Before giving birth to a second child, I had to get something important off my chest: namely, my daughter Beatrice. She was three-and-a-half years old and still breastfeeding. I knew I would not have the patience to nurse her alongside an insatiable newborn, so I finally decided it was time to quit. My only two questions: how do I wean her, and how in the world had I nursed her for so long?
I didn't know anything about babies when I got pregnant with Beatrice, but I decided early on I wanted to try breastfeeding. "Good for brain development," the magazines claimed. "Great for health," said all the experts. Plus, I'd lose weight.
Baby books recommended a minimum of six months or, even better, up to a year. I loved the idea: no clean-up and it's free. I'm nothing if not lazy and a cheapskate. Still, I didn't expect to get so carried away that my daughter would be fake-breastfeeding her own dolls by the time I even thought about retiring my tattered nursing bra.
When Beatrice was just a newborn, I rolled my eyes at mothers who breastfed toddlers, sure that they were compensating for troubled marriages. I smugly dismissed support groups that promoted breastfeeding beyond babyhood as clubs for women who crave dependent relationships.
When I told my sister I didn't know how long I planned to nurse, she said that a child who could ask for the breast was likely too old for it. I threw my head back and laughed. Indeed. Who nurses a kid capable of reciting his phone number or knock-knock jokes? That's creepy. But then there I was, years after giving birth, hoisting my shirt and lowering my bra cup for the budding comedian in my lap.
After my three-month maternity leave, I figured I'd be forced to cut Beatrice off, since the obstacles to pumping and storing breastmilk at work were high. My ultra-modern dot-com office featured acres of cubicles and several security cameras — hardly conducive to a plentiful let-down. More private options included reserving the futuristic conference room several times a day or locking myself in a bathroom stall.
The conference room was out of the question. Its walls were a feat of technology — at the touch of a button translucent glass became a one-way mirror outside the office while remaining clear from the inside. In a rush to collect a few ounces from my swelling bosom, I feared I would misread the wall's opacity, treating the group of boy geniuses who ran the struggling start-up to a view of a miniature vacuum tugging at my leaking nipples.
I opted for a hand pump and the glamourless bathrooms.
Several times a day my slingbacks clicked against polished concrete floors as I made my way from the office fridge — where I stored my pump and baggies of the bluish-white breastmilk in an insulated lunch bag — to the women's restroom. While co-workers privately diagnosed me with a case of bulimia (noticeable weight-loss, frequent trips to the bathroom), I balanced over a lidless toilet pumping ounce after meager ounce even as my wrists ached and distracting noises emanated from the other stalls. I reluctantly vowed to wring out what I could until Beatrice turned six months old.
Then I got laid off.
I tossed my business cards and my pump and didn't look back — or forward. With each reason to wean, I found reasons not to. After a year, I still saw a baby when I looked at my daughter. She still saw a tasty snack when she looked at me. After eighteen months, I still needed my breasts to combat crankiness, boredom and painful ear-popping during an overseas flight. Fellow passengers praised my daughter's pleasant behavior. I quietly praised my hardworking mammary glands. Approaching Beatrice's second birthday, we learned we'd be moving half-way across the country. "After we settle in," I told myself, "we'll stop."
But the months — okay, years — of nursing whizzed by. As Beatrice got older, we became more discreet. Whereas I'd been praised for breastfeeding my hungry infant, I got disapproving looks when I nursed away the pain of my toddler's skinned knee. Even the strident breastfeeding advocates that I knew — the ones who drove bottle-feeders into defensive tirades with a suggestive glance — scrunched up their noses, as if the whole milky enterprise had gone sour. But neither my daughter or I wanted to stop. As a concession to public opinion, we stopped nursing in front of anyone but my husband and one of my closest friends. I let everyone else assume that Beatrice had weaned.
Other moms at the park speculated on the psychological ramifications of nursing beyond babyhood: "She fears letting go." "Her identity is wrapped up in her child." "She is reinforcing dependent behaviors." I wondered if they were right. My daughter had been shy and slightly clingy from birth — one reason I hesitated giving up nursing was it made her feel secure. Me? I did have a life, I swear. I was involved in a time-consuming neighborhood lawsuit. I was reassembling an idling career. I was packing, unpacking and settling the family in from a move. I had plenty to set aside while being asked to lift my shirt and sit for awhile. I wasn't driving our nursing bandwagon, Beatrice was. Admittedly, I let her hold the reins.
My husband, who is as lazy as me, was all for breastfeeding our girl as long as she and I wanted. Nursing staved off tantrums and knocked Beatrice out at night like no lullaby ever could. Of course, this meant my breasts were often too overwrought by the time they got around to him. But he found other things on me to play with.
Sometimes I worried I was damaging my daughter, making her too dependent on me or on eating for comfort. Sometimes, I was just plain sick of her sucking on me. So I would resolve to finally wean her once and for all. But by the time I got ready to make the big push to stop, I would think, why quit when no one's unhappy?
Then I got pregnant. I was tired and my nipples hurt. During my fourth month of pregnancy, I decided I needed a break before I took on a hungry newborn. I braced myself for the worst.
Beatrice woke me up the next morning, as usual, to nurse. I told her I wanted to snuggle her like a teddy bear instead. She wiggled into bed next to me, rustling the covers, preventing any extra sleep I would have gotten had I let her nurse herself back down. She asked to nurse a few more times that week, but I explained how it hurt and suggested we save the rest for her brother or sister. She's a sensitive girl. She didn't want to cause me pain and she was excited that she could do something for her future sibling. And that was that. I had long since broken my sister's rule, breastfeeding Beatrice until she was beyond old enough to ask for it. But she was also old enough to understand why I wanted her to stop.
Weaning was easy; too easy, in fact. Maybe she had been ready to let go too.
Sometimes while I'm nursing her sister, Beatrice crowds in just to bury her head in my chest. It feels good to have Beatrice back there, nuzzling me, droopy-eyed and content. We still talk about what she remembers. I ask her what it tasted like. "Sweet, like you," she says. She tells me she sometimes misses it. "I wish you would have nursed me until I was eighteen," she said the other day, only half-joking. I was cradling her baby sister, who held a breast between her two chubby fists, pulling and sucking with the familiar, desperate abandon of an infant ready for sleep. I had the glassy-eyed look of a tired mother with heightened levels of oxytocin coursing through her. "Come on," Beatrice asked, "can't I nurse just one more time?"
Beatrice's sister turned a year old last month. We're still nursing, of course. But it's hard to imagine going another two years — in fact, I can't imagine my youngest sustaining her interest that long. She's easily distracted by her big sister. I also can't predict when we'll stop. There won't be a pregnancy to bring about a tidy end. No more pregnancies. No more breastfeeding. It's an idea so enticing I sometimes think I can hardly wait. Other times, I'm already nostalgic for the years that my body belonged to what seemed like everybody else but me.
photo courtesy Schoichi Aoki