The Young and the Breastless, or Ode to the Breast Pump

Any of you who have kept up with my life as a new mom have heard me rant about breastfeeding. And not about breastfeeding itself – which I think is great – but about breast PUMPING, which I do NOT think is great. The bottles, the cleaning, the constant sound of machinery…trust me, if you are one of those people who thinks everything about motherhood is beautiful, this can change your mind. Breast pumping became such a point of contention for me that I even had my best friend and comedienne write some haikus for me on it. They went a little like this:

Breast milk in the fridge
Everybody knows it’s mine
I feel like a cow

Pumping at my desk
Sorry you had to see that
You should learn to knock


Read the rest of the entry - here, it still makes me laugh!

Anyhoo – Roman has always been fine taking a bottle, so the transition from breastfeeding at home to pumping and feeding bottles when I went back to work was easy. Everyone told me that was a good thing, since it makes weaning a lot easier too. My initial plan was to nurse/pump until the New Year and then start weaning before 1 year, but you know what they say about plans.

In the last month, I can say that I have gotten lazy about pumping. At work, nothing ruins the productivity of my day like stopping to lock my door, break out the pump and turn up my music loud enough to drown out the sound of lactation. So, with Roman getting older and eating solid foods more, I kinda slacked off and missed a day (or four) of pumping at work. He didn’t seem to mind and I was happy with the distraction out of my day. Especially since I had an entire freezer full of backup and my handy-dandy pump to turn things around at any minute…or so I thought.

Now as every pumping mother knows, without “demand” there is limited supply, so days went by without me pumping at work and my milk dramatically dropped down. Because I couldn’t tell how much milk meltdown we were talking about, I thought I’d finally pump one afternoon to see what the damage was. 25 minutes and only 2 oz later, I knew it was serious. (For reference, Roman eats 6-7 oz of milk/sitting and I use to pump twice that easily in 30 min!).

Worried that there wouldn’t be any milk left for little man, I frantically spent 3 days pumping as often as possible to try and increase what little was left. No dice. 2 oz went to 1.5 went to 1 and I started to panic. And then, something strange happened. In the mornings, Roman became “less than enthusiastic” about nursing certain times and pretty much wiggled out of my arms in favor of the high chair and pureed pears. Now, given the option, I too would probably choose a meal of fruit over ridiculously thin liquid, but Roman was always a breastmilk for breakfast baby.

Then, when he did nurse, it was for much less time than usual. Finally, just this past Wednesday, I tried to nurse him before he went down for bed and he pushed me away in favor of, get this, a bottle full of WATER! So for the next few days, we drank only formula and never nursed and this seemed to be his preference. In essence, Roman weaned HIMSELF from breastmilk!

Assured my every mother in town that I would know when my milk dried up by excruciating pain, I was confident that if he changed his mind we could get back on the milk train. But after a Saturday morning in front of ESPN for an hour pumping without a drop of milk, I can officially say, we have stopped breastfeeding.

I thought I would be more emotional about it all. Regardless of the pain-in-the-neck process of pumping, nothing made me feel closer to Roman than our mornings nestled in the rocker sharing “breakfast”. What would I do now that he wasn’t going to need me to nurse from?

I learned this morning what LABF is like (Life After BreastFeeding). This morning marked his first straight night with no breastmilk and morning of formula. And he seemed fine. We still had a night bottle, still read our favorite nighttime stories – even still had our morning in the chair watching dawn – just this time, it was with a bottle. He even practiced holding it himself in a recent show of independence. And he still spent the time staring into my eyes while I told him stories about how great his day was going to be. So it wasn’t the end of the world as he knew it….and I think we’re both going to be just fine.