TriadMommies.com: Weaning Her

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Weaning Her

4:16 PM | Posted by TriadMommies |

When I started exclusively pumping, I thought it would be temporary. I had been trying desperately to rebuild a supply since Evie was a few weeks old. She had never nursed productively, and we were getting by with an SNS and donor milk. But when we started treatment for thrush, Evie began refusing the breast completely.

Even worse, she wouldn’t take a bottle, either, so I was stuck pumping around the clock and dropper-feeding a 3 month old every two hours. I would try to latch her on, to no avail and much frustration. I tried everything I could think of to encourage her to nurse again, but eventually we gave up and I settled for having an exclusively breastmilk–fed baby if not a fed-at-the-breast baby. By her 6-month birthday, we had used the last of our donor milk, and I celebrated finally having enough of a supply to match her demand. By the 10-month mark, I was actually putting my own milk in the freezer.

Everyone expected me to stop pumping at her first birthday, but February came, and Evie was still relying heavily on my milk for her daily nutrition. She was a very poor eater, and even her pediatrician said that if she weren't getting my milk, she'd need toddler formula. We hadn't come that far only to give her formula as a 1 year old. So I kept pumping. I weaned off the medications and herbs I was taking, and I did lose some of my supply, but I was still able to keep her happily gaining weight as we moved through her second year.

In August, I finally quit getting up at night to pump, a move my La Leche League companions know was long in coming. Again, my supply suffered, but at 18 months old, Evie was willing to make up the difference with a little moo juice. I also resumed a full-time teaching position at the end of August and had to limit my pumping to only five sessions a day.

The same week classes resumed, I developed an abscess in my right breast, next to the nipple. The doctor who drained it told me the pain on that side would be too unbearable and that I would dry up before I could resume pumping. He told me that I should consider myself finished, that I had gone on for too long anyway, and that Evie didn't need my milk anymore. Oddly, instead of using the episode as a valid reason to quit, I took his words as a challenge and continued pumping, though the supply from the affected breast has never fully recovered.

As we moved through the fall, even my most ardent supporters began to question when I would stop pumping. I would say that my goal was to be done by her second birthday and that I would start weaning myself off the pump in December. Being very prone to plugged ducts, I wanted to take it very slowly. As December approached, I began to consider my weaning plan. As I pondered which sessions to shorten, how long between alterations, and how to reshuffle the schedule, I kept thinking about how much milk I was going to lose. I would think, I can’t cut down that session; that’s when I get the most milk, and I'd have to remind myself that the whole point of what I was planning was to ultimately lose my milk. All my milk. The milk that I had worked so hard to get. The milk that I had extracted from my poor, battered breasts for almost two years, whose procurement had become the guiding force in my life. The milk that had nourished my baby. The milk that only I could give her. This was going to be hard.

I want to wear real bras again, ones that don't have slits over the nipples, and to stop worrying about portable refrigeration. I want to be able to take a cough drop and to fall asleep next to Evie as I put her to bed without worrying about my final nightly session. I long for a day that isn't constantly interrupted by pumping and for nipples that don't look like they belong on a gorilla. But as much as I hate pumping, as much as I want to be free from it, and as much as I know that I have done well to give her two years of mommy milk, I can't quite let go. Evie eats better now and drinks cow's milk happily, and I have two solid months' worth of milk in the freezer. But I still want to cry at the thought of watching my supply dwindle.

Tonight was December 1 (as of this writing), and as I had promised myself, I cut my evening pump to 20 minutes. Following my plan, I will be down to a morning and evening session only by February, a pattern that I can't bring myself to set an end date for. I'm not sure why this is so hard for me, except that pumping and feeding my daughter has been nearly all-consuming since she was born. It has been the source of much frustration, sadness, and anxiety, and none of the joy that I expected to associate with nourishing my baby.

In some ways, our breastfeeding difficulties have defined motherhood for me. Closing this chapter means finally surrendering something I had waited for since I "nursed" my dolls as a child. It took me almost a year to come to terms with having lost that nursing relationship, and I still feel sad about it sometimes, so I suppose it will take me some time to let go of breastfeeding itself. But there are other stages and mothering challenges ahead, and as they say in one of my favorite musicals, "... everything in life is only for now."

— Melissa (melissab)

(Do you have concerns or joys to share about breastfeeding? Are you looking for advice about weaning? Visit our Breastfeeding forum at TriadMommies today!)

Labels: breastfeeding

Weaning Her

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