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Militant Breastfeeding Cult

Early Weaning to Extended Nursing

by Mandy

My daughter, Timely Rain, was born in April of 1998 at home. Breastfeeding was a little rocky those first few days, but nothing out of the ordinary. We got past sore nipples and overactive letdown within a matter of days and fell into the normalcy of nursing, until she was about 10 months old.

I noticed that all night long, she would pull off the breast and back on, switching back and forth, crying out. She was hungry all the time, eating what seemed like twice her body weight! It finally occured to me to take a home pregnancy test (the last thing I expected!), and there was my answer. I was already pregnant again, 12 weeks along before I even had an inkling about it. I never had a period between my pregnancies, and Timely was pretty much exclusively nursing when I got pregnant, with the exception of a few bites of banana and avocado when I was having them. It was seriously unexpected.

I did not want to wean Timely. She was so young and obviously still needed the closeness and nutrition that breastfeeding holds. I started trying things to keep my milk supply up, taking fennugreek and Mother's Milk Tea. I got my supply back up, but she just didn't like the taste. She would try to nurse and pull off, making her "yuck" face, crying. I remember crying with her, thinking how hard this must be for her, not to mention my own sense of failure. I was seriously committed to child-led weaning and thought that I would surely be nursing her well into toddlerhood.

Timely weaned right around her first birthday. It was a textbook weaning, right at 20 weeks gestation. I can remember having debates with some of my real life mother friends who only had one child about whether weaning while pregnant was child-led weaning or not. It's not. It's not fair to the older child because she did not choose to have that taken away from her. It was as if she had been receiving this wonderful, delicious food her whole life, then suddenly that wonderful, delicious food was replaced with something that was bitter and unpalatable.

I think the older a nursing child is during the mother's pregnancy, the more likely she/he is to continue nursing because an older nursling has a greater capacity to understand the choice. The younger the child is, the more difficult it is for the nursling to actually say to him/herself, "Hmm. This tastes pretty yucky, but I like doing this because it helps me be close to Mommy."

After Timely weaned, she still used my breasts for comfort. She would hold one while she sucked her thumb, bringing it right up to her nose so she could smell it. This was normal for us and she would do it like a nursing child would nurse. To others, it probably looked like she was nursing.

My son, Noble Song, was born when Timely was only 17 months old. It was a hard time for all of us, Timely still being so much a baby and needing me just as much as Noble did. I had kind of hoped Timely would go back to nursing after Noble was born, but as the months passed I kind of gave up that hope. Then it happened. It was probably right after Timely turned 2 years old. She was lying across my lap, holding my breast while she sucked her thumb, and I was watching the movie The Last Emperor, which has the most endearing nursing scene. It shows the child emperor of China nursing with his nurse maid at around age 12. The evil wives of the former emperor see this happening and decide he's too old and they send his nurse maid away. He runs after her chariot for miles into the dessert. When the wives tell him he is too old for a nurse maid, he says, "She is not my nurse maid; she is my butterfly." Just as I was bawling over this scene, not really paying attention to my daughter, I suddenly felt her latch on! I looked down and there she was, trying her best to nurse. I thought it would be a freak incident, just something she was trying, but she continued to ask for it after that, and I had to teach her how to latch on again the proper way. She is now 3 years old and is still nursing.

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