Written as a chapter for:
To Three and Beyond: Stories of Breastfeeding Children and the Mothers Who Love Them
Edited by Janell E. Robisch and published by Praeclarus Press

My son almost weaned himself when he was 2 years old.

One morning, he declined to nurse when we woke up. I was surprised, but he gave me a hug and said, “I love you too.”

I didn’t feel ready to stop, but I was torn.

On the one hand, I was looking forward to eating what I wanted. My son had food sensitivities that kept him from sleeping well. One small serving for me of a forbidden food could result in a sleepless night 2 days later after it worked its way through my body into my milk and then into his intestines. We both had to avoid dairy products, gluten, caffeine, chocolate, and hot pepper, all foods I would otherwise eat, just to get a half-decent night’s sleep. To fill the nutritional gaps, I was consuming soy products, which weren’t so good for me.

On the other hand, I felt sad about weaning. For one thing, with all of the foods he had to avoid, breast milk was providing him with important nutrition.

Even more importantly, nursing was the one best thing that only I could do to make up for his rough C-section birth. It offered reassurance that the world was safe and okay, reassurance that I felt he still needed. Our close nursing relationship was helping him build a strong, grounded personality so that he could one day face life on his own terms.

I realized that I could probably influence him one way or the other but also wanted to respect his wishes. I wanted to do the right thing for him, but what was it?

The next morning when we woke up, he said he didn’t want to nurse. As I rose to get dressed, he saw my breasts and said, “I nursed them,” carefully using the past tense, but seeing them made him want to touch them. Touching them made him want to taste them. Tasting them led to a full-blown nursing session. I felt a little guilty that I had tempted him out of his resolve. However, he nursed enthusiastically for another year, and I was glad.

By the time his third birthday came around, I was feeling ready to stop nursing, but he was still enjoying it. At 3 years 2 months old, he was down to taking one breast at a time about twice a day. I weighed the factors and decided that there could be a net benefit to him if we stopped completely at that point.

One fine September afternoon, we were out on the deck nursing. I tried to explain to him how it would be easier to figure out his food sensitivities if he were not getting everything that I had eaten with a day’s delay in addition to everything he had eaten himself. He seemed to understand that it was a problem, at least for me.

“I think I could give up nursing,” he said generously.

I was surprised, grateful, and a bit apprehensive. “Okay, then,” I responded, “let this be our last nurse.”

The first thing he said the next morning was not, “I want to nurse,” as usual, but rather, “I think I don’t want to give up nursing.”

“No, we’re not going to nurse anymore,” I replied.

He peed in his diaper instead.

Later that day, we got a phone call from an uncle who knew all about breaking a drinking habit. I explained that we were weaning and that his nephew was finding it hard. He promised to send my son a gift when he had been “dry” for 1 month.

On the second day, my son invented a new game in which I was the mother cat and he the kitten. He wanted me to pat him on the head and back like a kitten, rub him behind the ears, pretend to lick him, and be close and snugly. We would meow and purr for an hour at a time, enjoying playful cuddling without actually nursing.

On the third day, we went sailing. By this time, my breasts were heavy with milk and leaking. I decided that I would have my son empty them at an unexpected time so that it wouldn’t remind him too much of old habits. The opportunity came when we dropped anchor at an island. My husband ferried my son and me to the beach to explore and then returned to the sailboat. Eventually my son got hungry, and I had no food with me except what was in my breasts.

“Would you like to nurse one last time?” I asked.

Of course he did, so I sat on a log on the sunny beach, and he had quite a meal. We both felt better in the moment, but there were tears too as I said my final goodbye to breastfeeding.

Over the next few days, he would ask sometimes if my breasts had milk in them.

“We don’t do that anymore.”

“But I don’t want to give up nursing!”

Remembering our experience of the previous year, I didn’t dare let him see my breasts during that period.

He started calling me by my first name. “Why?” I asked.

“When I was a little baby, I called you Mommy.”

A week later, he had stopped asking to nurse in the morning. He might ask once during the day, but I would casually brush it off. He didn’t whine about it anymore, but every day he asked, “What did Uncle say?”

I would remind him that when he had not nursed for 1 month, Uncle would send him a gift.

“What is it?” he wondered, and I had no answer, but thinking about it made him forget about wanting to nurse. A set of plastic dinosaurs soon arrived in the mail, and that sealed the deal.

After the miracle of my 42-year-old body making milk for the first time followed by 3 years of constant production, it seemed amazing that lactation would ever stop. I drank sage tea a couple of times to suppress milk production. However, I think that my milk factories had received the message that demand had dried up, and therefore, the supply line should cease operation. After a week, I was sure that my breasts were no longer filling up, so it was safe for me to eat whatever I wanted: coffee, chocolate, and cheese never tasted so good!

A few weeks after my son’s weaning, I noted mental changes in both of us. I was more interested in the news. I could better handle detailed technical issues. I was thinking more about my direction in life. I also observed that my son was expressing a little more aggression. We were now emerging from a cocoon of contentment that had been created by the hormones of lactation.

The day before my next menstrual period, I felt detached and sad. I just wanted to be alone and cry. This short-term depression returned before each period, lessening each month until it was hardly noticeable after five cycles. I’m sure it was my body finding a new balance without the nursing hormones, just as it would do a few years later at menopause.

Now, I am the mother of a remarkable, confident, and self-assured teenaged boy who has outgrown most of his food sensitivities. I’m sure that our closeness and mutual understanding, grounded in those years of breastfeeding, are making the moods of adolescence easier on both of us. His empathy for me is a reminder that nursing and weaning are carried out as a partnership of two people. We came to know and trust each other as individuals in an intimate setting, and that bond will always be there, even though he consciously remembers little of how it came to be.

There have been other kinds of weaning as we have danced the dance of holding on and letting go that is parenting. Whether it was starting school or flying far away without his parents to visit relatives for a month, each weaning adventure has presented its challenges and its victories for one or both of us. With every step that he takes toward finding his place in the world, it is still my job to provide the security and reassurance he needs while encouraging the independence that he is ready for.

Weaning from the breast is but one step in the continuum of nurturing and weaning a child.