A Long Goodbye to Nursing

Back in December, I made the difficult decision to stop pumping at work. My supply had dwindled over time, until I was getting less than 4 oz. a day. I wasn't even able to supply one bottle a day for daycare. Even worse, I had spent a few weeks in denial that Brianna wasn't getting enough from me on the weekends. I thought she could get a lot more since she was nursing directly, compared to what I got from pumping with a noisy, awkward machine. But being home with her for a few days over Thanksgiving, I finally recognized just how hungry she was when she wasn't at daycare. So my husband and I agreed that we would do formula on the weekends and I would stop pumping at work, but I would continue nursing her first thing in the morning and to help her go to sleep at night.

It was a lot harder than I expected. I was never engorged, since I barely had any milk at that point anyway. But emotionally was another story. It felt so strange to give her a bottle instead of cuddling her up against my chest. And she still would root on my chest to signal her hunger when we screwed up the timing on getting a bottle for her, or when she was upset and wanted comfort. Those were the hardest times for me, to know she still wanted to nurse but I had nothing to give her.

It had been such a gradual decrease that I didn't feel any guilt over having to stop. I had known it was coming, both because my midwife had warned me that pumping just can't match a baby for keeping up supply and because I could see the drop-off, week by week, in the number of bottles of pumped milk we sent to daycare. The hormones, however, were another matter.

Friends had told me that it could be like being post-partum all over again. FANTASTIC. I spent all of my Christmas holiday being a complete bitch, or overly sensitive, or on really bad days, an overly sensitive bitch from hell. Like when I got mad at Andy for having the heat cranked up on an empty pan while he made me breakfast and so I turned it off like a pouty teenager and then was certain he was going to leave me for yelling at him about the pan. Poor Andy. I don't think it was much of a vacation for him on those days.

By the beginning of January, Brianna had cut down to just 5 minutes of nursing in the morning. She'd nurse for a moment, then look over her shoulder, or bite me, or smack my boob with her no-longer-quite-so-tiny fist. Sometimes she'd manage to do all three AT THE SAME TIME. One morning there had been an empty bottle on the table beside the glider. She stopped swatting me long enough to try to roll over and grab it. Clearly nursing wasn't doing anything for her anymore, so we switched to a bottle in the morning.

She took to it like there was nothing strange about no longer getting to start her day with a couple of nipple chomps and playing whack-a-mole with mommy's boobs. It sort of surprised me that she gave it up so easily, and I have to admit, I took it a bit personally. I wanted to have some sign that she missed it, that she wanted to start the day cuddling with me.

We still had bedtime nursing, which mostly consisted of two minutes of nursing and then throwing herself out of my arms to say "Look lady, put me in that damn crib already, I want to sleep and you won't stop shoving that boob in my face!" But that only lasted a couple weeks and then I got the cold from hell. The kind that you catch from a husband who snores when he's sick so you're already tired from not getting enough sleep. And then you start to wonder if sinuses are really all that necessary, and whether you should carve out your nose or just cut off your whole head so you can feel better. That kind of cold. And hoo-boy, decongestants go to work awfully fast at drying up mucus in your body. Unfortunately they're not kind enough to say, oh, that milk, you want to keep that? Okay, let's just get rid of the snot that makes you sniffly and unable to sleep and we'll be on our way. So that was the end of that adventure. I just wish I had realized it would be our last nursing session, because I would have snuggled her a bit more.

Cue crazy hormones one more time! Super bowl commercials this year tended to have a few more "heart-warmers" than usual. Especially fun was tearing up after a particularly sad-sweet Ronald McDonald House ad with a series pictures of a kid who is sick but it shows him getting better and the commercial ended with a healthy kid and parents who were happy because they had a place to go when their son was sick and children get better faster when families stay together during treatment and now everyone is happy and nobody is sick anymore, aren't you glad you have a healthy kid and if you don't, we have this wonderful place for you to stay together! And by "tearing up", I mean sobbing, but without any snot because the decongestants dried me out.

It wasn't just me, I swear. Andy almost cried too. Take that, hormones! You're not the only reason I was a basket case during most of the Super Bowl!

So yeah. Everything is back to normal now. I still get achy sometimes when I hear a baby crying, but I haven't leaked and my boobs look almost decent again. At first (TMI ALERT!) they were sort of sad looking, like someone shoved a juiced grapefruit in a stocking and forget to add extra stuffing to make it roundish instead of saggy and lumpy. You're welcome for that visual. Now they look better, as long as I've worn a bra all day. Not so pretty when I first wake up, but then again, it's not like I'm showing them off at 7am, because SOMEONE likes to wake up at 5:30 even on the weekends, which puts the kibosh on sexy fun time in the morning. [Yeah, yeah, welcome to parenthood. It's not really something I expected to have, but I do miss it. Especially going back to sleep afterward and then being woken up with breakfast in bed. Note to couples without kids: don't tell me about waking up "so early" at 8am, or I will drop off a visitor for you.]

I'm incredibly grateful to have kept up with breastfeeding as long as I did. Things very nearly ended in the first few weeks because her wonky latch made it so painful for the first minute or so. But then we got the hang of it, and nursing was wonderful. I'm sad to see it go, but then again the advent of top teeth has made me quite thankful to have not experienced bites in recent days. Everything worked out well, and I'm proud of myself. Now pass me some decongestants, I feel a cold coming on.