Preeti is a researcher, writer and historian. Her debut book The Shoulders We Stand On: How Black and Brown people fought for change in the United Kingdom was published in 2023 by Dialogue Books. She can be found on X @preetikdhillon and via her website.
“You don’t look like you’re doing well.”
“I’m not.”
“Ok, and do you have a possible solution?”
“Formula, I guess?”
This was the conversation between me and my daughter’s paediatrician at her two month check-up. I blinked back tears as she noticed that I wasn’t ok. It felt so good to be seen, and I really, really wasn’t doing well.
My daughter had been born a few weeks early because I developed pre-eclampsia, and her small size meant that she was too weak to take all the milk she needed from the breast. This meant I was pumping alongside breastfeeding from the time my milk came in, and hadn’t stopped since. This two month check up was a tense appointment, as according to the midwife my already tiny daughter wasn’t gaining as much weight as she should have been. And I was exhausted.
This cycle of breastfeeding and pumping dominated our lives, and stopped me from spending quality time with my daughter.
The routine was: breastfeed (thirty minutes minimum), give my daughter a hug and hand her over to her father while I drank water and used the bathroom, or ate something, and stretched my legs. Then pump. Clean up pumping parts. Rinse (literally) and repeat.
My husband fed her with the bottle and got most of the snuggles and the playtime, and unsuccessfully tried to convince our daughter that tummy time was actually fun. Meanwhile, I was holed up in the bedroom trying to pump enough for the next bottle. I would watch snippets of comedy shows on my phone to try and help with milk production by getting the oxytocin flowing, and most importantly to distract myself from frantically looking at the amount of milk dripping into the bottles as I pumped. Watched breasts do not produce milk.
We were house-trapped. We couldn’t venture further than the park a six minute walk away because our windows of time that weren’t spent breastfeeding or pumping were so short. I couldn’t afford to miss too many pumping sessions. We couldn’t breastfeed in public either, I needed my trusty cushion as my daughter was too small to hold comfortably for her mammoth feeding sessions. I thought this was going to be my life for at least half a year. The low point was during a heat wave when we had to have the blinds closed all day so the apartment wouldn’t heat up too much.I didn’t know whether it was day or night and I felt more trapped than ever before.
So after two months of this, when the paediatrician asked for a possible solution, the only thing I could think of was formula. The paediatrician didn’t offer up any other possible solution, like where to seek breastfeeding support. She just raised her eyebrows at me as if to say “bingo”.
I wasn’t against formula, consciously at least. We supplemented with formula for the first few days. But I had the milk. My supply wasn’t an issue, and I felt a weighty sense of responsibility. I am not immune to the breast milk propaganda. “Breast is best” would cycle through my mind everytime I tried not to burn myself while using tongs to carefully extract the pumping paraphernalia out of the pot of boiling water used to sterilise them. It was a socially conditioned mantra meant to reassure me that my suffering was for the greater good.
I thought that I had to give my daughter the best start possible, my health be damned.
I told myself that if I could go through pregnancy for 36.5 weeks then I could definitely breastfeed and pump for a mere 24 weeks. I told the paediatrician I would give it one more month and then re-evaluate. Mum friends who had also struggled with breastfeeding had shared that they noticed a change around the three month mark, so that was the vague timeline I had in mind when everything would magically get better. “Fine”, the paediatrician said, not offering up even a solitary word of support. “But she is not gaining enough weight, you need to pump after every feed.”
Our routine was about to get even more intense.
(Part 2 to follow shortly)
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