Sorry this is so long, grab a cuppa before you start !
Oh Boris, I've been where you are and it's bloody hard. It was 6.5 yrs ago now for me and I still think it's the hardest thing I've ever done certainly mentally and emotionally. Can I ask why you are expressing? Is it a latching issue or more complicated medically than that? Are you seeing a BF clinic or specialist? What do they say and what have you already tried to get closer to feeding direct from the breast?
I was discharged from hopsital with a perfectly latched feeing baby, (according to the ward MWs) by day 5 we were readmitted as she'd lost almost 15% of her birth weight. She hadn't actually been sucking or getting any milk at all but being a first time BFer I had no idea what it should feel like and didn't know she wasn't feeding, essentially I starved her for the 1st 5 days of her life. So that's when the expressing began as she was, by that point, too weak to suck on a boob so a bottle was the easiest and quickest way to get something in to her. She took a bottle easily and like you I was able to express more than enough for her needs. Her problem was that she had a prefect latch, so it looked like she was doing the right thing, she just wouldn't suck when on there. We went to the BF clinic twice a week for 6 weeks and tried just about everything they suggested, from skin to skin, to cup feeding, to putting her to the breast for 10 mins before offering the bottle, to taping a ng tube to my nipple and putting the other end in a bottle of milk, the idea being that when she sucked on the boob, she would get the immediate satisfaction of milk and learn to associate the two.
Feeding basically took up our whole day, every feed took 3 feeds i.e put on boob, then bottle/ngtube feed, then express. I did learn to express out and about and time expressing/feeding so that we could go out though, I expressed in peoples houses, in the back of my friends land rover whilst going up the M1, in the car whilst camping, we even managed to co-ordinate expressing and feeding so that we (H, baby and I) walked up (and down) Snowden when she was 8 weeks old! I had a double pump at home and used a Medela swing when we were going out. At night I didn't bother with putting her on the boob and H fed her while I expressed.
By 6 weeks one of the BFc spent ages with me and huzzah, she fed, so stupidly I decided to go cold turkey and refused to give her any more bottles, as of course she could feed properly when she chose to. Big mistake, within 2 days I was hugely engorged and then the milk just dissappeared, leaving me with 2 saggy spaniels ear on my chest. Do NOT try that ! It took 72 hrs of expressing every 3 hrs day and night, to get my supply back and was hell. I was at breaking point by then though, we'd tried everything suggested, the BFCs were out of new ideas so I resigned myself to just expressing and feeding, forget even trying her on the boob as she just wasn't doing it. That honestly did feel like a weight lifted from my shoulders and halved the time feeding took.
So we carried on for another 6 weeks just expressing and giving it to her from a bottle, didn't put her to the boob at all which took a lot of the frustration out of the process. It worked but was still time consuming and not ideal as a forever solution. At 12 weeks I felt like I'd given it my best shot, and maybe it was time to give up, so I got the formula and more bottles in and set a date for switching so I could prepare myself mentally. I never wanted that day to arrive and felt like a failure but I just couldn't carry on the way we were. What else could I do? So the d