Cigarettes and Formula

I went out for coffee Thursday night with a new friend, Melissa. She, too, had to deal with low supply issues because of a breast reduction that she had had years ago. She combo breastfed/bottlefed her daughter until she was 16 months old. (What an inspiration!)

She knew that I've been struggling again and really pushed me to figure out why I'm being so hard on myself. I would never, ever be this hard on anyone else for breastfeeding, but for some reason I can't bring myself to be proud of myself, to be accepting...I just feel empty and sad for not being able to do what I wanted.

So I've been pondering this for the last few days. Why I can be harder on myself than I am on others is a bigger question than just this whole issue. But there's something else that I've hit on, which is my feelings of formula.

When I'm giving Lex a bottle of formula, I feel ashamed and dirty. Like it's something that I want to hide and just refuse to accept because it is so unnatural. This pretty much parallels my feelings of cigarettes. As an ex-smoker, I know that I didn't always feel this way about smoking...when it was just part of my routine and I wasn't thinking about it, I wouldn't feel like that. But I did always sort of hide my smoking...and hated it, too, especially the control it had over me.

The weird thing is that I would never, ever even think of saying to anyone that formula is something that you should be ashamed of using. I don't think I've ever even thought that to myself. But when I took the time to examine my feelings, here they all were.

So now this leads me to wonder if I am more upset at using formula than I am at not fully breastfeeding. I'm sure there's some sort of ying/yang element in there...one begets the other (except for bottle-feeding breastmilk, which does not bring about those same feelings for me).

I feel like I have been brainwashed by those "breast is best" messages out there. And brainwashed in the truest sense, as I didn't even realize this was what I was thinking and feeling subconsciously. But at least now I have a tactile starting place to moving forward, which is deprogramming this feeling around formula. Before this realization, I had already been thinking about calling formula "baby milk"...after all, expressed milk is called breast milk. Those breastfeeding evangelists out there insist on dubbing formula "artificial baby milk", but I think I'll take the opportunity to cross off that first word and make formula more affectionate-sounding.

Already when I pump, I tell Tommy that this is special baby milk. It is, in effect, all baby milk, right? Let the positive feelings begin trickling back in.