You Have Permission to Stop Breastfeeding

Just leaving this here for whoever needs it.

Every February and March, Facebook Memories resurfaces a few old photos that quietly break me for a minute.

The first round came this week; decade-old shots of my first baby in a hospital bed, recovering from having a gastric tube surgically implanted in her stomach because at six months old, we had finally grasped that she was a baby who could not eat by mouth.

The next one will come in early March but I grabbed it early for you. It’s a six-year-old photo of baby bottles (yes those bougie LifeFactory bottles, which new mom me was convinced I needed!) and cans of formula, which I took to commemorate the end of my second breastfeeding experience, when my younger daughter was five months old.

Now that I parent elementary school-aged kids, I rarely think about my ever-so-brief breastfeeding days. This, by the way, is the first thing they don’t tell new moms who are struggling to breastfeed and feeling wracked with guilt at the prospect of stopping. That prospect of “failure” feels monumental. But nobody can look around a first or fifth grade classroom and tell which kids were breastfed. As long as you have access to clean drinking water, breastfeeding is just far more optional than we want new moms to believe.