Good-Bye Boobies: The Lead Up

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It is two years today since I last breastfeed my son.  I decided his third birthday was the cut off point. While I would have liked to have gone another year, the need to reclaim my body and my space had got to a point where breastfeeding had become challenging for me. I was also mindful of the challenges faced by continuing breastfeeding when he went to kindy.

Considering the small percentage of babies in my state who are still breastfeed at one, let alone three, I didn’t allow myself to wallow in guilt too long about deciding to bring the relationship to an end.  Birthdays have always seemed like a good line in the sand to affect changes.

I realised soon afterwards it was important to put down how I felt because it was a period of grieving – the end of an era. So I wrote down one stand alone journal entry about the end of breastfeeding.

Reading back over this entry yesterday, the painful parts of ending my breastfeeding relationship with my son were prodded again, and the tears were plentiful. I am grateful I did write something down, because only two years down the track there are already things I had forgotten and grief softens with time.

To mark this anniversary, I have retrieved that journal entry to share in two parts across this week.

June 16th, 2007

….Today is a week since Dylan and I said good-bye to our relationship as breastfeeding buddies.  It was a bittersweet end in many ways.

For three weeks or so prior to his third birthday, I had cut out his morning boobie.  I decided that this would be the hardest feed to end, so decided to cut it out first.  As it turned out, it was an auspicious decision.  The first week was horrible and we all walked around, tired and cranky.  Dylan and I not only short on sleep, but on the lovely oxytocin high we had been sharing for almost three years.

It was a week of waking up to being slapped in the face, screamed at, kicked, headbutted and generally been the object of one very p*ssed off little boy.

The second week was much better.  There was some general unhappiness, but he became happier and more at peace with being told ‘no’. Instead he preferred to snuggle in to me after a short cry and whinge.  His wake up time became later too, which was appreciated by both Dave and I.  There was even one morning, where there was no mention of boobie when he woke up.  That was when we felt like we were making some progress in coming to terms with the end of this era.

The third week was really the count down to the end.  Dylan was finally OK with having no boobies in the morning.  He would ask for one, but it was with a sleepy, mischievous grin, as Dave pointed out.  At night I relaxed into enjoying our feeds, knowing that each feed bought as closer to the last one.

We made sure that we kept talking to Dylan about having no more boobies.  We would ask him, “How old will you be when you have no more boobies?” “I’ll be three,” he would reply – sticking up his ‘four’ fingers to emphasis his point (as he still hadn’t got the hang of sticking up three fingers.) All the preparation we had made, didn’t really prepare me for the final feed.”

In part two I share what happened in the final feed and the emotional fall out in the wake of the final breastfeed.

Jodi Cleghorn is a Brisbane mother, writer, lactivist and natural birth advocate. When she’s not writing breastfeeding articles she is working on her fiction stories including a new novella and a fledgling publishing project Chinese Whisperings. Her new blog Writing in Black and White chronicles her journey as a writer, editor and publisher. This week she celebrates five years of motherhood.

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