Public breastfeeding, Kim Kardashian, and the irony of it all.

 *stepping up on my soap box for this post...you've been warned*

I consider myself to be a retired breastfeeder.  I haven't breastfed a baby in well over 2 years, but I did breastfeed 2 babies for a combined total of 2 years and 5 months.  29 months.  116 weeks. 812 days.  Countless hours, countless nights.  So it's not recent experience, but it's a pretty good track record of experience in this department. It may not be something that is on my mind much now, but it was a big part of my life...and one that I look back on as a highlight of both of the boys first part of life. 

Breastfeeding Jake in the beginning was a struggle; without going into too much detail, I will just say that for the first week or so, each feeding required a breastpump, a syringe with which to feed him, a try at a "regular" breastfeeding session, followed by crying.  The crying was my own. It was an exhausted, overwhelmed, and frustrated cry over the fact that something that seemed like it should be so natural was not working for us.

Eventually, we worked it out, Jake and I...and we were able to ditch the vicious cycle of pumping and syringe feeding, thankfully. One thing I never did figure out with him?  How to feed him in public.  I felt strange doing it....and not because I thought it was wrong at all.  In fact, I'd see other mothers doing that and become envious, and wonder why I couldn't just get over my own insecurities and feed him.  Because feeding him in say, a restaurant booth discretely, would have been a whole lot easier than what I usually did...which was retreat to the car, where I would sit by myself to feed him. Don't get me wrong, that wasn't every single time...if I was at the mall, I could tell you the exact location of the nicest changing rooms at any location inside that place :)

With Liam, I was slightly more secure....maybe because I had grown to be more comfortable as a mom, but also probably because I was left with fewer choices.  If I was out somewhere by myself with the kids, I didn't have the luxury of dragging Jake with me to retreat somewhere to feed Liam.  Pulling a 3.5 year old in a small, hot dressing room to feed a baby for at least 20 minutes?  No thank you! So, I learned to be ok with it when I had to be.

Rant ahead.....

The bottom line?  I was never super comfortable with it....but that was just ME.  It burns me up like nothing else to read comments from people about public breastfeeding who say things like, "well, my sister breastfeeds her kid, but she ALWAYS goes somewhere so that she doesn't expose herself in public"  Well, good for your sister for knowing what SHE is comfortable with.  Maybe she's like me....I wasn't worried about the general public having a heart attack over feeding my baby, it was my own anxiety that kept me from doing it the first time. 

Which brings me to my whole point in saying all of this....breasts are for feeding, people.  Feeding little babies...little babies who should not have to eat in a bathroom stall.  Or with a blanket covering up their entire head when they're already pressed up against a hot body.  So if you are one of the people out there who say that it's an indecent thing to do, that women shouldn't expose themselves, and that (my personal favorite) "no one wants to see that"....did YOU look at the Kim Kardashian picture?  Were you ok with that?  Because I can tell you that I saw a whole lot more of Kim K just scrolling through facebook the day those pictures were blasted everywhere than I ever see of a breastfeeding mom out in public. Thankfully, we never have to see anyone's bare backside while they're breastfeeding either, so there's that. 

And speaking of seeing things...I don't know what people are really seeing when moms are breastfeeding out in public.  I would love to know if the people who are up in arms over it and think it should be "banned" (which yes, I did actually read online...I really must stop reading comments on news articles!) have ever actually SEEN anything when a mom has been publicly feeding her baby?  Because I find it very hard to believe that the mom literally pulled off her shirt and bra and starting to feed her baby right then and there.  Even without a blanket over top of a baby's head, the little bit of skin that shows is nothing in comparison to what other girls and women are wearing.  It's actually less than a lot of bikini tops I've seen...should we go ahead and ban those too, while we're at it?

We're ok with Kim K.  We're ok with hollywood starlets showing off sideboob in their gowns at award shows.  We're ok with Lady Gaga wearing pasties under a sheer dress. Maybe you in particular are not ok with this, but as a society in general?  We seem to be ok with it. But a mom sitting in a restaurant booth feeding her baby while trying to enjoy a meal with her husband...this, we have a problem with?

Let's pull it together here, peeps.

I was so sick of seeing and hearing about the Kim K picture until I saw Alyssa Milano's response to it...which was so very perfect:

Not only was I applauding Alyssa Milano (just like my friend Dawson above), but I found something even more amazing when I went to her Twitter page to pull the quote....I found that since she wrote that last Wednesday, people have been tweeting her like crazy to say thank you.  Women from all over, thanking her for being an inspiration and for giving them the self confidence to not be ashamed by what they're doing.

So what have we learned here today?  A repeat of a childhood lesson that I say to my own kids all the time....if you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all.  And to build on that for this scenario...if you don't like what you're seeing, turn away and stop looking. 

*stepping off soapbox*

Breaking up is hard to do.

Breaking up with breastfeeding, that is.

As a general rule, I didn't really talk about my breastfeeding relationship with Jake to a lot of people, aside from my mom, mother in law and a very few close friends (and during a few breastfeeding catastrophes, my "internet friends") :) it's not that I was at all embarrassed by it...it's just that to me, it was a private thing between myself and my son.

But now that it's come to an end, I felt like I should write something about it, just to reflect on how far we came. It was a rocky beginning for us....since I was on the magnesium drip for pre-eclampsia, Jake felt the side effects of that in his first few days of life and he was (what the lactation consultant referred to him as), a lazy sucker. He would latch on perfectly and it would appear that he was eating, but he was actually just hanging out, kind of moving his mouth (and normally falling asleep) In order to fix this problem, we spent 3 days doing (as Brian called it) "suck training": I would pump while Brian fed Jake previously pumped milk with a syringe; after he got a few gulps that way, Brian would hand him to me and I would feed him from there. Thankfully, this only went on for 3 days until he got the hang of it....if it had gone on much longer than that, I'm not sure if I could have stuck with it. I was exhausted, physically and emotionally...and the routine that I just described took almost an hour and Jake was eating every 2 hours. It wasn't very pleasant.

But---we got through that and his weight started picking back up and everything was back on track. There were still times that I was tempted to quit...mostly those times were at 3am when I had been up for the 4th time that night feeding him and felt like I hadn't slept in days, or during his growth spurts when he would literally nurse every hour, on the hour for days at a time. I'm not sure what kept me going, to be honest....I had set little goals for myself (3 months, 6 months, a year, etc...) and every time I met one of those goals, it just seemed easier & easier, so I stuck with it. Plus, anytime I saw a can of formula in the store and saw how much money we were saving, that gave me more incentive to stick with it :)

After those first few weeks, it was pretty much smooth sailing with just a few bumps in the road....I had a clogged duct that was pretty painful when he was 2 months old, thrush from antibiotics he was on when he was around 6 months old and mastitis just recently when I started the weaning process.

Fast-forward to January....I knew that I was going to wean after he turned a year and when the time finally came, I was ready. I was ready to be done with my pump at work and just ready to let my little baby move on to the next step in his life. I had braced myself for the worst (he was quite the milk machine, I thought he would have a hard time) but he seemed to get over it pretty quickly. I started by dropping bottles at daycare, figuring it was easier since I wasn't with him at that time and he's so busy there, he'd be less likely to notice. They said he did ok overall...the 2nd day of no bottles one of the babies was getting a bottle in a rocking chair & Jake stopped what he was playing with, went over and sat down in front of the chair & just watched, looking sad :( But, one of the other teachers came over & snuggled him for a few minutes in another chair & that seemed to be all he needed...he was back to playing within a few minutes.

I'm pretty sure I miss it more than he does at this point....even though I was ready to be done, I still had a hard time letting go of what seemed like the last "baby" thing that I had to hold on to. He's such a little boy now in so many ways, but holding him in my arms while nursing him made it feel like he was still an infant, like a whole year hadn't passed yet. I know there's a whole lot more to look forward to and I love all the new things I see in him everyday....but I still like to think back to those times when it was just Jake and I, snuggling on the couch together for a late-night feeding (but let's be honest-I'm grateful that I'm now sleeping at 3am!), or enjoying those last few minutes before bedtime at the end of the day. I'm grateful to have been able to make it to a full year and I appreciate anyone who offered advice and support, especially Brian, who was my biggest cheerleader....he's an amazing husband in many ways and there was no way I could have stuck with nursing if he hadn't been so supportive.

I know there are quite a few moms and moms-to-be who read my blog, so if you have any questions about breastfeeding or weaning or anything, you know where to find me via email :) I'm happy to help out in any way that I can.