Contemplating Weaning

Baby E just went to sleep without nursing. She adamantly refused milk, arching her back and shaking her head, and then demanded water. Water!

What, I'm not necessary any more?

She hadn't nursed since just after dinner, almost 6 hours before. Even then it was a brief nursing session, ending in her getting distracted and abruptly wandering off after just a few minutes. That's been happening more frequently lately--she'll refuse to nurse at a time she normally would have wanted to, or will nurse only briefly before toddling off to more exciting things.

My baby appears to be weaning herself. It's so hard to believe; she's growing up so fast. At 14 months, she is walking, using the potty, and saying lots of words. She tries to copy everything we do and say, and she so badly wants to be a big girl.

She is no longer content to be carried up the stairs. No, she wants to walk. More than that, she insists on taking the steps the way we do--one foot on each step. They're giant steps for her, so she concedes to let us hold her hands. But she has to walk up the stairs the way we do--reaching high with each foot and pulling herself up, grunting with the effort, chuckling to herself all the way.

She wants to sit on the couch, where she has her favorite spot: the corner next to the right-hand arm of the sofa. She'll sit there with a book and turn the pages, looking for all the world like she is reading. Or she'll try to get the remote control so she can point it at the T.V. and push the buttons in that direction. If she can't reach the remote, she just points at the television and says, "Dih-do! Dih-do!" in an attempt to get us to turn on a video.

She's 14 months old. I've never nursed a baby this long before.

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With AJ, nursing was excruciating. I bit my lip till it bled, weeping silently and doing Bradley breathing exercises through every nursing session for the first 8 or 12 weeks.

Nobody told me nursing could be so painful and difficult. Lactation consultants just told me my latch *looked* right, and that it shouldn't still be hurting after so many weeks.

We finally decided that maybe it was the Reynaud's syndrome (lack of circulation to extremities, characterized by interesting color changes [consecutively white, red, purple, and blue], pain and tingling) that was making it so painful.

Truly, the nursing was more painful and harder to manage than the childbirth itself had been--and it was something I was choosing. I was actively deciding to do it many times a day, every day. It was like choosing to walk barefoot on shards of glass every hour or two all day long.

I stuck it out through sheer determination.

After the first couple of months it did get a little better, but it was still uncomfortable with every nursing session. I no longer had to take Tylenol and do breathing exercises to get through each nursing session. It was still quite uncomfortable, though.

It didn't help that AJ wanted to nurse every half-hour or so for the first few weeks, and even when she stretched it out to every 2-3 hours she'd nurse for 90 minutes or more at a time if I'd let her. She was a strong suckler and liked to nurse.

I developed coping mechanisms like watching a movie or posting on message boards (now it's blogging) to take my mind off the discomfort while I fed her. I'd force myself to let her nurse at least 15-20 minutes on each side--longer if I could bear it. I was determined not to give up, because I believed breastmilk was the best food for my baby. I was determined to stick it out, and somehow I did.

AJ was about 6 months old when I got pregnant with M&M--on day 30 of a 28-day cycle. All the books and websites said it was quite possible to tandem nurse consecutive babies, and I thought I'd give it a try. At the very minimum, I wanted to nurse AJ for a year. I'd really wanted to nurse for 2 years or more, as doctors recommend, but I was determined to make it at least 1 year.

Being pregnant and nursing at the same time was difficult for me--very difficult. I'd gotten down to 99 lbs. within 4 months or so of AJ's birth, from a pre-pregnancy weight around 120 and having gained something like 35 or 40 lbs. during the pregnancy. I'd lost 50 or 60 lbs. in 4 months, mostly because I was too tired and stressed to eat much with taking care of a fussy infant.

Between being severely underweight and probably malnourished, having a newborn who had reflux, cried a lot and didn't sleep much, and my constant battle with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome; being both pregnant and nursing on top of that was a lot for my body to handle.

I was so exhausted. Physically, I felt terrible. We were in the middle of building a house and moving, DH's starting a new job, and other huge stresses and life changes at the same time.

I became severely depressed, probably largely because my body just didn't have adequate resources to sustain a level of functionality in those conditions.

I could barely get myself dressed in the morning and manage to take care of the baby, much less keep up with housework and meal preparation. To say I was in survival mode would be putting it lightly.

I really wanted to nurse AJ until she was a year old, though, so I persisted.

A week or two before her first birthday, I started cutting out a feeding here and there and offering her soy formula instead. She loved the formula and quickly decided she'd rather have a bottle or sippy cup than nurse. She weaned herself within days--faster than I'd planned.

Without that extra strain on my body, I felt quite a bit better and had more energy. My mood lifted. I was so glad to be no longer nursing.

A few months later, M&M was born. Nursing went a little better this time. The pain was quite a bit less and, if I remember right, the real pain lasted only a few weeks. A lactation consultant at the hospital was able to give me some new tips that I hadn't learned with AJ, and nursing was more successful the second time around.

Still, it was something I put up with for the baby's sake. Certainly not something I enjoyed. Although the pain was much milder than it had been with AJ, nursing never did really get comfortable for me. Still, the moderate discomfort was a great improvement over the kind of pain I'd had with AJ.

I never could understand why people talked about enjoying nursing, or feeling like it fostered a special bond with their baby. Sure, it was nice to be able to provide for my babies, and it was convenient and cheap. It was nice to be giving my baby the best nutrition possible, but it was more out of a sense of obligation than anything else. I really disliked nursing, but again I toughed it out.

Thankfully, I never had problems with milk supply, so it was just a matter of putting up with some discomfort for me. It was nice to see a baby satisfied, but I never enjoyed nursing. It was something I gritted my teeth and bore as well as I could for as long as possible.

After M&M was born the depression, which had never completely gone away after I weaned AJ during the pregnancy, worsened again. So did the extreme fatigue, of course. Which came first, or whether the depression was caused by the pain and fatigue, is a question of the chicken and the egg. Depression is certainly a common symptom of fibromyalgia, and my body's resources were taxed to the limit by two pregnancies so close together along with nursing, especially since I wasn't getting enough nutrients to sustain myself and two babies.

I know that lots of women handle close-together pregnancies just fine, and tandem nurse with no problems. Most probably don't have the kinds of issues I had. Maybe even I could do it under different circumstances without ill-effects. But for me, at that time and with my medical conditions, it was really hard on my body.

Again, the baby had reflux and cried a lot, especially when we laid her down. Again, she wanted to nurse a lot because her tummy and throat hurt, poor thing.

With M&M, by the time she was 11 months old I felt I couldn't bear it any longer. My body had been not my own for almost 3 years without a break, and I felt I'd go crazy if I didn't stop nursing immediately.

M&M didn't tolerate soy formula well, so we ended up using a milk-based formula with her--one with the proteins somewhat broken down. Like her sister, once I started cutting out feedings and offering formula, she was quite happy to wean. I weaned her 2 weeks before her first birthday.

For the first time in years my body was sustaining only myself. The relief was immediate and incredible. I had so much more energy, I felt better, and the depression I'd been fighting for the past few years lifted significantly, almost instantly. From that point on life became much more manageable. There were other factors contributing to this, but there was a definite difference with weaning M&M.

When we started thinking about having another child a year or so later, it was primarily the thought of nursing that gave me pause. I didn't want to have another baby mainly because I didn't know if I could survive another year of nursing.

By that point I was convinced there was an incurable physical reason that nursing was uncomfortable for me, and I just didn't know if I could go through another year of that kind of pain again. I was afraid I'd end up really resenting the baby, or--horrors--end up bottlefeeding and be a "failure" as a mother. But I was also afraid that if I went through another year of forcing myself to nurse, I would go crazy.

DH and I talked a lot about it, and finally decided that nursing alone wasn't a good reason to have or not have another baby. My husband encouraged me to give myself permission to have another baby and NOT nurse if that was what I needed to do. I'd certainly given it a good try with my first two children. He pointed out that I'd gritted my teeth through 2 years of nursing, and if nothing else at least I couldn't fault myself for giving up too easily.

We decided that it wasn't worth another year of that kind of agony just to breastfeed a baby. The depression and extreme fatigue that seemed to be connected to the excessive drain on my body's resources was a factor, too.

Yes, nursing had benefits for the baby. But we had to balance those potential benefits against the needs of the rest of the family. My kids--all of them--needed a functional mother more than the baby needed to nurse. And it seemed overkill to decide that if I wasn't going to nurse a baby it would be better not to have one at all. Lots of kids thrive on formula. There's nothing wrong with bottlefeeding. To us, it was certainly not an issue worth deciding not to have a child over.

If our third baby ended up being a bottlefed baby, so be it. That would be fine. It wouldn't make me a failure as a mother. We needed to make whatever decision we felt was best for our family.

So I made a deal with myself that if nursing was still miserable for me after 6 to 8 weeks, we would just put Baby E on formula. I'd do it sooner if needed, but my basic goal was to give it a couple of months and see how it went.

Just giving myself that permission was so freeing for me. I was less stressed out about nursing, and I think being more relaxed about it was helpful for me.

The first day after Baby E was born, it seemed nursing was going to be just as difficult the third time around. After 24 hours, I already had blisters and bleeding sores.

Then a wonderful lactation consultant at the hospital showed me a new (to me) way to hold the baby and help her latch on. She figured out that I'd been latching on correctly initially, but then letting the baby slide partially off and end up with a poor latch after the first few minutes of nursing. That's why no lactation consultant had been able to find anything I was doing wrong in the past.

A few nursing tips and techniques nobody had ever showed me before made a world of difference. I wished I'd known them with my first two babies. I wonder how much of a difference that would have made in my nursing relationship with them.

It was harder work holding the baby in the correct position to nurse the first few weeks, but it really made a difference for me. For the first time, nursing wasn't painful. It wasn't all a physical issue for me--it was largely a latch issue. Nursing was much more tolerable this time around, once we got a good latch figured out.

But it wasn't until the week we discovered Baby E's allergy to soy that I really embraced nursing. For a while I had to pump and dump, pumping and discarding the soy-tainted breastmilk that was making her sick and bottlefeeding Baby E with stored milk from the freezer.

It was very time-consuming heating a bottle and feeding the baby, and then pumping (I had only a manual pump at the time). It was a lot of work.

One thing I realized was that it took two hands to bottlefeed an infant while nursing, once established, took only one. And all that washing and sterilizing bottles and heating milk was laborious--not to mention a lot more difficult than nursing, especially when away from home. Breastfeeding was time- and energy-consuming work, but for me at that point bottlefeeding was even more so.

It was at that point that I realized I actually preferred nursing to bottlefeeding. I would rather nurse than bottlefeed if I had the choice--not just for nutritional reasons, but because it was actually easier and more pleasant for me.

At some point after that, I realized that I was enjoying being able to nurse. That was a huge change for me. I wasn't just making a sacrifice and putting up with it for the baby's sake any more. I actually liked nursing Baby E.

It was a good thing, too, because with Baby E's allergies I don't know that she would have been able to tolerate any kind of formula. Even though it's frustrating and a lot of work, I am glad to be able to adjust my diet so she can have milk that's free of corn, soy, other legumes, hazelnuts, peanuts and nightshades. It brings me some comfort to know that breastfeeding can help reduce the incidence of allergies, and that Baby E is getting some good nutrition that way.

Now she may be weaning herself, and it actually makes me sad. I've loved being able to nurse her mostly without pain this time around. I've bonded with her through the nursing process, through holding her a lot, and through just enjoying her and watching the older kids enjoy her. I haven't had to deal with the severe depression in this postpartum period, even though the time since I became pregnant with Baby E has been anything but easy.

I'm sure that having a baby that wasn't physically causing me a lot of pain every few hours for an entire year made things easier, too. I really wish I'd had better help from a lactation consultant when AJ was born. Sometimes I wonder if it would have been better to just switch to a bottle when nursing was still so miserable after several months.

This whole experience of my third child's infancy has been so different for me. Without the added difficulty of such severe postpartum depression, it was, in many ways, much easier to bond deeply with all three of my children.

I've enjoyed this baby more than I ever thought possible. I really regret missing out on enjoying so much of my older children's infancy. I don't know what if anything I could have done differently at the time, but I still feel guilty about it. I'd do anything to be able to change the way it worked out. I always loved my kids, of course, but the way I enjoy them now and the way I've enjoyed Baby E from her birth, and my connection with all three of them, is so much richer and deeper now.

Part of it is probably just that I'm older, more mature and more experienced as a parent, and am in a different place in my life. I've always loved my kids, but, to be honest, I haven't always enjoyed being a mom.

That largely changed for me a few years ago--before Baby E's birth--through some work God did in me through several different experiences. Much prayer and seeking God, some good advice, and a conscious decision to change my attitude, among other things, helped in that change. My enjoyment of being a mother has continued growing since then. I'm enjoying parenting all three children continually more as time passes.

One significant factor, I think, was the change in perspective that came with losing our nephew to SIDS at 3 months of age the week we became pregnant with Baby E. That made me appreciate my children in a new way, and value Baby E's infancy more deeply. God really used that tragedy to teach me something about both letting go and holding close in my relationship with my children; about treasuring them and relishing every moment I have with them.

I went into parenting this third time with the expectation that having an infant would sidetrack my life. This time I knew I would often have days where just taking care of the kids would be all I could accomplish in a day. I took on fewer commitments and made smaller goals.

This time, instead of getting frustrated with a baby that wouldn't let me put her down, I was prepared to hold the baby a lot and enjoy it. I finally mastered the use of a sling and baby wrap, which made that easier. Once we got some of her allergies figured out, Baby E was a much happier baby. She still didn't sleep, and the first year was still hard, but it was different somehow.

The difference, of course, wasn't really about nursing, but the better experience nursing has certainly been one of many factors that made this experience of parenting an infant more enjoyable for me.

I now suspect that much of my first two children's colic, inability to sleep and reflux as infants was caused at least partly by food allergies. We know that AJ had issues with dairy products and M&M with soy when they were a bit older--I'm sure those affected them as infants after seeing how extreme the difference is in Baby E with avoidance of her allergens.

I've truly loved Baby E's infancy, and I've enjoyed nursing her. I'll be really sad if it's going to be ending so soon.

It just seems so amazing to me that I'm actually sad at the prospect of my baby weaning herself. That's such a change from my past experiences with nursing.

My feelings are very mixed. If she weans herself, freedom! But I'll miss a lot of things about nursing, too.

Either way, I'm waiting with interest to see what Baby E does when I next offer to nurse her.