As a first-time mom, I had been generally fortunate, despite a terrible labor that involved preeclampsia and six hours of pushing. My kind labor and delivery nurse handed me my tiny pink bundle and asked how I wanted to feed my daughter. I knew “breast was best,” but I wasn’t sold.
“Honey,” the nurse said, “there are other ways to feed your baby that let you take care of yourself. And they are all perfectly OK. You’ll still be a good mom.” This advice resonated, and it was a relief not to worry about what my body could or couldn’t do. Plus, getting feeding help from my husband, especially overnight, was crucial to my health and well-being—on top of the stress of becoming a new mom, I also dealt with a chronic kidney issue that I take multiple medications for, including some I can’t take while pregnant or breastfeeding.
I needed to put my trust in things I knew, and I knew formula feeding had worked well for my family once before.
I didn’t know how much that nurse’s words—”you’ll still be a good mom”—would come to mean to me the second time I became a mom. I had twins on the way and a physically draining pregnancy marred by hyperemesis and other complications.
When the twins were born at 32 weeks, I was distraught. One of them was rushed to the NICU and hooked up to machines and monitors, and the other had been stillborn. This complication devastated me to my core and left me feeling like a failure: My body hadn’t been able to keep both babies alive. And on top of that, it had gone into labor early, kicking my living son out before he was ready to breathe and eat on his own. I didn’t trust my body, period—certainly not to be able to nourish my surviving son.
I’ve since learned that this feeling is common: The National Institute of Mental Health recognizes preterm delivery and medical complications as risk factors for postpartum depression and anxiety. The March of Dimes notes that stillbirth also raises the risk of postpartum depression.
Jenna bottle feeding one of her children.
The end of my pregnancy left me devastated by my grief, fear, and failure. I needed to put my trust in things I knew, and I knew formula feeding had worked well for my family once before.
But before I had even gotten to see my son, a lactivist neonatologist lectured me for an hour in my hospital room. I was groggy and disoriented from the medication I had been given during my C-section and distraught over the loss I had just experienced. She went on about the risks of formula feeding, fixating on the increased possibility that my surviving son would develop a potentially fatal condition called necrotizing enterocolitis, or NEC. I had already failed my son in so many ways. And now, according to this doctor, I was damning him to a lifetime of complications. The doctor kept going while I sat in my bed and cried hysterically. I asked her to stop. She continued.
The neonatologist had convinced me I was doing our son a terrible disservice by not breastfeeding him. My husband, concerned about both my physical and emotional well-being, didn’t want me to risk breastfeeding or to stay off my medications for my kidney disease. He also saw me putting all the blame for our loss and our premature son on myself. He didn’t want to add to my overloaded, fragile mental state by suggesting I breastfeed.
So we did what we thought was the next best thing: donor milk. If my body couldn’t provide my son the breast milk he needed, I could make sure he was going to get it from someone else, no matter what it took.
Being a good mother is much more than a feeding choice; being a good mom means taking care of yourself so you can take care of your children.
And it took a lot of legwork. Getting the donor milk to the hospital was not only expensive but a bureaucratic nightmare: Our hospital didn’t have a milk bank on premises. In order to give my son donor milk, we needed a prescription from the neonatologist, approval from the hospital, and all of this in writing to the milk bank. And time was crucial. He needed to start eating, so we had to get the milk overnighted from a city five hours away. We spent hours the day after my son was born on the phone with the milk bank and in meetings with the neonatologist and head of the NICU nursing staff to get all of this approved. The hospital staff told us it wasn’t happening, but the milk bank knew otherwise, having had sent milk to the hospital’s NICU before. On top of the difficult logistics, the milk was almost $200 for an amount that fed our son for three days.
Later, we found out that the NICU’s lactation consultant doesn’t even recommend donor milk for babies my son’s gestational age—at 32 weeks, babies need higher-calorie milk and often supplement—and she added that I was a poor candidate for breastfeeding to begin with because my milk had never come in with my daughter and I was on multiple medications.
The neonatologist had neglected to tell me any of the lactation consultant’s information, choosing to act with no compassion for our situation—but compassion matters. And a recent study in Nursing for Women’s Health urges healthcare providers to reframe the way they talk to women about breastfeeding. The study says that “psychological pressure to exclusively breastfeed has the potential to contribute to postpartum depression symptoms in new mothers” and that there is a “need to physically and psychologically assess and support women who are unable to breastfeed successfully or exclusively.”
Perhaps if the neonatologist had taken into account my family’s extreme circumstances and the increased risk factors I had for postpartum mood disorders, she would have acted with more sensitivity. If she had not berated and verbally abused me, perhaps I wouldn’t have developed crippling postpartum anxiety and depression because I wouldn’t have believed that I was failing my son yet again.
Being a good mother is much more than a feeding choice; being a good mom means taking care of yourself so you can take care of your children. That’s something the neonatologist didn’t see and made me forget.
The studies that urge compassion toward new mothers are a step in the right direction. Perhaps if there were more medical professionals like the kind nurse I had by my side during my first delivery, who acted with compassion, I would have had one less thing to feel guilty about when my world was in shambles around me. Perhaps shame over the perceived failures of our bodies—and the ways we get help, like formula feeding—wouldn’t be so prevalent.
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