Am I Allowed to Grieve?

“This baby is STARVING!” Those were the words that a nurse at our pediatrician’s office casually let fall after my second baby was diagnosed with failure to thrive. As I held my 8 week old baby girl, watching her scarf down a bottle of formula, my heart shattered. I had failed her. And I had failed at breastfeeding. It felt like an immeasurable loss but I quickly discovered that I was expected to just move on. I was not allowed time to grieve.

But shouldn’t I have been allowed to grieve?

Afterall, my breastfeeding journey was a relationship with my baby. It was something that I had planned for, something that I had counted on. I had breastfed my first baby for 9 months, but a return to work and a subsequent pregnancy when he was only 8 months old, ended in a dwindling milk supply and a decision to introduce formula. But those had been my choices and I was okay with them.

Still, I assumed that this time around, things would be even better. I was not returning to work and that dreadful pump. And there would be no more pregnancies after this one. I would easily meet my goal of breastfeeding this baby for at least a year, if not longer.

I made it two months.

And then suddenly, that relationship was over. Gone. No more. It felt like such a heavy loss. But one that no one seemed to understand. I was told to be thankful I’d been able to breastfeed her for two months. I was told well at least formula exists and shouldn’t I be grateful for that. I was told that no one would care in a year how this baby got fed.

But I cared. I look back now and can see that the people making those comments thought they were being helpful. But in reality all they did was invalidate my feelings. I wanted to be sad. I wanted to be angry. I wanted to mourn the loss of all my feeding expectations and goals. I wanted to grieve.

So I’m here to tell you: Yes! You are allowed to grieve. If you’re mourning the loss of a feeding relationship or the plans you had for birth or the vision in your head of what postpartum was supposed to look like, it is okay to grieve. As a doula, I understand how important it is to just let people feel their feelings; to actively listen to them and validate all of those big emotions. You don’t have to rush through those feelings just to make other people comfortable. You can sit in that discomfort as long as you need to. And if you need someone to sit with you while you grieve, then you need a doula.