Emotional Video Shows How Much Pressure New Moms Put On Themselves To Breastfeed
Whitney Port shares her breastfeeding struggles in a raw, emotional video
There is absolutely nothing easy about the adjustment process of having a new baby. It’s a dizzying flurry of emotions and wanting everything to be perfect, for everything to go right and for your little one to be okay — it’s a lot of pressure. Breastfeeding in particular is often a painful, exhausting venture that can leave moms frustrated and emotional. For a million reasons, breastfeeding is just hard.
Whitney Port, former reality star of MTV’s The Hills and new mom, recently opened up about her experience with struggling to adjust to breastfeeding her two-month-old son. In the latest episode of her YouTube series “I Love My Baby, But…” she gets incredibly candid about her breastfeeding journey.
In the episode, she says she always fully intended to breastfeed. Like many of us, coming home from the hospital proved to be a shitshow because first-time breastfeeding moms don’t know WTF we’re doing.
“After 48 hours of doing it, it just started to get so incredibly painful,” Port says of breastfeeding her son. “And we came home and I just hit a breaking point and said ‘I just can’t do this’ because it feels like someone is, like, slicing my nipples with glass.”
Raise your hand if your boobs are suddenly experiencing PTSD. For me, breastfeeding was a beautiful experience, but it took time, bloody nipples, Medela Softshells, and major adjustments to get to that point. I was lucky enough to not experience supply issues, or a tongue tie, or latch problems. I know how rare that is, and maybe I won’t be so lucky the next time around. Either way, those early days and weeks are painful, emotional, demanding, and exhausting.
Port says she’s been pumping and giving her son bottles, says she doesn’t know how long she wants to keep trying to get him to latch comfortably. “Because of the pain I’ve demonized breastfeeding in my head and the thought of doing it is dreadful.”
The pressure we put on ourselves — and the pressure put on us by society — to breastfeed only makes us feel worse during an already overly emotional, stressful, anxiety-ridden time. No one is immune to feeling the effects of it. Bottom line: breastfeeding isn’t easy, and if you can do it and want to do it, great. If not, your baby will be fed and loved just as much.
“I’ve heard other people talk about these pressures and I never thought I’d let it get to me,” Port says. “Because I think I’m a pretty strong person and I go with my gut. I don’t compare myself with other people and what other people are doing. And now I’m doing exactly that.”
Hey, we’re only human. Motherhood makes us all vulnerable to all sorts of things we never could have imagine before having kids.
When asked in the video what she’d tell someone else going through the same thing, she says, “I would tell them to not listen to anyone else and do what their heart is telling them to do. And that’s really what I should be doing.”
