Thank God for Formula

Any mom who has experienced feeding or supply issues or has had a baby fail to thrive can imagine the agony and terror of Zélie as she watched her babies starve.

Josephine enjoying a bottle of donor milk!

"I had to realize that formula is not poison."

Twice in the same week I heard this sentence uttered by veteran mothers to first time moms, struggling with supply or other breastfeeding issues. Formula is not poison. I think this is lost in our newly breastfeeding-friendly culture and it becomes the ultimate mark of failure for a new mom to "give up" and resort to formula.

Let's think for a minute about what happened before the invention of formula- babies died. In fact, one of St. Zélie's babies did die and several others came close (including St. Thérèse herself) because of poor Zélie's inability to breastfeed.

Due to her struggles to keep her babies fed, Zélie had to hand her children over to live with wet nurses for the first year or so of their lives. Sometimes she had to go days or weeks between visits to her babies because wet nurses were hard to find. Sometimes her babies were deathly ill and she had to travel for hours by foot in the dark, hoping to make it in time to see them alive. Sometimes the nurses neglected her babies; her daughter Marie-Mélanie-Thérèse died due to the negligence of her wet nurse. In the wake of the tragedy of Marie-Mélanie-Thérèse, Zélie did all she could to feed St. Thérèse on her own.

I hope with all my heart that you never have a child in this state. You don't know what to do or how to handle it. You're afraid of not giving her the right thing. It's a continual death. You'd have to go through it to know what torture it is. -St. Zélie

When her supply was again insufficient (possibly due to breast cancer), she fed Thérèse cow's milk which had been boiled with bread at the suggestion of her doctor. Finally, Zélie went urgently at first light to find Rose Taille, the reliable and loving mother who had nursed one of the other Martin children, begging her to save their daughter. Thérèse spent almost a year in the home of Rose Taille, bonding closely to her nurse so that she shied away when her mother came to visit.

Her wet nurse brought her, but she no longer wants to stay with us. She let out piercing screams when she didn't see the wet nurse anymore. -St. Zélie

Any mom can imagine the heartbreak Zélie must have experienced when her own daughter didn't recognize her, and the anguish of living apart from her babies. Any mom who has experienced feeding or supply issues or has had a baby fail to thrive can imagine the agony and terror of Zélie as she watched her babies starve.

When breastfeeding didn't work out after three months of relentless effort, I turned to exclusively pumping to feed my baby. When four more months of pumping failed to relieve the pain, I was forced to wean down and turned to donor milk for help. It is only through the bountiful generosity of fellow mothers and the milk sharing community (which seems to be stronger here in the Pacific Northwest than elsewhere) that I have been able to bottle feed my baby breast milk when she was unable to eat properly. I think of both pumping and milk sharing as modern-day wet nursing, and I am so grateful for both.

Throughout this entire journey, I have kept the words of those experienced mothers in the back of my mind- formula is not poison. Thanks to formula, I never had to worry that my baby would starve. It may not be breast milk, but it has everything that growing babies need to thrive. The sobering truth is that in the days before formula, babies died. Any 'mommy war' over breast versus bottle, milk versus formula is shockingly ignorant of recent history. Thank God for formula! Fed is best- anything less is harmful to both moms and babies.