Okay, so I have recently weaned Charlotte from the breast, after 20 months and thousands of hours. My leather couch has a divit in the center cushion that precisely the shape of my butt bones, plus or minus a few pounds. It will be there forever.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have my freedom back. Don't get me wrong. Nursing my children is something I will never regret. But to have my body back after 4 years of being pregnant, nursing or both, feels wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.
To celebrate the end of this era, I ran the Disney Princess Half Marathon a few weeks ago. Throughout the race, I was half laughing, half crying, just reflecting on this journey and also the return to myself.
My energy level since I began to wean Charlotte has skyrocketed, even though it has been a slow, months-long process frought with mixed feelings and motivated by fright over the thought of still nursing this very vocal girl when she is old enough to have an argument about it. Many of my good friends believe in allowing children to self-wean. I say more power to you. But I am so darn glad to be at the next thing.
Then, today, I came across this article.
I found out about it because of an e-mail I got from some group I joined when I was hormonal and political all at the same time (not necessarily a good combination, mind you). Author Hanna Rosen is being witch hunted by zealots of the liquid gold that is breastmilk. But many of her points triggered what Oprah would call an "A-ha moment" in my soul.
She says,
"In Betty Friedan’s day, feminists felt shackled to domesticity by the unreasonably high bar for housework, the endless dusting and shopping and pushing the Hoover around—a vacuum cleaner being the obligatory prop for the “happy housewife heroine,” as Friedan sardonically called her. When I looked at the picture on the cover of Sears’s Breastfeeding Book—a lady lying down, gently smiling at her baby and still in her robe, although the sun is well up—the scales fell from my eyes: it was not the vacuum that was keeping me and my 21st-century sisters down, but another sucking sound."
And then,
"The debate about breast-feeding takes place without any reference to its actual context in women’s lives. Breast-feeding exclusively is not like taking a prenatal vitamin. It is a serious time commitment that pretty much guarantees that you will not work in any meaningful way. Let’s say a baby feeds seven times a day and then a couple more times at night. That’s nine times for about a half hour each, which adds up to more than half of a working day, every day, for at least six months. This is why, when people say that breast-feeding is “free,” I want to hit them with a two-by-four. It’s only free if a woman’s time is worth nothing."
Wow.
