Bottled Up. Suzanne Barston
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a romantic, ethereal version of new parenthood. Through the gauzy lens of the camera, a journey filled with fear and anxiety looks easy, complete with a heartstring-tugging soundtrack and fancy cutaways to the most dramatic moments of an often arduous nine months. But one scene, that scene with the bottle, rings painfully true and blaringly corporeal. No amount of editing could have softened the conflict I was feeling in that moment.
Six weeks prior to filming that episode, the filmmakers had been there to record my session with a renowned lactation consultant. She wasn’t the first breastfeeding professional I had seen; no one could figure out what the problem was with my son’s “latch,” why the two of us couldn’t seem to figure out what was supposed to be a natural, instinctive process. The footage from that day was never used. I suspect it was too uncomfortable to watch: my eyes were rimmed red from exhaustion and tears, my voice shook due to a major bout of postpartum depression, and my child was starving and miserable (later we would discover that he had a severe intolerance to all milk, even mine, causing him to writhe in pain and discomfort every time he ate). I imagine what they managed to cut together was more like a horror movie than an inspirational Web series. So the producers casually glossed over how we were feeding our son for the postpartum episodes, and other than that brief moment with the bottle, you would never suspect the hell we went through.
Besides the fact that my breastfeeding “failure” was televised, my story isn’t unique. Whether a matter of necessity or preference, the way we feed our infants has become the defining moment of parenthood. Breast is not only best; it is the yardstick by which our parenting prowess is measured. Hospital maternity wards plaster posters with slogans suggesting that if you want to raise a happy, healthy child, nursing trumps both nature and nurture. Headlines announce new studies touting the superiority of children who are breastfed. The politics of pumping becomes a feminist issue, making any self-respecting NOW member want to burn her bra for entirely different reasons. Governments release public health campaigns imploring women to nurse for the good of the nation, and activists lobby to treat formula like a controlled substance. For many women of my generation, social class, and educational level, breastfeeding is seen not as a choice but as a given.
The day the cameras caught me “making a bottle,” I felt pretty sure that, given our circumstances, formula feeding was the best decision I could have made for my family. But my intellectual rationalizations couldn’t mitigate my worry. Was I condemning my child to a life of suboptimal IQ, reduced immunity, and psychological issues, as the “facts” suggested? Like many new mothers, I couldn’t shut out the ominous voices on television, in the news, in the parenting circles both in my own reality and online; I had nothing to back up my decision other than a gut feeling and a few kind words from my son’s pediatrician. Unlike many new mothers, I was a journalist specializing in consumer medical issues and the former editor of a Los Angeles area parenting magazine, but this only increased my anxiety: the sources I depended on in my professional life for factual information offered only vague, foreboding statistics on the detrimental effects of formula feeding. I desperately needed support from someone who had been through a similar experience, but I found none, save for some thinly veiled “I told you so’s” from relatives who seemed to think my fanatical attempts to nurse were an insult to the choices they had made in their primarily formula-feeding generations. Between my lack of sleep, my confusion (my son was healthy for the first time in his young life, thanks to formula—so why did I feel so disgusting every time I made him a bottle?), and my feelings of alienation from the other nursing moms around me, things were pretty bleak.
So I muddled through. I surreptitiously shook up bottles of formula in the bathroom at Mommy & Me class. The chip on my shoulder remained securely fastened in preparation for any attack I might endure at the grocery store while buying my teddy-bear-adorned cans of powdered poison. I made it a point to tell all my friends that I was envious of their ability to nurse, frantically defending my choice, or lack thereof. He couldn’t latch; he was allergic to my milk. Yes, that’s possible. Yes, it was devastating.
Formula feeding is a guilty secret for women like me, women who read the news, worry about health, and overeducate ourselves to our own detriment. The more you know, the more bottle feeding becomes a scarlet letter of sorts, the mark of bad motherhood. We’ve all been told that breastfeeding is the nutritionally superior choice; due to its lack of accoutrements, it is also environmentally superior. Is it any surprise, then, that it has also become the morally superior choice?
Breastfeeding is usually a beautiful, mutually beneficial act between mother and child. But breastfeeding isn’t necessarily the right choice for every mother and every child, whether it is for medical reasons, psychological reasons, professional reasons, or a myriad of other reasons that are, frankly, nobody’s business. Under certain circumstances, breastfeeding becomes a painful, emotionally fraught, conflicted act. And if you find yourself in these “certain circumstances,” there is little support. You’re left hanging in the shifting winds of public opinion, during those first fragile days of new parenthood when you need reassurance most of all.
During my own days as a lactation-challenged Hester Prynne, everything I read portrayed formula as a last resort, sufficient but pretty darn bad, the Big Mac to a breastfeeder’s organic salad. Even the can of formula itself pronounced that “breastmilk is best.” I wanted reassurance that went beyond the sweet but ultimately insufficient message that we “shouldn’t feel guilty” about formula feeding. That was all well and good, but I wanted facts. I wanted science.
When my son was eight months old, I began writing a blog about formula feeding, called FearlessFormulaFeeder.com. I wanted to provide a community for concerned, questioning, loving bottle feeders and to encourage the public to frame breastfeeding as an empowering personal choice rather than a government-mandated, fear-induced act. It turned out I’d stumbled on an unfulfilled niche—there were thousands of women like me in the world, desperate for the same sort of community, discussion, and information. I soon found myself completely immersed in the online parenting world, becoming the unofficial spokeswoman for formula feeding. I was far from fearless, but I put on a brave face for the women who followed my blog. They deserved it. Every Friday I’d invite readers to share their stories on the blog; these stories made my own struggle to breastfeed seem like a walk in the park. I learned about rare health conditions that made it difficult to produce milk or nurse without experiencing severe pain; anxiety disorders that were triggered by not knowing how much a baby was drinking at a given time; workplace complications that made pumping an impossibility, despite laws that supposedly mandated otherwise; breastfeeding that brought up painful memories of abuse; micropreemies who couldn’t manage the simple mechanism of “suck, swallow, breathe” without turning blue. The more I learned from these women, the more a slew of questions kept me up at night (okay, to be fair, my infant son was keeping me up at night, but the questions didn’t help). Is breastfeeding exclusively for six months a realistic goal when most women reenter the workforce (sometimes by necessity, sometimes by choice) after a few short months of maternity leave? What about women who need medications for depression or serious health conditions that are contraindicated for nursing moms—should they sacrifice their own health in order to give their children “liquid gold”? Should women with histories of sexual trauma or eating disorders, for whom breastfeeding might feel particularly oppressive or uncomfortable, be forced to bite their lips through six months (or more) of suffering? Is the antiformula culture insensitive to the realities of some parents, including teenage mothers, gay dads, adoptive mothers, or those in any number of other situations that stray from the middle-class norm? Why are we focusing so much energy on convincing women they have to breastfeed rather than offering better help to those who want to, and working to make formula the safest and healthiest alternative that it possibly can be? All of these questions danced seductively in my head, coming together for a big Chorus Line finish, the one singular sensation question that no one seemed willing to answer: Is breastfeeding really so superior that it justifies the guilt trip we heap on all of these women, essentially scaring them into nursing?
It took me two years’ worth of interviews with pediatricians, researchers, academics, sociologists, feminists, statisticians, and fellow moms and countless hours of reading through medical journals, websites, breastfeeding