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Home › Articles › Weaning › The Heart of a Mother

The Heart of a Mother

Breastfeeding Lingers Beyond Weaning

By Shel Franco

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I am not breastfeeding a child, but I am a breastfeeding mother. My youngest child weaned more than a few months ago. Yet the absence of this child at my breast has not changed me as a mother. I guess it goes a little something like this: Once a breastfeeding mom, always a breastfeeding mom.

Breastfeeding gave me confidence in those early days of mothering. I couldn't seem to hold my newborn as confidently as the nurses, my mother or my mother-in-law. I didn't put on his diaper with ease. I didn't even know how to give him a proper bath. But I could feed him like nobody else could. And even in my moments of doubt – Was he getting enough? – I somehow knew I was going to be OK.

Breastfeeding also taught me to go against the grain for the better of lives around me. As a young mother, societal norms and the expectations of those whom I admired always dictated my ultimate actions; then I breastfed. Society certainly didn't like the idea, and neither did more than a few of the people I admired most. But I did it anyway. I'm certainly not a renegade by any means, but I've proven to myself that I can stand up for what I believe in.

Breastfeeding taught me that my children are unique. They couldn't be fed from directions on a packet or can, directions that are uniform for children throughout the world. No, my children ate at different rates, different times and with different intensities. Some days they were hungrier than other days, and eventually I learned not to worry – a lesson I appreciated over and over again when the preschool years arrived.

Breastfeeding taught me to take care of my children intimately – not by simply going through the actions. I realized that I had the power to make everything in their little world right. I could fix hunger, pain, loneliness, sadness and the list goes on. I could fix them all by myself, without bells and whistles, without expensive toys, without fancy performances. When it came down to it – and comes down to it, still – I have the power to make my children's world right by simply giving them me, my time, my ears to listen, my hand to hold, my arms to hug.

Could I have learned all of these things without breastfeeding? Perhaps. But even now, when mothering gets hard, intense and overly emotional, I feel something within my breasts stir, something warm, tingling and tender, a sensation that reminds me of the rush I felt before my babies filled with sweet milk. And though I know my milk is long gone, I am reminded that the heart of this mother began with breastfeeding.

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