We’ve heard some strange breastfeeding stories, but one woman on Reddit’s recent tale pretty much takes the cake. According to the mom, as a nice neighborly gesture, she agreed to nurse the man next door’s 5-month-old daughter when he asked. But slowly, she went from makeshift wet nurse to her new neighbor’s hook-up partner and thought it was all going well — until she met his wife.
The woman had been trying to wean her 2-year-old off of breastfeeding when new neighbors moved in next door.
It was a young man and his 5-month old baby girl. After asking about his wife, she figured it was just dad and baby moving in.
“I assumed that she was out of the picture because he replied with ‘she’s not gonna be here,’” she wrote on a post on the Am I the A–hole forum.
She offered to help her neighbor move in and “anything else as casual neighborly friendliness.”
He took her up on that, so she babysat his daughter and helped set up furniture.
“One day, after finding out I was still breastfeeding my daughter, he asked me if I could also breastfeed his kid because he was concerned about formula and wanted his kid to be strong,” she recalled.
Sure, it was a little weird, but she felt bad for him and he seemed pretty clueless.
"I agreed, mostly because I took pity on him. He really didn’t seem to know what he was doing with the baby and I thought that maybe I could help at least somewhat," she wrote.
For the next two weeks she breastfed her neighbor's daughter along with her own.
Eventually, “my neighbor and I started sleeping together,” she continued. “I made sure my 2-year-old was distanced from this though and happened only during night time. I didn’t want her to feel neglected or replaced.”
The problem was — she incorrectly filled in the blanks about the baby's mom.
She was very much in the picture.
“She showed up,” the woman wrote. “I was taken aback because my neighbor shut down every conversation about this woman and had very vague answers.”
She thought she was being rude by asking him questions about her because “it seemed like a sour topic.”
“They’re split but had some custody agreement that I don’t know the details to,” she added.
That’s not the worst part: The baby's mom found out that she was breastfeeding her baby and “blew up at me.”
The baby's mom told the neighbor that she was “a sick person to ‘let some random baby suck up my bodily fluids’ and I wanted to destroy her bonding with the baby and alienate her from her baby.”
The neighbor tried to explain that she was only trying to help out and she really thought the mom was out of the picture.
“She said that something weird must be going on in my head because it doesn’t justify breastfeeding someone else’s baby and you should never do that,” the woman added. "She said that there’s formula for a reason and what I did is unacceptable.”
The neighbor swears she has no problem with formula and “used it myself sometimes, but the baby’s father himself had asked me and until now I thought he was the sole parent,” she continued. “Was I really in the wrong?”
Many people agreed that this was quite the pickle she had gotten herself into.
"Wetnursing used to be normal. It's certainly more normal than feeding a baby cow's milk. The guy himself is acting dodgy though," one commenter wrote.
"This is a weird situation and neither you nor the mother of the baby are AH, but the neighbor surely is," someone else agreed. "Wtf happened in five months that he has the baby but doesn’t mention the mother, especially since there’s a custody agreement. I feel like he was just trying to get with you and scared that the mother would present as a roadblock. Either ways, guy is a red flag and if you haven’t already, stop sleeping with him."
A third person put it this way:
"NTA. Not for breastfeeding the kid anyway. Wet nurses were very much a thing and now a days many women donate their breast milk. You really should have gotten all the details before making this commitment though."
Other people thought the woman had seriously messed up.
"Wet-nursing without the mother’s consent is not normal," one person wrote.
"I know you meant well but in my opinion breastfeeding a stranger's baby without the mother's permission crosses a line," someone else commented. "It's not like you gave the baby a bottle or changed a diaper once to help out. Breastfeeding is something really personal, emotional and intimate and if I was a mother I'd be furious if some stranger had breastfed my child without my permission."
"You're the a–hole and so is the dad," a third person added. "The world is in the middle of a pandemic and he just asks his random stranger of a neighbor to breastfeed his infant. You also said that you were sleeping with him. Put yourself in the mother’s shoes. Think about what you would do if you found out your baby daddy is letting a girl he barely knows and is fooling around with breastfeeding your kid."
The best thing the OP can do is apologize and back out of the situation right away. Now that she knows her the baby's mom is in the picture, she should walk away quietly and let the two of them figure out their issues.
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
