Nursing Your Kids

I started to write back to Stacie in the comments, but decided to make this a post in its own right. Responding to my Weaner-gate post from the other day, Stacie wrote:

I’m saddened that someone as involved in breastfeeding as the lactivist is is weirded out by toddler nursing. Certainly I think she should wean when she wants to but her attitude says a lot about how uncomfortable our culture is with the biological norm of toddler nursing and is unfortunate.

The Lactivist is already nursing a toddler, so that particular piece of the Weaner-gate scandal doesn’t bother me. It seems like a moot point. The idea of it weirds her out, yet she still nurses her son. I completely understand. I’m weirded out by the idea of nursing a two-year-old, yet I have a feeling that in just a few months that’s exactly where I’ll be.

I never dreamed I’d nurse this long. When Sam was one-month-old I wrote, “So yeah, it’s all about the boobies these days. I’m thrilled that they’ve come through for Sam and me- he’s probably at least 9 pounds by now since he was 8.5 last week- but man, it’s exhausting. Every few days he’ll go through a little growth spurt where he eats every hour. EVERY HOUR! Give a girl a break. I don’t know how people do this until their kids are two and three years old. In my opinion, if the kid’s old enough to use utensils, he’s old enough to be weaned.”

Utensils? In my head I based weaning on the use of utensils? How little I knew. The child’s been using utensils for more than half of his life now. What used to weird me out has become my every day. I still nurse my 20-month-old son and I’m not afraid to admit it, but I don’t nurse him in public. He doesn’t need to or want to and I don’t particularly want him to. He’s old enough to eat a cracker if he’s hungry. So while nursing a toddler may be normal for me, people only know I’m still nursing him because I write about it or tell them about it. It’s not something anyone sees anymore, not even my husband since these days Sam never asks to nurse in front of him.

Our culture is uncomfortable with toddlers nursing because it’s the exception, not the norm. I very rarely see anyone nursing a toddler and when I see it it’s weird. It’s not wrong, I nurse a toddler fairly regularly. It’s just different. It’s also weird when I see someone topless on the beach. Not because it’s wrong or unsavory, but because it’s out of the ordinary.

I think the Lactivist’s statements show that she’s reevaluating her feelings every step of the way. I think it’s fair to be weirded out by something that’s a cultural rarity and I think it’s fair that she’s ambivalent about her current situation.

Now that I’m a third of the way through my pregnancy (and nursing while pregnant is weird and painful enough) it looks like I may be faced with tandem nursing- another idea that weirds me out. To have a newborn attached to my breast for weeks at a time with a toddler, a walking, talking, jumping, singing, alphabet-reciting toddler, trying to get in on the action terrifies me. I never would have dreamed that I’d even have to consider the possibility. It’s weird. But perhaps in six months if it’s my reality it will cease to be weird. Honestly, I hope that Sam will wean on his own and I won’t have to deal with it, but if he doesn’t, my future seems weird to me.

I don’t think that the use of the word weird is necessarily negative. I am ambivalent about my current situation and ambivalent about what the future holds. I think that ambivalence is something that many women are still afraid to address. Honestly, I think breastfeeding is weird. It’s strange to have something (and a newborn is hardly even a someone yet which is why I use the word something) attached to your breast so many hours a day for so many weeks. I’m sure that all over the world nursing women look down at their newborn infants and think, “this is pretty weird.” Once you get used to it and it becomes less of a struggle it seems like the most beautiful, natural, thing in the world, but each new development in a nursing relationship, each foray into the unknown (like the first time Sam nursed standing in front of me!) feels strange. I don’t think it’s bad to be weirded out.