4 Lies About Breastfeeding

Know why I don't criticize moms who don't breastfeed? It's f*cking hard. Sometimes impossible.

I've heard a bunch of lies about breastfeeding. Lies become material for criticizing formula feeders, lies make it difficult to distinguish the hard from impossible, and lies are just annoying.

So I'd like to debunk the following (I've always wanted to debunk something):

1. "Your body will produce the right amount." (My mom)

No. And I have no idea why she told me this, because she supplemented fairly early because she was afraid she wasn't making enough. (And despite not being EBF, I have always been very, very healthy. On the rare occasion that I stayed home from school (and now work), it was almost always because I was faking it.)

I've had a lot of friends give up once they first tried to pump and were only getting a couple ounces at a time. That's exactly what I was getting when I first started. I gave myself a month to get a backup supply for when I went back to work, which resulted in somewhere around 30 ounces, if that. But, that was buffer enough as long as I pumped the equivalent of what Finley ate while we were apart. But I didn't. At first.

I Googled the hell out of ways to increase milk supply and found some good stuff. Like this and this and this.

The best of that good stuff: snacking. The downside, though, is that you're snacking on oatmeal and carrot juice. And fenugreek supplements. (Spell check doesn't even know what fenugreek is. No, I don't mean "greenback".) And worse, no candy canes! I know. It's July. I'm not sure whether I'm turning into Buddy the Elf or if it's just forbidden fruit syndrome, but as soon as I read that peppermint decreases milk supply, all I've wanted is a stupid candy cane. And then there's the unthinkable horror that I'll still be breastfeeding and stocking when it actually is Christmastime. I wonder how many Christmas cookies I'll have to eat to compensate for not having candy canes. I digress.

And, it's even harder than giving up peppermint. For a long stretch, I had to be rocking the dairy cow setup for about four hours of the work day to yield four bottles, and sometimes I'd still come up short. As long as Finley only downed three a day, we were cool. But then he started going for four, so we did a little role reversal and I started waking him up in the night for more feedings to give production a kick and fill him up. It took a couple months to get out of the woods, and if I drop the ball on any part of my routine, it's instant regression.

Even if you're willing to work your tail off to keep your kid on nothing but boob milk, it could be out of your hands. Not every mom has an office door and a job where it's usually okay to be in isolation for more than half the workday. And for those moms, hard might really be impossible. That's a big reason I get annoyed at moms judging other moms.

2. "If it hurts, you're doing it wrong." (The Internet)

Just because those mobsters over at La Leche League claim to know how to get it to work without pain, doesn't mean I'm doing it wrong. If my kid is eating, and he's not hungry, I'm doing it right. Listen, Internet, you can tell me that it doesn't HAVE to hurt or something, but don't tell me I'm doing it wrong. YOU'RE doing it wrong! (I kid. I know they're loving humans over at LLL. I know.)

It hurt bad. Like, I would have traded that pain for giving birth again. Toe-curling pain. I was in a constant state of fear of that latch.

And no, I didn't bother to get a consultant. Very often during those first few weeks, I was clothed in at least three bodily fluids. I didn't need to worry about a consultant smelling me, and the problem seemed pretty obvious: There was a creature sucking on my raw nipples for, I don't know, seven hours a day? My friend had a baby two months before me, and she took breastfeeding classes, read books, saw a consultant, maybe more than one. And while basically everything about her makes me feel like a bit of a slacker, I felt pretty okay about things when she told me it hurt for a month for her, too.

Praise the Lord, it got better around a month. I don't think I'd still be breastfeeding if it hadn't.

3. "You have to start supplementing to get enough sleep." (Friends with babies)

There's another option: co-sleeping. It's so easy. Call me lazy, but I prefer the easy way. You can also call me well rested. Because I am. And you get to dangle You've never had to wake up at night to take care of the baby over your spouse's head for, like, the rest of your lives.

I'm sure that's not always the silver bullet combo it has been for me. And, if you're not into co-sleeping, night feedings are what they are, in which case this number 3 isn't so much a lie for you. Lying about a lie. That's no good.

4. "The weight comes right off when you breastfeed." (Everyone who hasn't breastfed)

Seriously. Don't count on it.

I tried to make this happen. Around week two, I wanted to eat every pretzel, dark chocolate chip, bagel, granola bar, and piece of pizza I saw. And I more or less did. A box of granola bars would last one day in our house. And after a full day of eating, I could totally take care of one of those huge bags of Pirate's Booty all by myself. And then ask my husband to get me ice cream.

I hadn't been a big eater during pregnancy, so I actually watched myself gain weight since I gave birth, which I was pretty sure was backwards. So, after a few weeks, I foolishly attempted to get control of my lumberjack appetite. And my production went down.

So, I figured, f*ck that, I need to eat. Cheese. Chocolate. Peanut butter. Almond butter. Regular butter. Eventually my appetite got slightly less lumberjacky, but pounds are still not melting off of me. The only melting going on is in the form of cheese.