In case you wanted to know: My daughter was formula-fed

You didn’t ask, but I wanted to tell you: I formula-fed my daughter. And I didn’t feel bad about it!

You may be wondering: Is she still alive? Did she learn to count? Was she confined to a sick bed for her entire infancy, deprived of critical antibodies passed in breastmilk? The answers are: Yes, yes and no (though, confession, she did have Roseola around 9 months).

Even before she was born, my husband and I promised not to write about our now-3-and-a-half-year-old, so this is the last I will say about her: she’s hilarious, smart, a goofy dancer, a terrific conversationalist, a lover of chicken legs and a fan of seltzer (at least right now). She is on the small side, but we are a family of Hobbits to begin with. Our doctor has never been concerned about a thing, so we aren’t either.

Now you may be wondering: why am I writing this? Here’s why: Because more than once now I have found myself in the role of being ‘the lady who bottle fed’ for friends, and friends of friends, who struggle with breastfeeding and need to hear that their child won’t grow three heads or waste away to a wisp or never learn to walk or not love them if they have formula.

I do reassure on these points: Based on my experience, formula feeding will not turn your child into an alien or (I think?) a delinquent. But that’s not really what is most important to say. My first response to any query about why I formula fed, or how I dealt with the pressure to breastfeed, is: You’re a new mom. You had a baby (or babies). Congratulations! Stop being so hard on yourself.

How did you deal with the guilt?, they ask. Or the peer pressure?

Well, I didn’t feel guilty. I really, really did not. I loved giving her the bottle. And watching my husband give it to her. And her aunties and cousins and grandparents. I was looking at the expressions on the faces of the countless people falling in love with her, not at the bottle, and not what was in the bottle. She was happy and healthy, and my husband and I were, too.

On the peer pressure, I must have an anomalous group of friends and family, but no one even blinked when I pulled out a travel bottle of Similac. Or if they did, I didn’t notice, because then I was too busy staring at my gorgeous baby, and being in love with her, to note the judgey stares.

A nurse in the maternity wing at NYU did ask me, the night our daughter was born, why I wasn’t nursing. I think she was confused. I stumbled around with my reason, but immediately regretted explaining, because…. It was none of her business!

So why didn’t I? I could tell you why, but that would actually undermine the point of me writing this, which is: It’s actually no one’s business why a woman makes a decision to breastfeed or not. So stop wondering. It almost certainly isn’t relevant to your life.

I am sure there are people armed with numbers and stats and whatnot that they think prove I’ve done damage to our daughter with my selfish choices about how she was fed as an infant. But proving that formula is as good as breast milk or the same isn’t my point, either.

So what is it, anyway? Women have choices. They should feel like they have the room to decide how and what to feed their babies without the judgment of friends, family, the internet, BabyCenter commenters, or whoever raining down on them. Maybe they don’t want to haul a pump to work. Maybe there is nowhere to pump and retain their humanity. Maybe they are freaked out. Maybe they are a cancer survivor. Maybe it hurts. A lot. Maybe they had breast surgery. Maybe they aren’t producing enough milk and it’s so stressful that they are producing even less. Maybe, maybe…. It doesn’t fucking matter.

Formula is not an experimental beetle extract; it’s an FDA-regulated product available in your local drug store and bodega. For some women, for whatever reason, formula is a good choice. For some it may be the only choice. For some it isn’t available as a choice, because formula is expensive. For others, it’s not the right choice. We are all still women, and mothers, whether we breastfeed or not. There’s enough judgment of women in the world — by men, by government, by corporations. As all of us, even the formula-fed, learned as children: If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say it at all.

If you are thinking: Wow, this deluded woman is a terrible mother who has done irreparable damage to her only child, let me lay this one on you. I went back to work 10 weeks after she was born to run the one of the biggest news sites in the world during an election year. And I felt good about that, too.