Kate Upton says the pressure to breastfeed ‘was sucking the energy’ from her

Feeding your new baby can be a beautiful experience, but it can also be really hard. We at Motherly have talked about it. Amy Schumer has talked about it. And now Kate Upton is talking about it, too.

Upton and her husband Justin Verlander became parents when their daughter Genevieve was born in November 2018, and in a new interview with Editorialist, Upton explains that while she loves motherhood she didn’t always love breastfeeding.

“Having VeVe has changed my life in such a wonderful way,” she explains, adding that in the early days of motherhood she felt “so much pressure”…”to be doing all these things, like breastfeeding on the go—when the reality, for me, was that breastfeeding was sucking the energy away from me. I realized I needed to calm down, to allow my body to recover.”

Breastfeeding can take up a lot of a mama’s time and energy in those early weeks and months, and while Upton doesn’t explicitly say whether she switched to formula, combo fed, pumped or what, it’s clear that she did give herself some grace when it came to breastfeeding and found the right parenting pace by taking the pressure off of herself.

Upton took the pressure off herself when it came to her demanding breastfeeding schedule, and she’s also resisting the pressure to keep up with a social media posting schedule.

“I want to be enjoying my life, enjoying my family, not constantly trying to take the perfect picture,” she says. “I think my husband wants me to throw my phone away. We talk about it in the house all the time: ‘Let’s have a phone-free dinner.’ We don’t want [our daughter] thinking being on the phone is all that life is.”

Whether the pressure to be perfect is coming from your phone or from society’s conflicting exceptions of mothers it’s a force worth rejecting. Upton is loving life at her own pace, imperfect as reallife can be.

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