“‘Wow! He must have been hungry,’” Dukovan recalled the nurse responding. “He wasn’t just hungry, he was starving!” Brock would scream whenever he had breast milk; she thought it might be related to the dairy in her diet (which she tried to cut out) or his potential acid reflux (which it turned out he didn’t have). Eventually, Dukovan decided to talk to her doctor about exclusively formula feeding. “‘You’ve tried harder than 99 percent of the moms I’ve worked with to make breastfeeding work, and it’s totally OK if you stop and exclusively formula feed,’” Dukovan recalled her doctor saying. More from CafeMom: Mom Shares Tragic Warning After Breastfed Newborn Dies of Starvation But the reaction to her opening up about this serious struggle was brutal. Although Dukovan tells CafeMom that many women sent messages thanking her for her bravery and sharing the words that struggling moms “desperately needed to hear,” others trolled her for her honesty. More from CafeMom: Why This Mom Doesn’t Think It’s ‘Lucky’ That She’s Still Breastfeeding And despite what you may hear, Dukovan wants women to realize that formula-fed or supplemented babies aren’t less than. “Sometimes breast isn’t what’s best for baby and/or mom and that’s OK,” she tells CafeMom. “Your worth as a mother is not determined by how you fed your baby. I thought that the only way I should properly bond with my baby was if I breastfed him, and it wasn’t until I stopped breastfeeding that I truly felt I bonded with him. I didn’t have the stress of breastfeeding and I could just relax and enjoy looking into his eyes and signing to him or talking to him.”
