a toast to breastfeeding

Hi!

First of all, I recorded a voiceover of this So Into That! Click the play button above if you’d like to listen. I really, really tried not to cry, but it was just a crying kind of day apparently.

I’ve had a wild few weeks of travel — both for pleasure to Mexico with the kids, and then, eight hours after landing from Mexico, I left for a 10-day work trip that included announcing my new book on Good Morning America, delivering a keynote at my alma mater (go Heels), taping an upcoming appearance on The Drew Barrymore Show, bringing my 5-year-old along for the second half of the trip, and having a bazillion meetings and coffees in between.

That 10-day trip marked the end of breastfeeding my fourth baby. I breastfed my first baby for 14 months, my second baby for 12 months, my third baby for six months, and my fourth baby for seven months. That’s three years and three months of breastfeeding.

Before I go on, I want to say that I am not writing this to glorify breastfeeding. Any way you feed your baby is absolutely perfect. Formula rules. Giving a baby a pumped milk or formula bottle is just as cozy and wonderful (and also difficult at times) as breastfeeding, and provides many or all of the same moments I share below.

But I did breastfeed (in combination with formula for my last two babies), so, now that that chapter of my life is behind me, I wrote a toast to it, to say goodbye.

Breastfeeding: You made my boobs resemble empty wind socks, you made me question every single food or drink I had consumed in a 48-hour period whenever my baby wiggled slightly too much in his sleep, you made me smell so, so bad, you made my nipples bleed, you made my boobs leak in so many public places, and, according to my math, you consumed roughly 2,400 hours, aka 99 entire days, of my life over the past seven years.

You also allowed me to spend precious hours alone with my tiny, perfect babies, to escape countless boring conversations, to get out of so many tedious obligations, and to hide in dark rooms at parties. You created quiet pockets of time in the middle of loud, busy life. You gave me thousands of small moments with my babies that I’ll never quite be able to explain to anyone who wasn’t there with us. I have loved you, I have hated you, and I have felt pretty whatever about you, sometimes all in the same minute. And it’s time for us to say goodbye forever. But before we do, here’s a toast to you.

To the 1 a.m. feeds, the 3 a.m. feeds, the 3:45 a.m. feeds, the 5 a.m. feeds, and the 5:32 a.m. feeds, when the whole house was silent except for the rhythmic, baby-piglet snorts and gulps. To that first successful latch. To that first public breastfeeding session when you’re still trying to maintain a shred of modesty. To that last public breastfeeding session when you’ve thrown modesty to the wind. To the newly postpartum oxytocin blasts that felt like drugs. To never ever sitting in the rocking chair that my mother-in-law so lovingly bought me, instead preferring to breastfeed in bed, surrounded by pillows, in what my sons aptly named “mama’s nest.”

To the frantic “I NEED WATER! SERIOUSLY, I’M DYING, PLEASE HELP ME RIGHT NOW!” shouts to my husband. To the times he handed it to me before I even asked and it felt like the truest form of love. To my sons asking “does he need to drink yer boob!?” every time the baby cried. To all the food dropped on my babies’ heads. To going from breastfeeding being a quiet, peaceful time to learning how to breastfeed while kissing toddler boo boos, or feeding myself lunch, or building MagnaTile castles, or making snacks. To living life to a soundtrack of white noise. To crying while listening to Michelle Obama’s memoir in my first baby’s first nursery. To flipping the pages of so many books with my chin because I didn’t have any free hands.

To my body literally having a super power: the ability to instantly calm a baby. To powering through the extreme discomfort of breastfeeding on the bleachers at a baseba