Breastfeeding (or Not Breastfeeding), Body Image, and the Pressure to “Do It Right”: 10 Things I Learned Along the Way
Two days after giving birth to my daughter, I stood in the hospital bathroom, tears silently streaming down my face as the pain from my incision and engorgement from my milk coming in both intensified. My brain was swirling with all of the things I was supposed to do and not do, the decisions I had to make, the new and unfamiliar things happening to my body, and the reality that I was now responsible for keeping another human alive when, at this moment, I barely felt like a human myself.
“Make sure you get up and move; walking will help speed up the healing process.”
“Wow, your milk is coming in early! Keep latching her and pumping to help establish your supply.”
“Keep putting her on the breast; we’ve got to get her to latch.”
“Breastfeeding will help regulate her blood sugar.”
“Do you want to supplement while we figure out her latch? We can use formula or donor milk.”
“More skin-to-skin will help. Have you tried the football hold? That should encourage a good latch.”
No one could have prepared me for the physical, mental, and emotional whirlwind I would experience when trying to breastfeed. I never really gave breastfeeding a second thought while pregnant; I planned to do it and assumed it would come naturally when the baby was here. When my daughter arrived several weeks early, I learned quickly that breastfeeding was not going to be the easy, intuitive, and natural experience I thought it would be.
The Pressure to“Do it Right”
In the minutes, hours, and days following my daughter’s birth, I was bombarded with lactation consultants, nurses, and others prompting the breastfeeding experience, correcting the things I was doing “wrong,” and asking me questions I felt ill-equipped to answer (I didn’t know if I wanted to supplement? Do I!? Should I? Are they asking me about supplementing because she is starving? How do I even know that she’s getting enough milk?)
Once my daughter was here and I was face-to-face with the reality that breastfeeding was not going to be a walk in the park, my anxiety went up even more. Truthfully, it would have been best for my mental health to combination feed or to switch to formula feeding my daughter early on. However, I went into my motherhood experience believing that “breast is best” because, well, that’s what I was told. So when I struggled with breastfeeding in the hospital, I felt a significant amount of pressure to prove that I could do it. I’m not sure who I was trying to prove it to: myself, my family, the medical professionals, friends… probably a mixture of all of these. On top of this, I had always struggled with my body image (for as long as I could remember); I didn’t realize how much the decision to breastfeed or not and then the journey that followed would be a new, intense, and unexpected challenge for my relationship with my body.
I learned a lot about breastfeeding, my body, the relationship between the two, and the internal and external factors that played a role in how I responded to the pressures I was facing. Below are some of them.
10 Things I Learned Throughout My Breastfeeding Journies
(as a mother who struggles with body image)
Breastfeeding is hard
This may not be the reality for everyone, but it certainly was for me. I ended up exclusively pumping with my daughter after months of struggling to breastfeed. I’m now near the end of my breastfeeding journey with my son, and both journeys were/have been challenging in different ways. I wish I had known how hard it could be before I had my daughter; I might have felt less shame for struggling.
People have opinions about how you will feed your baby.
As with anything else, people will have and share their opinions about whether you breastfeed or not, how long you breastfeed, the benefits of breastfeeding, the best formula to use if you don’t breastfeed, the best position for breastfeeding, the best way to increase your supply, and the list goes on.
Something I found interesting is how some people were so encouraging and celebratory at the beginning of a breastfeeding journey, but then some of those same people would make comments when someone breastfed differently than they did/or would have. I have heard things like:
“So-and-so is still breastfeeding and [child’s name] is almost two! I don’t know; I think that’s too long. I mean, the baby can TALK.”
“Yeah, she doesn’t actually breastfeed, she pumps. She really should have reached out to a lactation consultant earlier; I bet the baby had a lip tie. Mine did, and once we figured it out, I breastfed until [kid’s name] was one.”
Ultimately, people are going to have opinions no.matter.what. I worked hard to tune out this noise, especially the second time around, with my son. It made it easier to make decisions that I felt were best for me and my baby with clarity.
3. “Breast is best” is reductive and can be harmful
This mentality can set women up to feel shame when they struggle to or choose not to breastfeed. “Fed is best” may circulate more now, but the reality is still that “fed is best” only came on the scene because “breast is best” was there first. In my experience, there is still an undercurrent of judgment from many for not breastfeeding. I felt so sad and embarrassed that my breastfeeding journey with my daughter wasn’t working the way I had envisioned that I spent weeks trying everything from nipple shields to lactation consultants to pumping first and then trying to latch her to see so my letdown wasn’t so intense. I tried over and over, and in hindsight, I think I tried so hard because I felt a lot of shame, not even necessarily because of the breastfeeding itself.
4. Choosing not to breastfeed is a valid feeding decision.
I know a few people who decided – before the baby was born – that they were not going to breastfeed. I think this is commendable. Breastfeeding is also commendable, but to decide not to in the face of all of the pressure and expectation to “at least try” is probably not easy. If this is the decision that is best for you and your family, you deserve to make it without feeling judged or without feeling the need to justify why you made this decision.
5. Breastfeeding may make you feel like your body isn’t yours
After being pregnant for nearly a year, I was looking forward to my body feeling like mine again when my daughter was born. I was not prepared for just how demanding breastfeeding would be on me, both physically and emotionally, and the fact that this would make me feel like my body wasn’t my own. This, in and of itself, caused me to struggle with my body image throughout the time I was breastfeeding. I would often be pumping while feeding my daughter a bottle – forcing me to either prop her up in a seat or contort my body in some weird way so that I could hold her, feed her, and pump all at the same time. Because I ended up exclusively pumping, I felt like I was tethered to the pump, bound by time (strict pumping/feeding schedule), and always stressed about how much milk I was producing. For a while, my body felt only like a vessel for nourishment for my daughter.
6. Breastfeeding made it hard for me to have a healthy relationship with food
As someone who already had a complicated relationship with food, I really struggled to stay mentally healthy when I was breastfeeding. I ended up having to cut out many foods and food groups due to my daughter’s reflux, which led to me obsessing and restricting, but this time it was because I had to make sure I didn’t eat anything that would cause her reflux to flare up.
Even when some of my dietary restrictions eased up, I was hyperfocused on the amount of food I was eating (enough to maintain my supply, but not too much to where I would gain weight!). I felt accomplished when I would eat what I felt like a lot and “still lose weight” because my body was using a lot of energy to make milk. My thoughts and behaviors became obsessive, but it was hard to “fix” or even detect this at the time because the obsession and restriction were “justified.”
7. Breastfeeding is often marketed as a means to “lose weight”
In light of my above point, breastfeeding was often talked about as a way to help “shed the baby weight.” I now resent this for a lot of reasons: the fact that losing weight is one of the primary points of conversation postpartum is so sad, it causes women who are breastfeeding under this impression to be disappointed when this does not happen for them, and it reinforces the idea that our bodies are always in need of changing, fixing, optimizing.
Growing and birthing a baby is not miracle enough; we must also shrink ourselves “back” to make it look like we never carried a baby, and we should use feeding our baby to do it. Then our bodies will be worth celebrating.
8. Breastfeeding can make you feel “frumpy” and this can mess with your body image
Okay, so this may be in the same vein as breastfeeding making you feel like your body isn’t your own, but another layer of this is the fact that I often felt “frumpy” throughout my breastfeeding journey. I can remember countless times when I would be changing at the end of a day, only to find a nursing pad had attached itself to the inside of my shirt or, much to my dismay, somehow had found its way outside of my shirt or on the interior of my coat.
Sometimes I couldn’t wear a shirt I wanted to wear because it didn’t work with my nursing bra, and the fluctuation in breast size – even throughout the day– made outfit and bra selection hard. I often wore dark shirts at the beginning of both of my kids’ feeding journeys because I was scared of leaking milk. These and other experiences like them made it hard to feel confident in my clothes and in my own skin. And with the societal pressure to look “put together",” even (or especially?) as a mother, I often was fighting against the feelings that I was just not “bouncing back” (ick) quickly enough.
9. Breastfeeding can change the way and how often you think about your body
When I was breastfeeding, I paid attention to parts of my body in ways I never had before for reasons I never had before. Was I engorged? Was this mastitis starting? Why is this boob producing so much more milk than this boob? Is this a clog? What do I do if it is? Oh, wow – that’s a lot of milk; did I forget to pump earlier? Will my supply drop now?
I noticed that I thought about my body in terms of function and what it could produce more than I ever had before. And some of that was good – my body was doing an amazing thing, but I didn’t expect how this would forever shift my body image and cause me to measure my body’s “worth” by what is produced. This felt and still feels complicated and confusing at times.
10. You’re allowed to feel disappointed in your breastfeeding (or not breastfeeding) journey
Whether you wanted to breastfeed and it didn’t work out, you wanted to breastfeed longer than you did, you breastfed but didn’t enjoy it, you didn’t breastfeed and regret it, or some other experience related to your feeding journey with your baby, you are allowed to feel disappointed.
I was so riddled with guilt for various parts of my daughter’s feeding journey, that I ended up feeling guilty for feeling guilty and disappointed that I felt disappointed. I spent a lot of time trying to “manage” my emotions around this experience, and I didn’t let myself just feel disappointed (until much later).
You’re allowed to feel disappointed in, or sad, frustrated, and angry about how the journey goes (or doesn’t), how it impacts your body and mind, and how it makes sleep even harder than it already is with a baby. These things are all real, and you are not – in any way – failing at any part of your motherhood journey for feeling them.
However You Feed Your Baby, You – and Your Body – Are Enough
If you are a mom, or if you hope to be one day, know that the choices you make about how you feed your baby and your body are 1) entirely yours to make and 2) not a reflection of your worth or level of success as a mom. Know that it is normal for these decisions and the experiences that follow to have an impact on your body image. Anticipating this by surrounding yourself with a network of family, friends, and medical professionals who will support you in your feeding decisions and your postpartum journey is critical in helping you navigate the days, weeks, and months following the birth of your baby. Every woman deserves to feel validated and supported throughout their postpartum journey, whether it includes breastfeeding (at the breast or pumping), combination feeding, or formula feeding.
By: Erika Muller, Assistant for Wildflower Therapy LLC
All images via Unsplash
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