Unfinished Business - returning to the breast after a 12 month break - Sif’s story

Posted on November 25, 2008
Filed under: Breastfeeding beyond infancy (2 years +), Breastfeeding through pregnancy, Suck training, Unweaning

When I first became pregnant with my eldest, I had never considered that I might breastfeed my baby. I’d never seen breastfeeding in my family or anywhere else in society. It was only when I started reading pregnancy books that I realized that breastfeeding was the “optimal choice”. To be honest, I was attracted to breastfeeding because it was “free”!

When my son was born, it took a few days to established a successful latch, and then we were off and running. I was very lucky never to have issues with mastitis or cracked nipples, and my child loved the three hourly breastfeeding “routine” my maternal and child health nurse advised me to adhere to.

Solids were introduced at 4 months of age, and by around 9 months of age, my son was having three regular feeds a day. I assumed I’d wean him at around 12 months of age, like all the good parenting books advised.

As 12 months drew closer, I found that I didn’t feel a strong desire to wean him. To me, he was still very much a baby, so we continued our breastfeeding relationship and I surfed the net to see if there were other mothers “breaking the rules” and breastfeeding beyond 12 months. I found there were, and many were breastfeeding well into the preschool years, and to the benefit of their children’s health and emotional well-being. Some mothers were even breastfeeding more than one child at a time when they had subsequent babies.

We were planning our second child and I was inspired by other mothers’ stories of breastfeeding through pregnancy and then tandem feeding – these things sounded like something I would like to do!

When my son was 15 months old, I became pregnant again.

It wasn’t long before I discovered that breastfeeding during pregnancy could be quite uncomfortable, and sometimes downright painful! To my secret relief, my son soon cut out his midday feed. Then at around 17 months of age he cut out his bedtime feed as well. Over the next month I noticed that he wasn’t interested in his morning feed every day either. I started to worry that he was weaning, and did some research on the internet.

I found that many babies cut back or even weaning during their mother’s subsequent pregnancy, but often have a renewed love affair with the breast once colostrum starts to be produced in the third trimester. I hoped this is what would happen with my son.

When my son was 19 months old he dropped his last feed completely.

I was both sad that he hadn’t chosen to breastfeed longer than 19 months, and hopeful he would come back to the breast within a couple of months when I started to produce colostrum. I continued to offer him the breast, but he just wasn’t interested.

Sure enough, in my last trimester of pregnancy I was able to express tiny amounts of colostrum, and I offered him the opportunity to taste it and told him it was sweet, as he’d told me my milk had tasted salty (and I’d sampled it and found it was – since then I’ve come to believe I probably wasn’t drinking enough water during my pregnancy and this caused dehydration, causing the milk to taste saltier). He wouldn’t have a bar of the breast.

When my son was 23.5 months old, his little brother arrived. During the first month of my second son’s life, I offered my first son the breast several times, but he wasn’t interested. After that I was too distracted with the medical needs of my second child and my own post natal depression to try and encourage my older son to breastfeed, I simply assumed our breastfeeding relationship had reached its natural end.

When my younger son was seven months old, so 12 months after my older son had weaned, I was sitting on the lounge room floor feeding him and my older son indicated that he wanted to know what the milk tasted like. I expressed a bit of milk for him into a cup and he drank it and then asked for more!

The following day, he asked for more milk, and I started to express some more, but he indicated that he wanted to drink it directly from my breast. I hesitated a moment, he seemed so big now - he was 2.5 years old – and to my mind he was weaned, so it seemed strange that he wanted to breastfeed again after all this time. I offered him the breast, but he lay there in my lap with his open mouth motionless over the nipple, as if waiting for the milk to flow from my breast like water from a tap.

Realizing he’d forgotten how to suckle, I offered to express milk for him, and he accepted a cup with milk in it.

The following day he asked to breastfeed again. It occurred to me that for him this was somehow “unfinished business”. I said he needed to suck the milk out, so he attempted to suck on my breast as if from a straw (ouch!). I realized I’d have to teach him how to suck from the nipple all over again. To do this, I put my little finger into his mouth, the way I routinely did with his little brother when he needed to suck for soothing (he had severe reflux and needed to suck even when he wasn’t hungry and would reject the nipple, but he wouldn’t take a dummy, so I let him suck on my fingers instead)…

I had my older son “practice” suck on my little finger and when I could feel that he was moving his tongue the way he would to extract milk from the nipple, I got him to try sucking at my breast.

The look on his face when his sucked his first taste of breast milk that day was priceless! His eyes lit up and he fed for 10 minutes. He was so happy!

I, on the other hand, was a little worried about what people might think about my previously weaned 2.5 year old coming back to the breast 12 months after fully weaning – in particular, what my husband would think!

That night I told my husband about what had been happening over the previous couple of days, and at first he felt our son was taking “a step backwards, regressing”… I explained to him that I felt our son was actually just concluding unfinished business; that his breastfeeding needs had been interrupted by the pregnancy and he’d weaned because the milk didn’t taste right to him, not because he was “ready” to wean. I said that felt, for his emotional development, allowing him to finish the breastfeeding relationship on his terms would be beneficial. Luckily I have an open-minded and compassionate husband who decided to support this turn of events even though it was something completely unexpected for him (and for me too!).

My son weaned completely, for the second and final time, when he was 4 years and 10 months of age, on his own terms, when his needs had been met.

Filed under: Breastfeeding beyond infancy (2 years +), Breastfeeding through pregnancy, Suck training, Unweaning