Breastfeeding was just so hard in the beginning. Learning to latch. Hand expressing colostrum for days. Engorgement. But mostly, not knowing what on earth I was doing and whether or not I was doing it right. More than anything, in the those early days, I simply needed someone to hold my hand. I had no idea then that I would feel exactly the same at the end of our breastfeeding journey.​

 

Well into my son’s second year of nursing, I used to wonder what people

meant when they talked about feeling touched out? I had been back at work

since my boy was around 9 months old (in between various global

lockdowns), and I had always been excited to rush home to nurse him. It

had felt so wonderful to be reunited after spending the day away from one

another. My heart broke a little when that changed as we approached three

years of breastfeeding.

 

By this point I had been working from home for almost a year and I was still nursing on demand. Something had shifted. Was it being together 24/7? Was it the fact that my son was much bigger physically now? Or maybe because

I was craving more time and space for myself? Whatever the reason, I started to feel frustrated and resentful when he asked to, "Boob.” Shortly after my son’s third birthday, I realized that there was a pattern to my

feeling touched out. I was experiencing feelings of aversion mostly when I was ovulating and just before the start of my period. I had read about breastfeeding aversion being common around the time of a mother’s menstrual cycle and so initially I put my feelings down to that. Besides, I was committed to natural term weaning, wasn’t I?

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Ultimately I came to the decision to wean my son off the breast after a bout of illness. Both he and I were physically and mentally exhausted and I was struggling to cope with his desire to be attached to my breast almost overnight. He had previously been sleeping through the night in the previous months, but this latest bug made him cling to me like a koala 24/7. The more he clung, the more I felt like running in the opposite direction. One night I broke. “I can’t do this,” I whispered to my fiancé between deep sobs. “I can’t do this.” He took our son downstairs, screaming his heart out as I buried my head under the covers. Something needed to change...

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