The end of breastfeeding

I don't expect you to understand.

And I don't say that in the common, holier-than-thou way.

It is just that unless you have actually breastfed a baby, maybe unless you're breastfed what you think or realize will be your last baby, I'm not sure what other experience I can relate it to. This sadness, this mourning that can wash over you when you even consider stopping.

I've been looking for other women's writing on this topic, this week, because baby J had a horrible time sleeping on our trip to the mountains. As in, woke up once a night. All three nights. We were destroyed when we got home (at least the two of us who were in charge of rocking or feeding him back to sleep), and I woke up the next morning weepy. Most things made me cry. In that depression, "oh my god, I'm out of toilet paper/shampoo/my glasses are dirty/look at that cloud in the sky, I'm going to cry" kind of way.

Time to revisit the idea of anti-depressants. And with those, the end of breastfeeding. Uh-oh. Wow much do you want to bet that just turned the waterworks on full throttle?

But baby J's sleep got better, even better than before the trip, in fact, and with it my emotional stability has returned.  I have a prescription for an anti-depressant just waiting in my wallet, should I need it, though. And I've been thinking about the pluses and minuses of stopping breastfeeding since last Thursday.

Pluses: M can tend to him some nights and I can sleep even more, especially to share the load if he gets sick. No more pumping (that's a whole nother post coming up) at work or when baby J gets a bottle. I can eat and cook normally again - Milk! Butter! Cheese! Garlic! Onions! saving both time and my outlook on eating. I don't have to be getting as much protein as possible every single minute of the day or taking Calcium supplements any longer. Because, teeth.

Minuses: Uh-oh.

When I thought that baby A might be our one child, at the end of breastfeeding her at 7 months I was also sad. Mourning. And now, I know we're done having kids, and so, as some mothers on other blogs have said, this is the end of my childbearing life. The end of my fertile life. The end of the physical connection to a baby. My body is now officially old, in reproductive terms.

So even though a part of me is ready, a part of me is so very sad. And pretending that other kinds of bonding will be the same, isn't right. They won't. The calming, the falling asleep in my lap, at my body, that won't happen again. In fact, it may not as big a change for baby J as it will for me.

This isn't about him, actually. It is about me. About my life story.

And I need to take the time and space to attend to this huge milestone properly. Anti-depressants and sleep issues aside, there will always be a moment when a nursing mother breastfeeds for the last time, and I think it should always be allowed to be a big deal for her.

So maybe I can expect you to understand, if this really is about a closing chapter of my own life more than just being about the act of breastfeeding. We celebrate last days of so many other things - school, jobs, lives. We are allowed to feel melancholy about them, even when other nice things are still ahead. This last day should also be included.