Why I'll Never Exclusively Breastfeed Again

A lesson I learned the hard way, over and over again, at 1am, 3am, and 5am...

Throughout pregnancy, numerous people asked me if I planned to breastfeed. Still not sure why that’s a casual question, but anyway, I always replied “If I can!” Meaning, as long as my supply was good and it worked for me and baby, I wanted to do it. If it didn’t work, I wouldn’t hesitate to switch to formula, because I knew that making sure my baby was fed was the most important thing.

After some help from the hospital lactation consultants, we were off on our breastfeeding journey. And it was going relatively well! I used a nipple shield—an amazing silicone thing you put over your nipple so that it doesn’t get torn to shreds. My husband and I call it “the prosthesis.” It also provides a more elongated surface for the baby to latch onto. Without it, CJ had trouble latching and my nipples were getting damaged. So we used it and it worked and we were both happy.

After the first week or two, my supply was pretty stable and my breasts felt comfortable. I basically just laid around and breastfed my newborn all day and night. In the beginning, my husband also got up with us in the middle of the night and brought the baby to me because I was still in a lot of pain from the C-section. But once I didn’t need his physical assistance anymore, I was getting up with her alone. I was the one feeding her, so it didn’t make sense for him to get up multiple times a night, too. (If I fed her and put her back down and she started crying again soon after, he knew it was his turn to rock and soothe since she was already fed.)

For the first two months, I powered through. I told myself it was temporary. I told myself we just had to go a few more weeks and then she’d be down to one night feed and that would be totally doable. Except, it wasn’t. Nothing about the sleep deprivation I was experiencing was manageable. I was sleeping in 2-2.5-hour shifts. I spent every day exhausted and dreading the next night, wondering how I’d get through it again. About 3.5 months in, I reached a breaking point.

Looking back now, I’m upset with myself. I knew formula was an option, but I didn’t think it was an option I could take if I didn’t have issues breastfeeding. My supply was great, she was getting what she needed, my nipples were fine (we used the shield for about 3.5 months, until one day she suddenly couldn’t latch well with it and latched perfectly without it). I just assumed if I COULD breastfeed, I SHOULD and WOULD.

But… at what expense? Exclusively breastfeeding is too much pressure for one person, and I learned that lesson the hard way. I didn’t realize it at first, but I was depressed. I was so tired, I was a shell of myself. I was anxious about every single thing pertaining to the baby’s eating and sleeping because my sanity hinged on whether she slept well each night or not. (Example of my obsession: I regularly lectured my husband if he turned the sink water on too high because it might wake her up.) I was too preoccupied with my lack of sleep to care about anything else. Sure, CJ was getting those good breast milk antibodies, but she was also getting a zombie for a mother. My husband was getting a ghost of his wife and he didn’t know how to help me; the only thing I wanted and needed was sleep, but as long as I was the baby’s sole food source, I couldn’t get it.

Exclusively breastfeeding also meant that the baby only got a bottle of pumped breastmilk a handful of times in her early life, and so right around the same time I decided I was not okay, she refused to take bottles (she also decided to refuse naps around the same time, which is a topic for another day). Which meant that not only was I not sleeping, but I couldn’t physically separate myself from my baby for more than 2 hours. When I’d go grocery shopping just to get out of the house alone for a bit, I’d come home and open the door to her crying, my husband trying to console her until I got home and could feed her.

When I broke, I gathered the random bottles we had from the Babylist Bottle Sampler Box we got as a baby shower gift. We tried different ones. We wasted a lot of pumped breast milk. We committed to enduring the crying until she finally drank from a bottle. When she did, I ordered more of that exact one (shoutout Philips Avent Natural Response, CJ is a BIG fan, which means I am, too) from Target same-day delivery. Then, we gave her formula. She was fine with it. She seemed to like it.

Now, she still gets breastfed most of the day because I’m home with her and it’s easiest. But she gets one or two bottles a day no matter what, to make sure that she never forgets she likes them. When I’m not home, she gets a bottle of formula from someone else.

Our nights look very different now that she’s almost 5 months old, but I’m kicking myself for not introducing formula and regular bottles from the start. I think about how I could have maybe sort of enjoyed the first three-ish months of my daughter’s life if we had done so, instead of lying in bed every morning and every night obsessively willing her to sleep even just a little longer because 3 solid hours would absolutely feel life-changing compared to 2.

Exclusively breastfeeding is a completely unsustainable method of feeding and caring for a baby. At least it was for me. Maybe if she had been a miraculously good sleeper from the get go, or if I was someone who could naturally skate by on just a few hours of sleep each night. Maybe then it would have been easier. But as it happened, my commitment to breastfeeding was the worst thing I did for myself postpartum, and by proxy, a bad decision for my family.

Next kid is getting combo fed from the start. My husband and I will take shifts so that neither of us it completely sleep deprived. I’ll be a much more present, safer, and healthier mother and wife if I can share the feeding responsibilities with someone more equally. I’ll get to actually enjoy my newborn instead of desperately counting down the days until they’re down to just one night wakeup. To be honest, I’ll always look back on CJ’s newborn era as the hardest time of my life, and kick myself just a little for not wising up sooner. I now know that it didn’t have to be so damn hard. That just because I could, didn’t mean I should.