Switching to Formula

The choice of how to feed your new human is one of the most fraught choices in a life that is suddenly full of them. The options are to breastfeed or to use formula. There are pros and cons to each. There are people who have strong opinions about both and are eager to share those opinions with you. Even if you haven't asked for them. Even if you've specifically asked them not to share.

This is true of every decision you make as a new parent, of course. Which stroller is the best? How do you pick a car seat? Is it actually necessary to pay more for the special laundry detergent? How many toys is too many toys? But the breast milk vs formula decision is harder. It's much more personal and gets tied up with all sorts of body image issues and what it means to be a good mom. Which is probably why so many moms are so quick to defend their own choices. Kevin has been absolutely wonderful and a partner in every way during this whole process, but there is a point where this becomes my decision and my struggle and he simply can't be there with me the way he was when we picked a stroller.

On some level it's been similar to the natural child birth vs cesarean section decision we faced early on. Gavin is big, and he has a big head, and we suspected from the beginning that this would be true. Even before I got pregnant I was mentally preparing myself for the possibility that I would need to have a c-section. I got push back from any number of surprising places, and it contributed to my nightmares the night before I was induced. But ultimately the decision was placed in the hands of my doctor, and my labor was relatively quick and easy as these things go.

There are two key ways in which feeding my kid has differed from birthing him. First, there's no doctor who's going to be the ultimate authority on this. There shouldn't be. It makes it hard to wash my hands of responsibility, even though I know there isn't a wrong decision. Second, the breastfeeding vs formula has proven to be a much more ongoing source of stress. It's not a decision I could push off into the future, actively engage with for a few hours, and then move past with hardly a second thought.

No; this conversation has been happening for weeks, both in my head and with Kevin. Strangers are quick to offer their opinions, and doctors have been reluctant to say anything definitive. I have opinions and feelings of my own, as does Kevin. And then there's Gavin, who is now old enough to have and express opinions but not old enough to argue or reason.

But perhaps the hardest thing of all is that this dilemma and my reaction to it have taken me completely by surprise. I really thought I'd be above it. My brother and I were both formula-fed and we turned out fine, so I know there's nothing wrong with feeding my son formula. Back when I was pregnant I told myself and Kevin that I would try breast-feeding but I wouldn't kill myself over it. I said that if the process of breast-feeding ever reduced me to tears I would switch to formula then and there, because it wasn't worth it.

Kevin gently reminded me that I would be hormonal and susceptible to crying in the first few days, and that this was probably not the best metric to use.

Breast-feeding was hard in the beginning. Gavin's mouth was too small for my nipples, and sometimes it felt like I needed three hands to wrangle both him and my boob. But it was actually one of the few things that didn't cause tears in those first few days when I cried at the drop of a hat. Every problem that came up had a solution, and those problems came up one at a time. I used a nipple shield. I fed him every hour until my milk finally came in. I dealt with chapped nipples and bleeding nipples, with clogged ducts and milk blisters, with a lopsided milk supply and a baby who occasionally ate for an hour straight.

By the time Gavin was six weeks old, I looked back at everything I'd dealt with and told myself that if I'd seen those problems looming six weeks earlier, I'd have gone with formula from the beginning. But we made it through, and breast feeding became easy and convenient and wonderful.

And now we come to the beginning of the dilemma. Breastfeeding is amazing, and pumping is arguably the worst thing in the world. At some point, the bad outweighs the good.

I would like to continue to breast feed my son until he is a year old at least.

I would like to never pump again.

My brain is at war with my heart, and it's taking all I have to muddle through this transition without tearing myself apart. And of course it's not even as simple as that.

Breastfeeding is so convenient, especially in the middle of the night. Preparing a bottle of formula adds time to the feeding, precious minutes when I could be sleeping. On the other hand, Kevin can give him the formula, allowing me to get even more sleep than I would otherwise. Moreover, the formula takes longer to digest, which should result in Gavin sleeping longer, making this a moot point.

I want to get my time back. I currently plan my life around the fact that I need to either feed Gavin or pump every three hours, both of which take roughly 20 minutes during which time I can't do anything else. I'd like to attend a 5 hour work event next week without having to leave to pump halfway through. I'd like to go to my friend's bachelorette party in a few weeks (and her wedding a few weeks after that) and leave my son with a sitter and not spend the whole night obsessing about how much milk he's drinking while I'm gone and whether I'll be able to replace it before he goes to daycare. I want this part of my life back, and that's a perfectly reasonable thing to want, but I still feel selfish for wanting it.

Every reasonable argument points to transitioning my song to formula. That's why we're doing it. The problem is all the unreasonable arguments, many of which are tied to how I relate to my body.

Before I got pregnant, it seemed like I was losing control of my body. I started gaining weight around my 23rd birthday, and there was nothing I could do to lose it again. I could stop gaining weight for a few months if I went to the gym religiously, but I could never lose any. I did okay with strength-training, but I always struggled with balance and flexibility. My weak ankles and knees and back (souvenirs from a decade of ballet lessons) kept slowing or halting my progress.

But then we decided to have a kid, and I got pregnant almost immediately. For the most part I enjoyed being pregnant and my labor was easier than it had any right to be, considering the size of my kid. Finally, my body was doing exactly what I wanted it to do. I've wanted kids for my entire life, and my body's cooperation in this (when it seemed to fight me on everything else) was incredibly affirming. Even at my largest, I felt like a goddess. I felt like a mother.

Breast-feeding was easier than I expected it to be. I was going to be one of those mothers who breast-fed until the 12 month mark and then easily transitioned to a diet of solid foods. It didn't hurt that, for the first time since I'd been on a liquid diet, I was losing weight. Effortlessly! Not quickly, but steadily, the number on the scale kept going down. I weigh less now than I did when I got pregnant, less than I did on my wedding day, less than when Kevin proposed.

And so the feeling of failure is twofold. That I can no longer provide enough milk for my son goes to this primal part of my brain and says that I'm not as good a mother as I thought I was. Which is completely untrue, but you can't argue with a feeling. There's also a nebulous fear that I will stop breastfeeding and immediately put on all the weight I lost and then some.

At least one facet of this is anger that my body is taking this decision out of my hands. A sense that I am once again losing control, that my body and I are no longer united in a common goal. It's like the opposite of when women talk about getting their bodies back after pregnancy.

After much back and forth, we've reached a compromise. We'll be giving Gavin formula instead of breast milk once a day for the foreseeable future. I'll still have to pump. I'll still get to breastfeed. But it's a step I can't take back. The less I feed him, the less I'll be able to feed him. Before I know it, breastfeeding will be in our past entirely. I feel like I'm losing something that I can't quite articulate. I didn't expect the sense of loss to be quite so profound.

Flexible Rigor

In 2016 my New Year's Resolution was to be more flexible. I meant this both physically and mentally. To the first point - I was a ballerina for ten years and was only ever barely able to touch my toes. Forget the splits, which I did exactly once shortly before a back injury ended my ballet career forever. And to the second one, I can get a bit stuck in my routines. I wanted to work on it.

Of course then I got pregnant, and my daily yoga went out the window. First because I was too exhausted to do anything other than eat dinner after getting home from work. And then because I was too pregnant to move. I did touch my toes once before I quit yoga completely. But I also lost the ability to put on socks and shoes earlier in my pregnancy than most. Though in my defense, I got larger than most (and gave birth to a 10 lb 3 oz monster of a baby).

But pregnancy did force me to become more flexible mentally. As my body made demands on me I had to become more comfortable letting certain things go or find new ways to get them done. Having a newborn only amplified this. It's something I'm still working on, but I think I'm making progress.

The solution has actually been to rely even more on my routines. This difference has been to make those routines more modular. I break up longer tasks to their basic components and do what I can when I can. My morning routine used to be a non-negotiable hour from which any variation could throw off my entire day. Now I've managed to work it out so that I can get interrupted by a crying baby and feed him without really missing a beat. I had to sacrifice some sleep, but it results in a less stressful morning overall.

The other aspect of this is that I started a bullet journal. Which is a trendy pintrest thing that I totally scoffed at until Kevin's most recent business trip forced me to get even more organized. Basically it's a to-do list broken up by day, but you can also add notes and events. And it's flexible enough to handle a shifting schedule. If I can't do something, I move it to the next day (or the next week). It's helping me figure out what I'm actually capable of on any given day and celebrate the small victories.

This newfound flexibility has been absolutely crucial in the past few months. The thing about babies is that no matter how hard you try to get them on a set schedule, they will thwart you. As soon as a routine develops, something happen to throw it off. And all you can do is roll with it. I'm still working on this. A lack of flexibility on my part is probably why it took me so long to get back into the world. But as Gavin gets older (and when we add a second kid to the mix) I'll really have no choice but to let things go. All I can do is prepare as much as possible at my own pace.

And We're Back

Blogging with an infant turned out to be a lot harder than I expected it to be. I did alright when Gavin was really small. But then he got older and more interesting and started taking more of my time and attention. Plus I went back to work. I had to prioritize my time and blogging was the thing that suffered. The thing that's been hardest to integrate back in to my life.

But I think I'm getting there. Part of the problem is that I was, on some level, resisting this place turning into a mommy blog. The only thing I wanted to write about was Gavin, but I didn't want my entire blog to be about him. While I was searching for something else to write about, the backlog of things I felt like I should be writing about kept getting longer and longer. Learning to be a single mother when Kevin went on his first business trip, our vacation in Hawaii, various milestones liking rolling over, mastering the use of his hands, and starting solid foods. It got so overwhelming that every time I went to write something, I got stressed out. And that's not what this is supposed to be. My blog is a release valve, a place to vent my stress. It shouldn't be a source of it.

So I gave myself permission to stop. And I didn't write for a while. I felt the need at one point, and I caught up on my book blog instead. Life happened, and I focused on figuring out my new normal. What does motherhood look like in the day-to-day and how do I integrate all my pre-baby interests into my life now that so much of it centers on my kid.

When I needed it, my blog was still waiting, as I knew it would be.

So here we are. A lot has happened since I last updated. I'm beginning to feel like a whole person again, not just a mother. Though being a mother has become undeniably central to my identity, it isn't the whole of me. It's taken me longer to get here than I thought it would, longer than I suspect it takes many mothers. Or maybe not. Maybe everyone has to take half a year (or more) to ease back in to life after a disruption of this magnitude.

The point is that I think I'm back. I think I've figured out how to carve out the time for this blog, and I finally feel a need for it again. So expect the updates. I'm sorry if they all end up being about my son. I still like reading and cooking and riding my bike, but it all seems to revolve around him now. And I guess my writing will too. That's not a bad thing, but it is a bigger mental adjustment than I was prepared for.

How to Cry Over Spilled Milk

Step one: Hurt your back

Step two: Aggravate the injury by continuing to pick up your kid. Lift him. Hug him. Feed him. Change him. Bend and twist to get him in the car. What else can you do?

Step three: Sleep less. Between the injured back and the growing kid you're back to sleeping in 2 hour chunks. Only this time you also have to go to work and make dinner and walk the dog and on and on.

Step four: Stare at the clock. Count down the minutes until your husband gets home. Hate him a little for being at a bar in Japan while you're at home weighing the pros and cons of sacrificing half an hour of potential sleep to soak in an epsom salt bath. Yearn for a hug and his calm reassurance that this, too, will pass. Settle for the email he sent when he was trying to wake up and you were trying to fall asleep because that 12-hour time difference is killer.

Step five: Wonder if you can convince someone else to come over to the house and take care of the kid overnight so you can rest. But you'd still have to get up to feed him, so you might as well be the one to lift him out of the crib, too. Besides, you're too tired to do anything other than snap at them for failing to help in exactly the right way, and that just leads to guilt and shame and less sleep. Better to power through.

Step six: Pump less than usual and worry about it. Worry about your kid getting enough food at daycare. Worry about whether this is just normal ebb and flow or a sign of your milk drying up. Worry if it's stress or lack of sleep or the Tylenol you're taking. Worry about switching your kid to formula, the hows and the whens. Turn to the internet for advice only to find page after page of mothers imploring you to keep trying to breastfeed which does nothing to alleviate your stress. Or your insomnia. Or your back pain. Decide to table the decision until his doctor's appointment next week.

Step seven: Knock over a bottle of breast milk and watch the three precious ounces spill out and disappear in the crack between the stove and the counter. Wonder how you're going to clean it up. Wonder how you're going to replace it before daycare tomorrow. Wonder how you're going to make it through two more days before your husband gets back.

Step eight: Find the silver lining. You punched through the writer's block.