Who Would Even Have The Bandwidth to Breastfeed for Two Years?

NOT NOW, American Academy of Pediatrics

This week, the American Academy of Pediatrics released new guidelines on breastfeeding. Now, rather than recommending breastfeeding for the first year of a child’s life, they are recommending doctors talk to American mothers about breastfeeding their babies for the first two years of their child’s life, or more!

I learned this fact while scrolling through Twitter as I breastfed my daughter at 4 am. She had woken up in the middle of what must have been a terrifying baby dream (about what, I have no idea, as nothing bad has ever happened to her) and feeding her is always a failsafe way to get her back to sleep. In fact, it's the only way to get her back to sleep. I'm exhausted. I've been exhausted for months. But I'm more than halfway toward my goal of meeting the original AAP recommendation of one year of breastfeeding; eight months down, four to go. As soon as she turned one, we'd pack it up, and my body would be mine again.

So it was a strange time, both personally and historically speaking, to be told by a medical organization that what I was planning on giving up for my daughter was not enough.

"The AAP supports continued breastfeeding, along with appropriate complementary foods introduced at about 6 months, as long as mutually desired by mother and child for 2 years or beyond," the announcement read.

Haha, noooo thank you.

Breastfeeding was not difficult for us compared to how difficult it can be for others; we figured it out within minutes in the hospital, she’s getting the nutrition she needs from it. I have the flexible schedule of a freelancer, so I can structure my day in a way that minimizes the amount of pumping I have to do (pumping sucks). I don’t anticipate any of those things changing in the near or medium-term… but even under these near-ideal circumstances, the notion of breastfeeding for two years OR MORE seemed like a bridge too far.

Thanks for the memories, breastfeeding, but I absolutely do not want to keep doing this for two damn years.

I’ve written about the actual cost of breastfeeding before. It’s not “free.” It’s a round-the-clock part time job’s worth of time commitment from mothers who do it, even if they have an easy time of it. It takes both a physical and mental toll.

In addition, there are hormonal changes that happen to a breastfeeding body that I don’t think are discussed enough as different medical organizations bandy about suggestions for how long it should go on.

During breastfeeding, prolactin levels are very high, which means the amounts of both estrogen and testosterone are depressed, which prevents ovulation but also throws the body into a “perimenopausal-like” state. For many women who breastfeed, this can mean painful sex, hot flashes, night sweats, leaking breasts (which is-- I cannot stress this enough-- extremely embarrassing), and a decreased sex drive. Two years-plus is a long interruption within a marital sex life, even for the most patient of spouses.

All of my nightshirts smell like cheese after one wearing and I’ve been getting gray hair. I've been in maternity and nursing garments for so long that all of my pretty bras probably think I'm dead.

There are social consequences to breastfeeding. My daughter is old enough to grab for things, and the fact that I’m breastfeeding her means that often when I pick her up, she grabs at my breasts like a drunken 1950’s ad executive at the company Christmas party. It doesn’t matter if I’m in public, or with friends or family. She will contort herself in rage if I pick her up when she’s hungry and I don’t feed her fast enough. She even gropes other people with breasts who hold her. In her baby brain, there are two genders: milk and not-milk.

Seeing as she’s still months away from the earliest baby development experts say she can understand the concept “no,” this is behavior I’m just going to have to live with.

Breastfeeding means that I can’t go for too long without feeding her or pumping, which means that even on days when it isn’t my turn to watch her, I can’t venture far. Date nights have a cap of six hours. It means that if we go anywhere with the baby, when the baby runs out of patience, I’ve got to bring her home. It’s a bond, it’s a tether.

I’m all for systemic support for breastfeeding in line with the AAP’s new guidelines. I think it’s absurd and inhumane that many mothers who would otherwise want to breastfeed their babies aren’t able to because of work demands. (It’s also totally fine if a mother doesn’t breastfeed for no more urgent a reason than she simply wants to retain sole custody of her own breasts.)

But the American Academy of Pediatrics might as well have called on all mothers to get bi-weekly bikini waxes or start every morning with three hours on the Peloton. Sure, that'd be nice if our lives were set up so that we had the time and space to do that. But even if we could, do we want to? Should we want to?

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