It worked for me: Breastfeeding was crazy hard, but weaning is sad too
Written by Addie Pobst

My son Conan is pretty much weaned now, at 13 months. It's been about a week since he last nursed, and he's perfectly happy without it. I have mixed emotions about it — on the one hand, it is SO liberating, but on the other hand it's the end of a really close part of our relationship, a connection we will never have again. But time moves on, and my little guy is rapidly metamorphosing from a baby into a toddler.

Thinking back on my early experience of breastfeeding, the thing that really jumps out is that I never, NEVER believed that we would make it through a whole year. For the first 2.5 months nursing was excruciatingly painful for me. Besides the physical pain, I felt like a total failure because I was constantly in a state of dread regarding the next feeding. A good mama would WANT to feed her baby, right?

That special one-on-one nurturing bonding time that I had so hoped for during pregnancy sure took a LONG time to materialize. I nearly gave up on so many different occasions. In retrospect, only my sheer stubbornness and a sort of twisted sense of maternal self-sacrifice kept me going. Now, a year later, I'm glad I did. Because as horrible as the first couple months were, the later months really did make up for it.

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