by Mary Jessica Hammes
September 25, 2009

Brook Cook, a WIC breastfeeding counselor in the Philadelphia area, felt ready for any possible nursing issue she might encounter when her son was born four years ago.

Her research served her well when her son had breast milk jaundice and difficulty latching in the early days, when she had mastitis, and when her son battled thrush for several months. But things eventually clicked,” she says.

“For the most part, breastfeeding was relaxing and calming for me,” she says. There were times it was embarrassing and sometimes funny—like when my son was old enough to sit in a grocery cart and figured out that my breasts were at arm level, resulting in lots of grabbing or trying to pull down my shirt. And days where it was stressful—like the non-stop nursing of a growth spurt, or getting comments from family members about when I was finally going to stop breastfeeding.

He weaned when he was around 3 years old. The mastitis, the jaundice, the latching issues, the thrush—“I was prepared for that,” she says.“What I wasn’t prepared for was the emotional response I had to my son stopping nursing.”

Indeed, weaning is often tumultuous for the mother.

It makes sense, especially when you consider what’s going on with your hormones. “It’s a double-edged sword,” says Meredith Turner, a certified nurse midwife at Women’s Healthcare Associates in Athens, Georgia. “You have the drop off in prolactin, and at the same time you have the increase in the hormones of menstruation.

But there’s other stuff happening, too. If you are weaning before you wanted to, you may be feeling pressure or even guilt from others (or yourself, if you aren’t meeting the goals you once envisioned for yourself). You may even feel rejected by your child.

“The nursing dyad is a couple, and any person in the relationship can exert power over the other,” says Turner. When you lead the weaning process, the baby might be irritated and mad at you, she says, and when the baby leads the process, “It’s not uncommon for women to feel rejected.”  But take comfort: “The sadness is quite short-lived, I would think.”

What happens when the baby, who is leading the process is, well, not a baby anymore? According to the CDC’s Breastfeeding Report Card (based on 2006 data), only around 22 percent of Americans breastfeed for their child’s first year. Turner herself doesn’t have much experience in talking to women who are weaning non-infants.

“I don’t see a lot of women who nurse over a year,” she says. “But I do see a lot of women who go back to work at six weeks and try to pump and nurse and end up weaning, and they feel bad about it.”

Speaking as someone who is watching her nearly 3-year-old wean himself in a rather drawn-out process, I can attest to the emotional stew of sadness and elation that I was not expecting.

The very complexity of weaning—the emotional response, the hormonal explosions, the societal and inner pressure, outside relationships, the guilt— is “why there has not been good research” on the issue, says Turner. Unless you have family or friends who have nursed and are willing to talk about it, weaning might take you by surprise.

Fighting “double guilt”
“Literally my entire life, this was something I imagined I could do,” says Angie Cleland, a social worker and interim executive director at a teen shelter in northeast Georgia. “I’d breastfeed my child and do it like a champ and stop when she was ready to stop.”

But after her daughter was born two years ago, “I started out not great and continued not to do well.”

There was no lactation consultant available at the hospital while Cleland was there. Her new baby slept—a lot—and Cleland, who was exhausted, slept a lot too. In retrospect, Cleland thought a nurse might have woken her up to encourage regular nursing, but no one did.

“By the time that I realized I needed to be (nursing) more often, my supply was waning,” she says.

Her daughter was 9 pounds, 2 ounces when she was born, and down to 7 pounds, 14 ounces at the end of her first week. It took her over a month to get back to her birth weight, but she still did not gain weight steadily. Cleland began supplementing with formula when her baby was 6 weeks old.

Meanwhile, her daughter was not giving her recognizable hunger cues, and she continued to sleep more. But Cleland was doing anything but sleep: she took herbs meant to increase her supply and pumped or nursed every hour on the hour, sometimes using a supplemental nurser.

After months of this, Cleland had built back her supply, but “I was so exhausted, and after four months of this battle, I gave in and started sleeping more,” she says. “My supply went back down.”

The guilt was overwhelming.

“When I had to go out and buy the first bottles, I almost felt like I was cheating on myself,” she says. “I was horribly embarrassed to give my child a bottle in public. It was so hard for me to look at other people and think they were wondering why I wasn’t breastfeeding.”

She’d feed her child bottles in the car, away from other people.

“I felt so guilty,” she says. “I knew it wasn’t rational, but I couldn’t get past it. None of the books I read prepared me for how emotional it could be.”

Meanwhile, Cleland scrutinized every detail. “Did I screw up in the beginning?” she remembers asking herself. “It was even more of a guilt trip…Double guilt.”

“Nobody, nobody could understand,” she adds. “I didn’t really have anyone to talk to…It’s still really hard for me to think about that somehow, my body wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do.”