My first effort at public parenting — in my local Starbucks — made me feel about as good a mother as Joan Crawford. I settled down in a comfy armchair, then lifted my four-week-old baby, Alice, out of her pram and onto my lap.
Then I began to notice the other mothers. One, in her early thirties like me, was casually breast-feeding her baby as she chatted to a friend about her husband’s inability to get the weekly supermarket shop right. Another talked loudly into her mobile phone about her daughter Honey’s sleeping patterns as she gently nursed her infant.
Instead of feeling some instant mumsy camaraderie, I felt deflated. As a third mother struggled to get her pram through the doors, I wondered if she might be my ally. The decaf she ordered should have been my clue: she unhooked her bra, deftly held her nipple between her first two fingers and expertly placed it into her gasping baby’s mouth.
Then, a strange thing happened: I felt obliged to hoist up my T-shirt, pull down the cup of my non-nursing bra and guide my nipple into Alice’s mouth. She was happy to remain there, but I knew she wasn’t feeding. The truth was, I was pretending to breast-feed in Starbucks in front of a group of strangers. Why? To save face. I was too ashamed to bottle-feed in public.
I hadn’t imagined it to be like this. My breasts were the female equivalent of the horn of plenty. Minutes after Alice was born, she was suckling away. But those first few days turned out to be the honeymoon period. From then on, my daughter’s relationship with my breasts turned sour. On the evening of the fourth day of her life, after an eight-hour cycle of sucking, falling asleep, puking, but not feeding, Alice was looking a little on the yellow and floppy side. In newborn-baby terms, this is not good, and when my husband called the hospital, he was told to take Alice to A&E immediately. When a long, thick needle was inserted into a minuscule vein on the back of her teaspoon-sized hands and she didn’t even flinch, I knew she was in the best place.
That night, I sat sobbing by my daughter’s bedside as the nurses pinned down her spindly arms so they could insert a tube up her nose and down her throat while she tried to gag it out. I sat and watched as a nurse dripped in my expressed breast milk, drop-by-drop, down the tube, straight into my daughter’s stomach. She only violently vomited up the first ounce; the rest, her new body managed to hold down.
After three nights in hospital, the only conclusion the doctors came to was that my daughter was a lazy sucker. She would guzzle my milk fed to her though a needleless syringe placed in her mouth, but put her on my breast and she’d nod off in no time, despite all the known strategies employed to keep drowsy feeding babies awake. After leaving hospital, I persevered with the breast-feeding for a few days, because as well as the guilt, the natural hormonal urge to breast-feed is huge, and your body makes you feel dreadful about stopping. Even though I ended up dreading every unsuccessful feed, I mourned the final one.
It was bottle not breast from then on, so I could be sure Alice was properly nourished. I invested in a hideous expressing machine that made me feel like a beast in a cow shed: my nipples were dragged into clear chambers and I could watch my milk squirting out. But as the long nights wore on, and my milk supply began to dwindle as Alice’s appetite increased, a friend suggested we introduce the forbidden fruit that is formula milk into her diet.
I had expected to feel more embarrassed whipping out my breast than brandishing a bottle in public. In fact, the opposite was true. I wanted to wear a big badge for all the other mothers to read, saying: “I did try to breast-feed, but my baby prefers bottles.” Why the stigma? We bottle-feeders can be loving parents, too. After all, it’s not as if we are feeding our babies junk food: formula is jam-packed with the perfect balance of vitamins and minerals.
Yet the prevailing pro-breast-feeding wind blows everywhere. At the weekly baby weigh-in clinic at my local health centre, new mothers sit round in a circle on plastic chairs. In a room of 15 women, I had one ally. I could see her fidgeting and looking concerned when she couldn’t see anywhere to warm her feed. After all, this was a baby clinic, but you were more likely to find a bottle warmer in a motorway service station cafe than here among the “breast is best ” posters.
In our society, there is nothing to prepare you for how hard breast-feeding is. You are led to believe that your baby will naturally latch on, and off you go on a journey of blissful feeding. This is the case for a lucky few, but pain, frustration and scabs is what many face.
Yet underneath those feelings of disappointment, I felt a sense of relief when I started Alice on formula feed. A nipple no longer chained me to my baby. I began to rest, knowing my daughter had had enough to eat. I could have early nights in bed or go out for that much-needed drink, leaving my husband to look after Alice, who was happier now that she had food and two chilled parents. I could reclaim my breasts and keep them neatly away in an attractive bra, rather than constantly hanging them out to air in the hope that my nipples might heal. Everyone knows successful breast-feeding is beneficial to both mother and child. But how many times do we have to be told? Breast-feeding should be applauded, but that does not mean bottle-feeding should be hissed and booed down.
5 REASONS NOT TO FEEL GUILTY ABOUT BOTTLE-FEEDING
1 A new mother is a novice, and if the experts don’t teach her how to breast-feed properly, then they are the ones who have failed.
2 Breast milk is not the miracle answer to your baby being healthy for the rest of its life. It is not true that if you breast-feed your baby will never suffer from allergies, become obese, diabetic or have heart disease.
3 The early milk, called colostrum, that your breasts produce in the first three or four days, is worth its weight in gold, as it is high in protein and disease-fighting antibodies (immunoglobulins). Even if your baby gets just this, he/she will benefit enormously.
4 There are many healthy and happy bottle-fed babies; whereas there are plenty of tearful breast-feeding mothers of babies who are permanently hungry and won’t settle. This way of feeding your baby does not set it up for life — if anything, it can give him/her a food anxiety.
5 If you watch a baby being bottle-fed, you will see that it is being cuddled in its mother or father’s arms, has a delicious feed, then happily drops off to sleep. He/she is not lying there thinking about what a foul mother it has for not breast-feeding it.
Clare Byam-Cook
What to Expect When You’re Breastfeeding ... and What If You Can’t? by Clare Byam-Cook (Vermilion £7.99)
