Taking Back Our Power

When we have low supply, especially primary or chronic low supply, it’s easy to feel like we have lost our agency. Many of us expected to have a beautiful feeding experience because we were told that’s what happens after you have a baby if you want what’s best for your child. While having that kind of relationship is still possible for some breast/chestfeeding dyads with low supply, it’s a lot harder to achieve. And then it is only natural to view our postpartum life in terms of what we have lost, what we wanted but can never have. With that comes a lot of grief and often anger. But there is another way to look at things. Yes, a lot is out of our control, but there is also power that we can take back.

The low supply itself often happens despite our best efforts. But after it has been established, maybe after the lactation consultant has had The Low Supply Talk with us, letting us know that the full supply that we’ve been taught everyone can expect is not going to happen, it may be time for a new perspective. Possibly the most critical part of this low supply perspective is putting our agency front and center. There are many ways to do this, but most importantly: We should always be making a conscious choice about feeding strategy. 

It’s often a given that the goal of lactation for parents with low supply should be making as much milk as they are capable of making. But at what cost? If you are reading this, you probably have a good idea of what that can mean. Some people find their power in making the choice to do all the things to maximize supply. But we can choose to accept or reject that path. We have additional options, like deciding if we want to focus on maintaining a lower supply—or weaning—if that feels more doable and protective of our mental health.

There’s a lot in that space between all and nothing. Do we want to get longer stretches of sleep, a luxury that our mammotypical friends don’t necessarily have if they’re trying to keep up that full supply? Do we want to devote our energy to direct breastfeeding and its many benefits, even though our supply may or may not go down when we stop pumping, because pumping makes us unhappy and we want to prioritize the time with our babies? Or do we want to exclusively pump, but fewer times a day, or sometimes with a wearable pump that may get out less milk but feels so much more manageable? 

The default should never be feeling like we have to do 100 times more than everyone else—often ultimately still for a partial supply—just because our bodies require more work to make less milk. 

It’s true that we usually don’t choose to have low supply. But there are so many legitimate choices everyone with low supply can and should be empowered to make for herself. It should be intuitive, but for so many people with low supply, it very much is not. It’s not all or nothing, and only we get to decide what that means to us and our babies.