When my first son was born, I was surrounded by support. Family close by, advice from every direction, people who loved him before he had even arrived. I want to start there, because so much of what I felt afterwards had nothing to do with a lack of care around me and everything to do with a lack of information.
Everyone had an opinion on feeding. Breastfeed him. Breastfeed him for longer. Watch how long you do it for. The advice came from a good place, but it came from every direction at once, and very little of it actually answered the question I was quietly sitting with: how do you keep breastfeeding a baby who is growing so quickly, and what does that actually look like week to week?
I breastfed him, and I am glad I did. But I stopped earlier than I would have liked, not because I decided bottle-feeding was right for us, but because there was simply too much conflicting information, and I did not have a clear enough picture of what continuing would actually involve. In the end, I picked one version of the advice and went with it, tired, and quietly worried I was getting it wrong either way.
He thrived. He moved to the bottle earlier than I had planned, and he was, and is, completely fine. I share that not to make a case for one method over another, but because I think that fear, the one that says you have failed if you deviate from the plan you set for yourself, deserves to be named. It is rarely spoken about honestly, and I think that silence is what makes it feel so heavy.
So much has changed since then. There is more information available now, more support, and more openness about how varied this stage of motherhood actually is. But I still hear from clients, in the middle of nursery conversations that have nothing to do with feeding at all, that they are carrying some version of the same worry I carried. Am I doing this right? Will people judge me if I do it differently from how I planned?
The Wingback Glider Chair
This week marks World Breastfeeding Week, and I did not want to let it pass without saying this plainly. However you feed your child, whether that is breastfeeding, bottle feeding, a combination, or a path that changed halfway through your own plans the way mine did, you are not the exception. You are the rule. Every mother I have ever met has a version of this story.
At The Baby Cot Shop, we think about this often when we design nursery rooms, because a nursery is not just a room; it is where these early, uncertain moments happen. A comfortable place to feed your child, however you feed them, matters more than people realise until they are sitting in that chair at two in the morning, working it out as they go.
It is also part of why we host parenting events in-store. Our last one, The First Feed, held in association with The Tenth, was well attended and, from the conversations we had that evening, genuinely informative for the parents in the room, in the way that only talking honestly with other parents can be. We will continue to support parents wherever they are in their own journey, in the nurseries we design and in the community we build around them.
If you are in the middle of that season now, wherever your own path has taken you, I hope you feel a little less judged reading this than I did living it. And if you are somewhere in the middle of preparing a space for your own family, however that looks, we are here to talk it through with you, without judgement and without a plan already decided for you. You can book a Complimentary Nursery Vision Session with us whenever you are ready.
With love, Toks.