And Then We Were Two

The end of our first big little era

My daughter and I stopped breastfeeding this week, drawing to a close a magical 15-month chapter, and I was completely wrong about in whom this would bring out the Big Feelings. We’d been winding down for a while - a calm feed in bed every morning, another most evenings (though sometimes she was too heavily invested in knowing, for the 375th time, how Goodnight Moon ends and said no), very occasionally during the day if she asked - and I knew I was going to call time on it sooner rather than later, but hadn’t totally decided when.

Then on Sunday, entirely unplanned, I chanced bringing her a bottle of warm cow’s milk in bed instead, just to see if she’d protest, to test how far away we were from a morning bottle being a thing. If she made a fuss I’d take a step back and try again a few days later, I thought. But she gobbled it up delightedly without so much as a raised eyebrow. And that was that.

Since then, whenever she asks for milk I offer her a bottle of cow’s milk and a snack, and so far there hasn’t been a single issue, a single top-yanking incident, a single tantrum or a single tear. From her, that is.

I, however, have been a hot mess.

We both absolutely adored our breastfeeding journey and were extremely lucky to find it very straightforward and very lovely right from the start, which was a huge comfort after a complex and traumatic journey to parenthood involving multiple miscarriages and failed rounds of IVF; finally my body was doing what it was meant to do, and doing it really bloody well. I had plenty of milk (#feeder) and my gorgeous baby was extremely greedy (quelle surprise, have you met the parents?). Perfect.

I didn’t want to have to use formula, solely because I’m profoundly lazy and all that washing and sterilising sounded like one hell of a lot of work. Extreme respect to mothers who do use formula; my brain was so fried in the weeks and months (and year) after birth that I could barely work out how to use the TV remote let alone a steriliser. Hats well and truly off.

For the same reason I never bothered pumping either, which did mean I couldn’t leave the baby with anyone else for more than about eighteen minutes and that I didn’t go out in the evening until she was - wait for it - 14 months old, but I truly didn’t care. I didn’t want to leave her! I didn’t want to go out! I didn’t want to do anything whatsoever except cuddle and feed and play with her, to be entirely honest.

Curiously, I never managed to harvest a single drop of colostrum before she was born, despite the hospital’s insistence that it was absolutely imperative to have a chest freezerful of the stuff in advance of the big day. I now wonder how much of that was a trauma response to recurrent loss; the midwives tell you to imagine your baby while you’re trying to squeeze out this golden, life-giving liquid, but I could never quite truly believe that I’d be lucky enough to meet my baby, even at 39 weeks pregnant, so I couldn’t really imagine her without feeling panicked and sad. Only when she was fully, truly, properly in my arms, snuffling away like a tiny, beautiful piglet did my body finally let go of that trauma and release.

The end of our breastfeeding journey has felt comparable to the start of it, emotionally and physiologically, which is understandable since when you begin breastfeeding a huge hormonal rush of oxytocin and prolactin fills your body, overwhelming you with love and emotion. At the end of it these hormones plummet, causing you to feel sad, anxious, overwhelmed, depressed and even sometimes dizzy.

When my milk came in on day four after my baby’s birth, Mike found me in our bedroom feeding her in the rocking chair, listening on repeat to the song that had been playing in the car when we drove home from hospital (Little Things, Adrian Berenguer, what a banger), sobbing that ‘I won’t know her when she’s really, really old’. This week, on the fourth day of it all being over, Mike called home from a work trip to find me sobbing while watching High Potential (there’s a cute baby in it, I think she got me going), bereft that it’s all over, that I may never feed another baby again, that my baby and I are now officially two people where we’ve felt like one all this time.

I have been promised (by friends now out the other side) that the freedom I will feel in a few weeks is nothing short of miraculous. A friend with two small daughters told me ‘it’s like a fog lifting; your brain isn’t entirely your own until you stop breastfeeding’, and that she now goes all day forgetting she even has children until she gets home.

The idea of reclaiming my brain (and my boobs) is tremendously exciting, I must admit; I’ve felt like an illiterate imbecile for much of the past 15 months so I’m really hoping to start being able to string sentences together properly again in the not-too distant future. But I now realise that this ending is the first in a lifetime of little goodbyes. Goodbyes, not badbyes - her growing up can only ever be a beautiful thing - but each is a little step further away from me, until one day she’s off to university, moving in with a partner, having a baby, GETTING ON A PLANE ALONE WITHOUT ME JESUS FECKING CHRIST.

My God. How did our parents do it? Hormones are wild.