C doesn’t sleep. For months now, she wakes over and over at night, 10 times, 12. The only thing that calms her is the boob. So of course Ricky suggests night weaning. We have to get her off the boob, he says at 2.13am as C wails so loudly I can barely make him out. “What? What?” I yell into the noise and the dark. But I don’t want to stop breastfeeding, though I’m also totally desperate to.
The trouble is I’m on a home birth WhatsApp group full of vehemently natural mothers who forswear thermometers and paracetamol. Every now and then some desperate sleep-deprived baby slave will pop up and ask about weaning. The nice, natural moms (not those stinky, pill-popping, Calpol-swilling corporate swine) will kindly ask how old the offending tippler is. If he or she is younger than three, they are politely but firmly told to “get support”, but keep bebe on the boob if they don’t want an alienated, rejected, love-deprived husk for a child.
I’m also on another WhatsApp group. Whenever sleep is brought up there, that aching, heavy-lidded day zombie is directly by the efficient moms (not those dirty hippies who let their babies die of meningitis), via Instagram, to a sleep consultant, who will train the terrible tot to sleep in three days flat. These seem to be the choices: total sacrifice for years unending with the threat of spiked cortisol levels hidden by a quiet-but-actually-miserable baby, or a quick-fix solution sold to you en mass for a low, low price and put in place just in time for cocktail hour with the other go-getters. I want neither. And my breastfeeding seems tethered to something else entirely.
First there is the line of mothers stretching out, mouthing the command of all martyrs: don’t be blamed – whatever you do, make sure you can hold the victim pole, and especially the self-sacrificing aspect. This creates a paradox for me: I am choosing to keep C at the breast, meaning my sleeplessness is my fault; but it is also the ultimate in holy mothering, giving it all up for the suckling babe. Then there is this duty I feel; this is what good mothers do, they breastfeed. This is also connected to the story my own mother told me about stopping breastfeeding me at four months. (Am I breastfeeding C for this long as a reaction? Am I just caught in the same cycle?) Finally I have my cousin in my ear, saying C is simply using me as a dummy (I’m a dummy, a putz, manipulated by a mere baby).
I cry a little in the morning, hiding from the nanny and C in the hallway. I cry from exhaustion. I cry from confusion. I cry because I’m so tired I could die and I can’t sleep in the day, even when there is that possibility. My whole system is a battleground.
In a therapy session I am asked to visualise, without the baggage, breastfeeding, and why I do it. I close my eyes and see C on my breast. Her tongue is just visible along the line of my nipple. I watch it undulate. Sometimes she smiles while drinking, or laughs, and then I can see her tongue more fully as it laps. I feel the pull on my breasts as a tug on the skin, but also as a slight sense of the milk moving from me into her; I can feel the flow, the cycle circling between us. C receives without impediments, fully herself and in no way suspicious of this outpouring. She receives it not as her right either, but as though there were no difference between her and it. She does not love the boob, or me, or the milk so much as she is all of these things. Sometimes she absently pinches me or strokes the skin on my chest or hugs my arm, gripping on to me as though I were a raft in the sea of night.
I try to say why I breastfeed, why I chose it and why I choose it still, but find I can’t put a shape to it. Why did I fight to make it work in the beginning, when it would have been easier not to? Why did I want a home birth, when I knew I’d have to fight for it from everyone around me? I find only this: somehow I wanted to stand on my own ground.
At a party I am told by three different people to stop breastfeeding and get a life. It is because I have to leave the party early to do the nighttime routine, which includes breastfeeding to sleep. I remember the one sleep book I read warned never to breastfeed to sleep. Yet, it feels like the only thing that calms her. “Boop” was one of her first words (after “out, out, dogs” and before “nahna” for banana). “Boop, boop,” she now demands, hitting my chest and pulling at my top. My bra and breasts are flashed to friends and strangers. People look at me askance.
Someone commented that if they can ask for it, they’re too old for it. Another said teeth are an indicator that it’s been going on too long (meaning anything from four to six months). I cast around to try to figure out what to do here. C loves the boob more than anything. Ricky says she’s boob obsessed, and she is. I feel afraid. I feel afraid of her need, her new monstrousness, as she whines and hits, commands.
Another word she has learned is “no” (she seems not to know “yes”). She uses her “no” more and more. I offer water, “No,” she says firmly pushing it away. Oh, thank goodness, I think. Now we are communicating. Ricky goes to comfort her in bed while I rush off to pee and she cries, “Nooooo, Nooooo, no, no, Nooooo.” I return and she dives into my breast. Ricky and I look at each other over her snuffling, searching mouth, frantic to be hooked up to my nipple again. We hold eyes for a long time in the half light.
C has gone through a stage of rejecting Ricky, pushing him away or crying madly in his arms. At first he laughed, but it happened enough to begin to wear a being down. She knows what she does not want. That is her “no”. And she hears it back to her, over and over. No, Ricky says, as C screams and wiggles to get out of his arms. I’m sorry, but this is it. You can cry, and I will hold you. She cries, Nooo, nooo; he holds, rocking. When she falls asleep in his arms, he deposits her next to me and she immediately wakes and sucks on a breast.
I ache. My body must keep lying in one position for much of the night. What is too much? Is this it? Probably, yes. I should probably get a life. Ricky says I matter too, as does he. It cannot be all her. We are both so, so tired. How do I find my sides, her sides, his sides; what boundary needs to be laid down? C’s “no” is also my “no”. She is, as I watch her, imbibing noness. She polices herself, it seems. When she approaches a plug she wags her finger. No, she says, wagging her finger over the plug, seconds before reaching for it. No, no, she says, as she pulls it out. I wonder, does she think that one interacts with a plug by first signalling “no” and waving a finger? Or is she showing she knows this is wrong but can’t resist?
She does the same with the oven. Hot, hot, she says. No, she says, but always she touches it. What is her world but a series of boundaries, inexplicable and everywhere? The dishwasher is a no-go zone, though full of dishes which are allowed to be touched in other places, like the tupperware cupboard. The cactuses receive a screaming No and a grab away, yet other plants are a lazy no, plants don’t want to be torn. Why? Her whole world is like this. No!, she yells back. Of course she does.
No more booby, I say to her in the night, after I slip my pinkie finger between her lips to break the suction on my breast. She wails. Booby is closed, I say. A boundary, I am laying down a boundary. I am not just a teat to be sucked on all night. I matter. I have a life. Ricky says I’m half night weaning and its torture for everyone and very confusing. I need to make up my mind. Again, it seems my options narrow down to all or nothing: an all-night open bar or total sobriety. I read that toddlers who are boob obsessed are just looking to form secure attachment, as opposed to insecure attachment. “It lays down the way she will interact in relationships for the rest of her life.” Jesus! Whip out the boob, quick! “Boop, boop,” she says. “No,” I say and then say something about how frustrating it is not to get your way: “Learn how to hold boundaries, C, be happy, with strong foundations, please God.” Or “Yes, okay,” I say, and then stroke her hair and croon, meeting her eye and feeling her tongue on me: “Be secure, C, be happy, with strong foundations, please God.”
What is this other, better life I am meant to be living, as recommended by people at parties? Should I shrug off this seeming smallness, voyage forth with a three-pointed hat to conquer some grand far-away place, bloody myself, cover myself in glory – which in this age would look like a headliner job full of money and stress and prestige, full of back pats and awards, maybe even an Oscar, an A rating, or at the very least the adoration of TikTok followers? I would have to wean the baby first, obviously, before I colonise some gleaming virgin territory.
Or should I fall into the humdrum, try to find fullness in a sink full of dishes, in nappies and sleep experts and WhatApp groups? Should I breastfeed until C is three or four, become one of those “I feel you, mama” mamas who talk about their profound and total dedication to their children with melting smiley faces and hug emojis?
Do I break the grip of this suction with my pinkie finger – this much and no more! – or do I let this unfold, flow, like my milk into C? Am I creating a monster? Will I become one?
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