by Mary Jessica Hammes
September 25, 2009

Talk about your feelings
Talking to her mother about her own short-lived breastfeeding experiences helped, as did a lactation consultant who was a friend of the family.

“She was giving me emotional support as well as data and facts,” says Cleland. “The hard facts of what (the baby) needed to survive—that’s what I was able to grasp onto at the end to pull me through the fog.”

Cleland still thinks about breastfeeding, though, and still feels emotional about it.

“There are still times when I think about it and get upset,” she says. “If we have another kid, I expect having this wealth of knowledge and having it go swimmingly…but I want to be realistic. I have to think about that…It still tugs at my heartstrings. I still wonder, what if I we started out on the right foot?”

She has a new set of expectations now, and a newfound confidence when considering the possibility of more children and breastfeeding again.

“I can still do this,” she says. “I can do it the way my body will let me, and not put the pressure on me…however my body responds is the hand we’re dealt and we’re gonna run with it.”

If you’re having similar problems, here’s her advice: “Go find women who are going through the same thing, or have experienced breastfeeding in a different way, to get the perspective that (you are) different from other people, and it doesn’t have to be the way it’s laid out in the books.”

“I don’t think we ever talked about weaning,” says Shirin Modaresi, recalling conversations past with lactation consultants. “I think it’s probably understood that it’s sad to stop.”

Modaresi, a fourth-year veterinary student at the University of Georgia, had some warning from her mother, who had nursed her and her twin sister. “My mother told me she cried when she weaned us,” she says.

She went back to work half-days when her son was 12 weeks old. When he was 10 months old, she went into clinical rotation and worked full days, nursing in the morning and at night and pumping once during the day.

Not long after that, her son, now 15 months old, decided he was done nursing.

“His changes are overnight,” she says. “He was a solid morning and night nurser. One night I came home and he was just like, no, no boob. Then he was just a morning nurser. A couple of weeks later…it hit me. I’m done now! I ended up overnight being done.”

Because the weaning was gradual on the whole, she was spared an emotional rollercoaster, she says. Still, “His abruptness was sad,” she says. “I knew I would be sad. I was preparing myself for it…I actually still miss it. I loved it. I knew I would miss it, and I still do.

“Ultimately I was pleased because he made the choice, and that’s what I wanted,” she continues. “It was incredibly peaceful and 100 percent his decision.”

Like crashing from a sugar rush
“It wasn’t anything I saw coming,” says Kelly Foster, a survey research project manager in Athens, Ga. “I really didn’t believe that postpartum depression was a serious thing; I didn’t think it was real…when it was an issue for me, it was particularly shocking. And everything I read said that breastfeeding made it better, but that wasn’t the case for me.”

When Foster’s son was born two years ago, she expected the normal “baby blues” we all hear about to go away, but they stayed, and just kept getting worse.

After losing 35 pounds in her first postpartum month because she wasn’t eating, she went on antidepressants. When she tried to go off the medicine four months later, “it got really bad,” she says. She tried again three months after that with similar results.

To her surprise, breastfeeding hormones seemed to exacerbate the problem.

“I’d feel better while I was nursing, but within 30 minutes to an hour after nursing, I’d have low episodes, feel very depressed, and a little obsessive,” she says. “The only time I ever felt good was when I was breastfeeding. The only thing I can liken it to is a sugar rush—you feel fine while you’re eating, and then you crash.”

Her doctor told her that some women have problems with breastfeeding hormones. It makes sense to Foster: “My body’s always been super sensitive to hormonal fluctuations,” she says. Still, the realization that breastfeeding had the opposite effect on her as it did for many women was hard. “I felt so deceived.”

But Foster was determined to avoid formula, and she did. She nursed her now 2-year-old son until he was around 10 months old, the earliest her doctor felt comfortable with giving him cow’s milk.

“When he started weaning,” she says, “I started weaning my medication and was able to come off of it shortly after he was done nursing, and I was fine.”

Despite her rocky time breastfeeding, she would “absolutely try to breastfeed again,” especially now that she’s done more research on postpartum depression and how to avoid and treat it.

“I feel like the benefits of it outweigh the personal cost for me,” she says. “Whatever it takes to have a healthy child is what should happen.”

Tandem twins
When Emily Brown’s twins were born, “I was uneducated about breastfeeding,” she says. “I knew it was the healthiest thing for them, knew it was natural, knew that my great-grandmother nursed her twins. I didn’t know that I couldn’t do it. I attribute that to my success, the naivety of thinking it was totally possible and easy.”

Because it wasn’t always easy.

Brown, a stay-at-home mom in Springfield, Mo., had an unplanned c-section and had a difficult recovery. Her daughter nursed the morning after she was born, but her son, who spent time in the NICU, didn’t nurse until he was 2 days old. She nursed her daughter every three hours and pumped for Max, who refused the breast for nearly two months (until one day, he nuzzled her chest, latched on and had no more problems nursing).

She nursed the twins on demand for the twins’ first year, sometimes every three hours, sometime more often, and mostly with both babies nursing at once.

When the babies hit 7 months, “I started getting sick of breastfeeding,” says Brown. “Sometimes I wanted to run away…I got down in the dumps around then. I felt like all I ever did was nurse, that no one appreciated this monumental thing I was doing for my children.”

With encouragement from other mothers of multiples she had met online, she vowed to make to at least their first year. When her husband helped her night-wean at 14 months, “my outlook on life greatly improved,” she says.

But the twins began nursing more—around 10 times a day. When her husband came home to find her crying, he suggested they cut back. In one weekend, they cut back to three sessions a day, a schedule they stayed with for three months.

“Then we were gone several days in a row before afternoon nap, and all of a sudden that session was dropped,” she recalls. “This was right before my period, and the combination of the two sent me into a downward spiral. I didn’t realize how bad it was until one evening after the babies were asleep, I was laying in bed, knitting and watching MTV’s ‘16 and Pregnant’—sobbing uncontrollably. I put it together that the lack of oxytocin and rush of menses hormones was not working well for me.”

These days, the twins are 19 months old, and Brown says she feels normal—especially after increasing her intake of fish oil and maintaining a daily yoga practice. The twins still nurse twice a day, which she’d like to keep doing for a while—both because she feels they are still benefiting from her immunities, and also because she likes keeping that connection.

“I don’t want to wean for selfish reasons, but there is a fine line between wanting my body back being a selfish reason and being a valid point that every mother deserves,” she says. “I have struggled with depression since high school. I opted to stay unmedicated after they were born, opting for natural remedies. For the most part, I would say it has worked well. I fear that when they wean my hormones will go berserk, and I will suffer depression because my children aren’t babies anymore. Even though you could call them toddlers, nursing keeps them dependent on me for a while longer. I like that. I don’t want them to grow up yet. They are so young, but do assert their independence from me. When they wean I worry we will lose a bond that we have.”

Brown laments the lack of information when it comes to weaning and toddlers.

“It seems like most of the information you find is about nursing a newborn,” she says. “It is few and far between you can find books about nursing toddlers or weaning. Most of the weaning information I’ve found is pretty vague and not helpful: ‘Just cut out a feeding one at a time.’ Well great, but then when my child is asking me for milk and I’m denying them, I feel like a real jerk. That doesn’t do anything to help my depression. I wonder if the debate of mother-led or child-led may aid in this lack of information. I planned on doing child-led but decided my sanity was more important.”

Mary Jessica Hammes is an Athens, Georgia-based writer, trapeze instructor, knitter, gardener, comic book enthusiast, and hula hooper. She is mom to Tommy.