Goodbye sweet nursing bra's... I miss you..

This is a very hard post for me to Publish. 

As anyone who knows me or reads my sh@t will know, I am very pro-breastfeeding. I hope to train as a breastfeeding councillor and to help people in the way in which, I was helped in the early days. So it fills me with sadness to say that on 1st Dec 2011 I officially stopped breastfeeding frog (although I have fed a few times since) That was the official stop date. :-( Frog is only 9 months old, I wanted her to have Mummys milk for 2 years, or at least 12 months, but our wonderful, special journey has come to an end. 

After trying to change jobs, trying different ways of expressing, working out every which way to manipulate my shifts it became clear that i wasn’t going to be able to keep feeding once I returned to work on 9th January. I wanted to give us both time to adapt and if I am being brutally honest there were some selfish reasons for me stopping too. I wanted (or thought I did) to be able to spend more than two hours away from frog without having to plan for it like a military operation, and shamefully I wanted to have a Christmas drink without having to worry about units, calculating hours, feelings of guilt in case alcohol is still in my system. Everyone else thought it was the right time, and so did I ... so I stopped, and now my milk has gone. 

So why do I feel so awful? Well, mostly it is for the frog, I really wanted her to have the best start for the longest time possible. Also for me, I feel all the emotions I expected to, regret, guilt, loss, failure, grief? I miss it.. I really miss feeding her! I miss the closeness we shared and the fact that ONLY I could have that with her, it was our bond, our thing. 

Maybe most of the feelings I have are caused by the hormonal changes within me. Very quickly your body let you know that things have.... changed. Frog misses it too, for the first two weeks, she head butted me constantly, threw her open mouth onto me as her signal that she wanted to nurse. She has stopped that now too.. she knows, that her milk now comes from Dr Brown, not Mama frog. 

I am very proud of our journey together, When I was pregnant I wasn’t even sure I would breastfeed, then when I had her, I aimed for 4 months. I almost gave up after 5 weeks and I honestly think that if I wasn’t going back to work we would still be going strong. We got to (almost) 9 months and had many problems along the way. I have learnt so much about this amazing nurturing skill. I am very grateful to the frog for giving me this fantastic experience, and I have nothing but fond memories of feeding my little girl. She is wonderful and so am I.

I will always be a strong supporter of breastfeeding Mama’s. I will always smile at the lonesome Mum trying to breastfeed in a coffee shop with a scarf in one hand, fidgeting baby in the other, I will always give a hug to the mother who says “she’s still every two hours’ or ‘I know she’s comfort feeding ..but..’ ... But also, after the last month, I will ALWAYS listen to the Mum who tries breastfeeding and stops for whatever reason, because breastfeeding isn’t easy, but stopping is very very hard. 

Goodbye sweet nursing bras. I will remember your awkwardness, your unsupportive style, and your unflattering designs, with nothing but fondness and love. 

Until next time... Goodbye xx