Am I a Bad Mom for Supplementing with Formula?
By: Stephanie Gruner Buckley
Tags: Breastfeeding, Parenting, Nutrition, Baby, Motherhood

Photo by Rainier Ridao on Unsplash

It’s 2009 in Tbilisi, Georgia. My husband is working for the US government, and I’m a new mom, hanging out at a playgroup with other new moms.

The day before the playdate, I read an article in the Atlantic by a real rebel, a woman who marches into parks and announces to other moms that she is thinking of quitting breastfeeding after just one month.

“At this remark, the air of insta-friendship we had established cooled into an icy politeness,” writes Hanna Rosin, “and the mothers shortly wandered away to chase little Emma or Liam onto the slide.”

You’d think she’d learned her lesson. Instead, she does it over and over again just to see the reaction.

Emboldened by Ms. Rosin, and after more than six months nursing my own daughter, I pose a similar question at the playgroup.

“Has anyone noticed their babies’ tummies getting much bigger after supplementing with formula?”

Blank stares all around.

“Why are you supplementing?” asks a beautiful woman from Kazakhstan.

“I’m running out of milk. I just can’t give her enough.”

“You know that will run down your milk supply,” she says.

“I know, but she’s hungry, and my milk isn’t enough.”

“Are you sure you’re really running out?” she asks.

“Well, she cries and stops feeding, and the only way to calm her down is to give her a bottle.”

“I’m sure you have enough milk,” says another woman, a buxom blonde who looks like she could easily nurse the room.

“How do you know?” I ask. The room is turning icy, and I’m feeling cornered.

“I’m sure you do,” she says. “You should stop supplementing.”

“It’s been six months. My daughter is fine.”

“You should breastfeed for a year,” she says.

“I think six months is enough. I need my freedom again.”

“This isn’t about you,” she says.

This really ticks me off. Armed with Ms. Rosin’s reporting, I say: “You know studies are inconclusive about whether breastfeeding is all that much better than formula.”

“That’s not true,” she says.

“It is true,” I respond, though I really only have one article to go on. “The samples are biased. Studies don’t assign women to breastfeed or not. They look at women who did and didn’t. Then they conclude that breastfed children, the same children of mothers who routinely buy fruit and vegetables, and help with homework, do better in school.”

“What you say is wrong,” she says simply.

“Everyone has become such a nursing Nazi,” I nearly say, but stop just in time.

The blonde giving me a hard time is German.

Still, I want to fight back. Six months is a long time to breastfeed. For nearly five months, my baby nursed every two hours, meaning once I finished feeding her, I had less than an hour and a half before the next feeding. When she finally moved to a four-hour cycle, my milk supply plummeted, and so I started supplementing. I confide my problem to mothers — people you would think might sympathize — and they make me feel ashamed.

I’m about to quote Rosin again when an Italian friend comes to my rescue. “Six months is fine. People have gotten crazy about this. In Italy, if you don’t breastfeed, the nurses and doctors treat you like a pariah. It’s really too much.”

“Yes, but it’s very important for the first year,” says the German. The Kazakh is nodding her head, but a good-natured Welsh woman sides with us. “Six months is enough. Most of our mothers didn’t breastfeed at all.”

And on it goes until some breastfed kid cracks another one over the head with a block of wood, and the conversation ends. (I made that up.)

Somehow the conversation moves on, and I leave feeling guilty.

Maybe I am selfish. I vow to try harder. What’re six more months anyway?