. Just note these are big pumps, often plugged into a wall and are nearly impossible to move around with.
5. BREASTFEEDING IS HARD AND YOUR TITS MAY NOT BE SQUIRT GUNS BUT IT’S STILL WORTH IT
You see it all the time on Instagram, the breastmilk flex: a woman opens up the extra freezer she had to buy to show you the millions of bags of breastmilk she has stored up for her baby’s winter. This was not the case for me.
I made just enough, sometimes not enough, and during the first few weeks, I hired two lactation coaches to come and help me and Romy figure it out. This is a team effort after all, not just all on the mama! (n.b. A lactation coach in Portugal costs about $40/hr vs. in the USA it can run up to $400/hr.)
Over the holidays, I was drinking wine with a pregnant French girlfriend of mine who told me she was not going to breastfeed again with baby #2. 99% of the time, you should never share your opinion on how to be a mama to another mama. But with the wine in my system, I just had to tell her that I thought she should reconsider. Breastfeeding your baby, however hard it can be at times and painful and frustrating, also reveals some of the most magical bonding moments you can ever imagine. Cause when it clicks, and you look down and the little being you love most in the whole world is looking up at you, nourished and milk drunk, it’s really just the most amazing thing.
6. STOPPING BREASTFEEDING IS A WHOLE THING.
I decided to stop breastfeeding gradually over 10 weeks. (In contrast, my best friend decided to stop and 24 hours later, she was done.) In the first few months of Romy’s life, I was pumping or breastfeeding every 3 waking hours and breastfeeding 1–2 times a night.
Around 6 months, Romy started sleeping through the night (after one night of “crying it out”). This was a major event in terms of decreasing my milk supply as I was no longer waking up in the middle of the night to feed her. (In full transparency, we probably could’ve gotten her to sleep through the night sooner but I struggled to give up our midnight breastfeeding sessions!)
Just after this, I went to another conference and by this point was pumping just three times a day — waking, midday, and before bed. By December, I tapered down to pumping just twice a day and by Christmas to just once per day. It was around this time that Romy took her last swig of my breasts before pushing me away one final time in favor of the bottle. I also got my period back and noticed major hormonal swings (like screaming at Yann, writing overly emotional work emails, and crying uncontrollably a lot).
Admittedly, I started panicking when I saw my supply drop and imagining what would happen if Romy and I fell out of a plane into the Sahara Desert and I had to figure out how to keep her alive like a mama elephant and get my supply back. Yes, this is crazy mom brain at its finest! In early January, we got to Cape Town and I was pumping out just about 1oz a day. And then on January 5th, to borrow a phrase from my mom’s diary about breastfeeding me, “the old cow dried up”.
Side note: A few months into my pregnancy, two of our best friends announced their wedding date of January 6&7th in Cape Town. I told them, “That’ll be when I’m done breastfeeding cause I am going to PAAAAARTTTYYY!” It’s really funny to me that literally the day before their wedding was my last pump.
It’s so interesting how the mind works and when you set an intention, it’s like setting the directions in Google Maps to your final destination! So however you want your breastfeeding journey to be, set an intention, know that it might not go according to plan all the time, and know that you are absolutely amazing whatever the outcome.
Thank you for reading mamas (and some wonderful empathetic papas?) and best of luck on your breastfeeding journeys (or not if you decide that’s what you want!).
If you’re a mama who has already started or finished their breastfeeding journey, please share your top tips and learnings below!
