A Note from a Low-Supply Mom & Certified Lactation Counselor during National Breastfeeding Awareness Month
For many parents, National Breastfeeding Awareness Month is a fun time to celebrate the hard work and benefits that come with breastfeeding, as well as normalizing breastfeeding in a society where human milk and breastfeeding have been ostracized and ridiculed in decades past. In fact, there is little of the American parenting community that hasn’t been touched by the incredibly successful pro-formula, anti-breastfeeding marketing campaign that was blasted at parents in the middle part of the 20th century. Nowadays, science has proven breastmilk to be the perfect nourishment for the vast majority of babies.
Breastfeeding awareness, normalization, and education is a worthy cause; it deserves its own PR campaign.
But what if you wanted to breastfeed and you couldn’t? What if you tried and your baby cried and you cried and your nipples bled and, in the end, you found yourself feeding your baby from a can?
You count. I see you. Whether your baby received breastmilk for a day, a week, a month, or a year, you count.
As a certified lactation counselor, I’m well-versed with common pitfalls and hurdles to a successful breastfeeding relationship. I know how milk-making works on a physiological level and how the mechanisms can be impeded by formula supplementation and advice by well-intentioned, but poorly-educated-in-lactation doctors. I know there is a huge lack of education and support for what baby-led, physiologically-normal breastfeeding looks like and that there are systemic failures that contribute to the abysmal breastfeeding rates in the US. And I know that misinformation is a huge reason that many families give up breastfeeding when they may well have been successful with the right support and education.
But sometimes, you know all the things. You do all the things. You see all the specialists. You follow all of the recommendations. And it still. doesn’t. work.
Sometimes you know what you need to do, you have no problem making milk, but your baby struggles to remove milk from the breast due to any number of oral function issues and you don’t have the time or financial resources to seek out the specialists that can help.
You’re amazing.
Sometimes you need to choose formula for the sake of your own mental health.
I’M SO FREAKING PROUD OF YOU.
Sometimes you’re able to breastfeed, but it looks different than you were hoping and you need to turn to exclusive pumping or combination feeding breastmilk and formula.
Look at you being all flexible and shit, changing your expectations in order to get your baby fed!
I see you because I was you. As mom to four kids, even after becoming a lactation counselor, after supporting dozens of other families through their births and successfully meeting their breastfeeding goals, after making birth and postpartum choices statistically proven to improve breastfeeding outcomes, I was a mom with a chronically low milk supply.
My babies survived on everything from formula, goat milk, donor milk from multiple donor moms, and my own breastmilk.
Even when I literally had a newborn on the boob 20+ hours a day, drank the teas, took the supplements, and had the ties revised, there was nothing that could fix a condition known as Insufficient Glandular Supply, which meant that I did not have enough milk-making tissue to actually produce enough milk to sustain a baby.
Maybe later this month, I’ll have time to come back and share about all of my individual breastfeeding journeys with my babies, but for now, I just wanted to offer a few words of encouragement and reassurance if you’re feeling isolated from the “mainstream” breastfeeding community because your journey looks different than what’s considered “normal.”
For you, maybe it’s not quite as easy as popping out a boob.
Maybe you’re feeling the pressure to stop from family and friends that don’t understand why breastfeeding is so important to you.
Maybe you’re feeling the pressure to keep trying, even though you feel like you’re drowning in parenthood and don’t have the support system you need and no one will freaking listen when you tell them what you need in order to be successful.
Here’s a big, long hug, if you need it. Or, over there is a safe corner in my house where you can simply sit and cry about it; I’ll sit in the other corner and not say anything, but I’ll probably cry, too.
On one hand, if you fought through struggles and were able to meet your feeding goals, congratulations, I’m literally so proud of you. Nursing through toe-curling pain, mastitis, failure to thrive, ALL THE THINGS, is serious mom strength.
On the other, if you had to readjust your goals, for whatever reason, I love you, I’m FREAKING proud of you because flexibility takes a whole other kind of strength.
Momming is hard. Really hard. Parenting a baby is maybe one of the toughest thing you’ll do in your life. And when the best that you had imagined for your baby doesn’t happen quite like you had hoped, it’s so valid to feel a little bit of heartbreak when you witness occasions like National Breastfeeding Awareness Month (the month of August) and World Breastfeeding Week (the first full week of August). Take some time for yourself. Step away from social media. Focus on your baby and on what’s going right.
You’ve got this, you really do.