As many of us quickly learned, either when we became moms or even before our babies were born, there is a huge debate out there regarding the pros and cons of breastfeeding versus formula feeding. When many of us were growing up in the 1980s, formula-feeding had become a highly accepted trend. Now, with the increase in breastfeeding advocates chanting that “breast is best” and sharing the scientific research that shows that mom’s milk can offer unique nutrients and help baby to better fight against viruses, there has been a big shift back to breastfeeding.
With these two competing points of view, many of the women I have met have “picked sides.” I have witnessed an immense amount of mom-shaming for women who choose one path versus the other. And for some reason, this highly personal, vulnerable act of nursing a child has become a highly acceptable topic for people to weigh in on. And not just women- but men too. I have found it shocking how many men I have met that feel they have the right to dictate how their partners should nourish their babies, with no consideration as to the physical and emotional toll this choice may have on the women and their lives.
After I adopted Keira, one would think I would have escaped this discussion. Naturally, I was not producing milk and therefore it was no surprise that she would be entirely formula-fed. Yet still, once I shared the news that I was pregnant with Jackson (with Keira just a baby still herself), I got questions: “so, if you are pregnant, can you trick your body into producing milk early so you can nurse her?” Even further still, once Jackson was born and Keira was 4 ½ months old, I was occasionally asked, “so now that you are nursing him and producing milk, will you shift from bottle-feeding to breastfeeding her too?”
Not to mention the questions I received on how I would choose to feed Jackson, both while I was pregnant and after he was born. One woman in my life would regularly text me to ask how things were going, and if I was still nursing or had switched 100% to the bottle. What impact it had on her, I still have yet to determine.
Anyway, I went into my delivery with the point of view that I would feed the baby boy who would soon become my Jackson however worked best for both him and me. For the first 5 months of his life, I found that the “what worked best for us both” was a combination of nursing and formula-feeding. My son latched well, seemed to prefer breast to bottle (particularly at bedtime), and we were enjoying these moments together. This was fine when he was young and required no more than 2 ounces of milk per feeding. Yet we quickly learned that regardless of how much I pumped in between feedings, I was unable to produce those 4, 5, 6 ounces at a time that he soon grew to require. So I would nurse him first, and then top him off with a bottle. This kept my son fed and growing, and it helped me to feel I was providing for him as best as I could without simultaneously feeling tethered to my portable pumping machine and needing to be within a few steps of a private space where I could attach those suction cups to myself and sit, waiting passively, hoping the bottles would fill with a reasonable portion of milk.
There are many thoughts and stories I could share about those early days on maternity leave between nursing, pumping, and formula-feeding and the freedom I felt every time I empowered myself to leave my house or to leave Jackson, knowing I could hand him a bottle and that he wouldn’t go hungry. But I think a lot of that has been discussed at nauseum.
The bigger issue that I didn’t consider until I was living it was what happens after you return to work from maternity leave. How do you make sure your child is fed while still being able to do your job to the best of your ability? Let me start by saying- it was maybe the toughest part of transitioning back to work and I am not sure there is one right solution.
As I shared previously, my office had one Mother’s Room on my floor which required key card access. When I returned back to work, I was sharing that room with one other recent mom. We had to coordinate, whether over slack or email, to make sure that we weren’t in need of the room at the same time. Now let’s think about it for a moment. I was leaving my house at 7 AM each day and getting home at 5. So the latest I could have reasonably fed Jackson before leaving for work was 6:30 AM. That means I had a 10 ½ hour gap between when I could feed him to end the morning and to kick off the evening. If I wanted to pump on a schedule that matched Jackson’s feeding schedule at the time, I had to make sure I pumped at least two times during the work day… maybe even three. Realistically, I knew that three was never going to happen, so two was the goal. Ideally I would go into the Mother’s Room sometime around 10AM and another time around 2PM. Indeed, the other mom in the office was managing to a similar schedule.
Now, I don’t know about you, but my days are nearly 100% filled with internal and client meetings back to back to back. I often have colleagues ask me “Are all of those meetings on your Outlook calendar real or do you have some flexibility?” Some of these meetings are on the phone, so in theory, I could try to align my pumping time with my phone call meetings and do both at once. In reality, as much as these brands advertise their “silent pumping mechanisms”, there is nothing silent about this process. I really did not want to be the person on the phone with a consistent, mechanical sound in the background who had to focus on muting the phone at all moments when she wasn’t speaking. Even if I did do this, inevitably an in-person meeting would run over time or something else would get scheduled and I would lose my window to go to the Mother’s Room. Many of those two time target days morphed into one.
Now once you find the time and the place to engage in pumping, there’s the whole issue of what to do after. You can go to the sink and clean out all of your materials for the next use. You can use the fun trick of filling Ziplock bags with your “gear” and putting them in the refrigerator as a temporary between-sessions solve. And then of course, at the end of each day you have to take your pump home to clean all of the parts out to start over again.
I would go through all of this, and I would go through all of it discreetly, because I didn’t want to be the person explaining to the young men who report to me or the senior leaders that I reported into that I would be late to our meeting because I had to go pump.
Then, the most heartbreaking part of it all. I would go through this process of pumping for twenty minutes or so, and look at the bottles to see that I had produced anywhere from 1.5-2 ounces per session. I would carefully combine the two bottles because, in my mind, every last drop was a meaningful contribution to feeding my son. That means in a work day, I could take home anywhere from 3-4 ounces that evening, or enough to feed my son one breast-milk bottle the next day while I was at work. Inevitably, during the hours I was at work, he required three bottles. So for every one bottle of breast milk, he was being fed two bottles of formula. I would advise my mom and the sitters who were taking care of Jackson at the time to make sure that they fed him the breast milk bottle at a time when they knew he would be really hungry and finish it all. Because what a tragedy it would be for him to drink the milk I had worked so hard to produce, and decide to stop after two ounces, rendering the remaining milk undrinkable after another hour passed. At night, when I was home, we would go back to the combination routine.
When I first returned to work after Jackson’s birth, I was part-time, so this was sustainable for a while. When he was about 10 weeks old, I opted to travel on a work trip to London. I was only working two days a week at the time, so this wasn’t really expected of me, but the trip was a big opportunity. Our Global CEO would be present, as well as all of the Global Senior Leaders, including our Regional CEOs. We would be talking about our data strategy and our tools and technological solutions. Essentially all of the things I spend most of my work day focused on.
I was still nursing Jackson, and I was determined not to let this trip throw off our routine. I would be leaving on a Tuesday evening, and returning on a Friday morning. So I had to get through roughly 2 ½ days. I brought my pumping machine filled with a number of frozen ice packs. On the plane ride from Chicago to London, I took one break to sneak my way into the airplane bathroom for pumping session number one. I found myself crammed in the bathroom, hoping there wasn’t a long line of people waiting to use it behind me that could hear the faint “err err” mechanical sound. When I finished, I packed my bottle away in my pump bag until I made it to London.
I had an overnight flight and so I landed at Heathrow in the morning. Instead of going straight to our offices for the meeting, I first stopped at my hotel. I asked for an early check-in to clean out my pump and was hoping to store the milk I had pumped that had been on ice for the past couple of hours. Well, I learned that our hotel rooms didn’t actually have refrigerators, but the concierge had one upfront and would gladly store my breast milk for me. This meant that every time I had a new sample to add to my collection, I had to stop at the concierge’s desk and once against have a conversation regarding my breast milk, often with a different concierge.
We had two full days of meetings and they were just great. I was completely energized to be participating with some of our most capable colleagues and to be looking for ways to collaborate and bring our North American ideas across the globe. Let’s be clear- I was thrilled to have attended and it was absolutely the right choice for me from a visibility standpoint within our organization, a reputation standpoint in showing what I could contribute, and a personal growth standpoint in hearing from others.
But I had to leave these all day meetings a few times a day to pump, and then store my breast milk in a communal office refrigerator for the day before running to my hotel to drop it off before dinner. And where did I have to do this pumping? In the women’s room. Yes, the multi-stall, public office women’s room, where anyone in an adjacent stall could take a pretty good guess as to what the sound they heard was and anyone waiting for a stall would notice the same set of feet under the door for twenty straight minutes. Why was I pumping in the women’s room? When I asked the office administrator if they had a Mother’s Room in the office, her answer was a very apologetic no. But didn’t I understand that in the UK, women had a one-year maternity leave, so the idea of a Mother’s Room was completely frivolous? Of course.
By the end of my 2 ½ day trip, I had produced a few full bottles of breast milk that I would bring back home to Jackson. I remember going through the security line in the airport and alerting the TSA agent that there was breastmilk in my bag, as you are told to do. She had to take it out of the bag and examine it quickly. And I still remember her asking, “is this all of it?” holding the bottles up to me. Obviously she didn’t mean anything by this really, but in that moment I felt so deflated. Yes, I had gone through carrying ice packs, pumping in bathrooms, talking to concierges, washing my gear in my small hotel bathroom, and flying across the Atlantic Ocean with my “bounty” all for just a few bottles to feed my son.
When Jackson was five months old, I went back to work full-time. By this time, Jackson was drinking six ounces of milk in a meal, and I was still producing far less than that per pumping session. I realized that it was time to shift 100% for formula feeding him. Part of me still judged myself for this and questioned why I couldn’t make it all work. But a much bigger part of me felt a wave of relief. My workday would now be my own and I wouldn’t have to work these sessions into my days. My son would still be fed and would still be growing. There were so many parts of my life that I was willing to sacrifice or shift for my children, but this was one freedom in my life that I could take back.
Every woman’s experience is different and that very colleague that I shared the Mother’s Room with did “make it to a year” of breastfeeding her new child. Which was great – for her. If it works for you, fantastic- you do you and I hope you feel the satisfaction of feeding your child in the way you believe is best that fits within your life. But I urge other moms not to beat themselves up if breastfeeding just isn’t a realistic option for them when they go back to work full time. Making it to a year of nursing should not be worn like a badge of honor for moms who are secretly miserable with their choice. Whatever choice you make, make it work for you because “fed is best”… especially when you return to work.
Business and Babies 