The antenatal class dedicated to our mental health was one of the more memorable ones. We read out fictional testimonies about a mother’s condition and decided whether she was experiencing a bad day, depression or “baby blues” – the infamous hormonal helter-skelter that happens when a mother’s milk comes in four days after birth. Nothing, though, was mentioned about the other end of breastfeeding. We were left to figure that out by ourselves.
I stopped feeding my son days before he turned 18 months old. Like many parenting decisions, it was one I had worried lightly about for a good while only to make very quickly in the moment. I’d been away for a few nights and, on the morning I came home, realised with bittersweetness that the feed we’d shared minutes before I left would be our last.
I’d read a little about the low mood that can accompany weaning through one of the scant handful of parenting accounts I follow on Instagram, and braced myself. When a week passed with no symptoms, I thought I’d got away with it. Three days later, I started questioning why I was still alive.
It took me 48 hours to realise that the frequent tears, malaise, inexplicable rage and utter sadness were my weaning hormones kicking in. I was also waking every two hours through the night – while my son and husband slept – and struggling to get back to sleep. As the days passed, I’d begin to feel more like myself, only to be caught out by the hormones again. It seemed relentless.
Trying to work out why I felt quite so unhinged was difficult, but feeling like I was totally alone with it was infinitely worse. Plenty of my friends had recently weaned their children. We’d freely talk about the most intimate parts of our matrescent bodies, but the conversation about our minds had been far more muted. Discussing the “baby blues” was part of postnatal life, but I’d never heard anyone mention post-weaning depression.
On a biological level, breastfeeding triggers the release of prolactin and oxytocin, both of which help to foster feelings of calm, connection and love between a mother and baby. When you stop breastfeeding, however, these hormones are no longer produced in the same quantities. Meanwhile, oestrogen levels increase, often sparking the (vicious) return of your menstrual cycle.
“There’s a hormonal shift when breastfeeding ends, and that shift will usually be more profound if the end was sudden,” explains Lucy Ruddle, who has written several books about breastfeeding, including the recent Breastfeeding Grief, and is an International Board Certified Lactation Consultant. “In addition, on a very primitive level, many experts think that it’s likely a part of the brain or the subconscious views the sudden cessation of breastfeeding as a sign that an infant has passed away, pushing that wave of sadness even harder. We tend to see this far less when a baby or toddler has slowly stopped feeding over a few weeks or months.”
Professor Amy Brown from Swansea University attests that “there hasn’t been a lot of formal research on the physical and psychological symptoms of stopping feeding, but women often describe being hit by feelings of sadness and loss, even when they were happy and ready to stop feeding. Some talk about feeling tired or irritable, very similar to feelings of PMS. And there can be physical symptoms to manage – fullness or soreness as milk production decreases and the risk of mastitis – all while you’re maybe back at work and trying to juggle.”
And that juggle is crucial. Ruddle explains that the lack of societal support in helping women to meet their breastfeeding goals can worsen the effects of stopping, causing the risk of postnatal depression to “skyrocket”. It’s also, like many aspects of the bodily processes involved in childrearing, nothing new. “Women have been talking about their deep sadness and distress about their breastfeeding journeys ending or going badly for as long as we can remember. It’s only been recently that we’ve actually acknowledged that these feelings absolutely are grief,” says Ruddle. “Breastfeeding is important to many people on a deep level they struggle to explain. It can form part of our identity in early parenthood. And then for it to not work? It can leave an emptiness that we can’t put into words.”
The circumstances around weaning can have considerable impact on how a woman feels once she’s stopped, Brown says. “We’re a lot better at recognising the distress and loss women can feel if they have to stop breastfeeding before they are ready when their baby is younger.” But that recognition is still rarely enough. Milli, who is based in West Sussex, stopped feeding her son when he was 10 weeks old. Those 10 weeks had been difficult, to say the least: she had undergone a grade-one C-section after serious birth complications which imperilled both her and her son’s life. Days later, Milli’s mastitis led to her being hospitalised with sepsis and feeding her son became a subject of medical debate between the teams responsible for her care. She and her son managed to find comfort in feeding by the time he was eight weeks old, but she was struggling to keep up with his demand. “I was very incapacitated in many ways,” she says. “I was so heartbroken when it ended before I wanted it to. I was devastated, but I didn’t want to tell anyone because I think it was hard for them to understand: I was already combi-feeding, and I’d already gone through so much, and I was so lucky that neither of us had died in birth or during sepsis. I remember trying to explain that to [my partner], and he just could not get it. I grieved. It really felt as close to grieving as anything else I’ve experienced.”
Milli’s is an extraordinary case, but her feelings of isolation unite the stories I hear from the several women I speak to. I consider myself very fortunate: I have always had a straightforward relationship with breastfeeding, and my son would take a bottle of expressed milk from his newborn days. I felt guilt when I decided to stop – I’d always found reassurance in the nutritional and health benefits of breastmilk – but I was also relieved. Nevertheless, I felt adrift when I did; there just didn’t seem to be the space for a proper conversation about how I felt. When I mentioned that I had stopped feeding, the standard response seemed to be “Well done!” Those two little words seemed deeply inadequate for the enormity of what my brain and body were going through.
Fiona, who is based in Rochdale, suffered from a depression that felt like “being hit by a bus” after she stopped feeding when her son was eight months old. “I would say it was literally an overnight thing for me. I have never felt worse about myself, ever. I hated the way that I looked. I thought everybody hated me as a person. I was crying a lot without knowing what was wrong.” Before her son arrived, Fiona hadn’t expected to breastfeed, and so hadn’t read about it in advance. “It felt quite natural to stop; it was very much on our own terms.” Her mood changed about a week later. It was only when a colleague asked if she had stopped feeding that she understood what was happening.
For Anna, who is based in London, even the GP couldn’t identify weaning as the cause of her symptoms after she gradually stopped feeding after six months. “I started feeling constantly sick,” she explains. “I was brutally depressed and crying constantly, but also I couldn’t sleep at all; I would literally lie there all night until 6am. My mood was absolutely horrendous… I went to the GP a few times, mostly to get my sleeping tablets like some sort of opioid addict. They tested my thyroid, but other than that they had no idea. I was just offered antidepressants, over and over again, to the extent that I started thinking, ‘Yeah, maybe I should start taking antidepressants.’” Anna says she started to feel better after three months, having sought advice from a homoeopathic doctor. “I was just so shocked by these extreme impacts; I had no idea it could possibly be like this. I was looking in books to find similar experiences, and I really couldn’t find anything.”
“Even with the support of a therapist, I was astounded by the fact I had never heard of what weaning might be like,” says Eva, who is also a therapist and based in London. Eva weaned her son, whom she bottle-fed after pumping milk, slowly after nine months. But even the gradual reduction in milk supply didn’t prevent a complicated web of emotions. “It truly was a horrendous period, and I felt extremely alone in it because I felt I had no one to talk to about it that would understand, that could relate, especially as I thought it was a flaw in myself, rather than being grateful that he was healthy and happy and could continue to be.”
When I posted a throwaway mention on my Instagram Stories about how trying my hormones had been since weaning, I was astonished by the tidal wave of responses I received. All these women, sharing their understanding and sympathy. It was enormously helpful: I wasn’t broken, I was undergoing yet another unspoken transformation of matrescence – one that, all too often, you can only know by going through.
Still, we can do more to make this change less punishingly silent. For Professor Brown, it’s a problem that can be tackled at several levels – that of undertaking more research into what women actually experience, of improving support at a healthcare level and, more broadly, at a societal one. “We’re really not very good at supporting mothers through changes in their children’s lives. It’s time we really valued how much our mothers do,” she says. One practical change that would help enormously, she suggests, would be to accommodate breastfeeding and weaning in the workplace support offered to women upon returning to work.
The women I spoke to had different ways of coping. One enjoyed her first night away from her daughter in over a year, and took a moment to journal about her feelings, acknowledging the new space she had carved out for herself. Fiona practised simple wellbeing exercises, such as getting outside and taking some fresh air. Michelle, whose work as a breastfeeding peer supporter still couldn’t prepare her for the “emotional discomfort” she experienced when she stopped feeding her son, has a plan in place for when she eventually stops feeding her daughter: “Nourishing foods, any rest I can get, writing, painting, running. One thing that really helped me has been taking selfies of myself and my children while they feed. It feels slightly ridiculous at the time of taking them but documenting this act feels incredibly important. I revel in them now and have hundreds to look back on. I want my babies to know what a precious experience feeding them with my body has been, how it brought me home, an exhale for us both.” Recently I’ve been wondering if there are any photos of me feeding; I’m surprised at my sadness upon realising I can only think of a couple.
“Journalling, sitting with your feelings, and rituals can all be supportive, healing and very important,” says Ruddle. “Some people get a drop of milk turned into a pearl to wear on a necklace. Some people write a series of letters to their baby, talking it all through. For me personally, I took a moment to carefully pack away my breast pump and all the things I needed to make my journey work in a box, acknowledging the role each item played and thanking it.”
I found myself doing similar things: sorting out the cupboard in my son’s room where the pumps and bottles were kept. Finally attending to my neglected underwear drawer, and recycling all of the bras that had held my changing self through pregnancy and feeding, then treating myself to new ones, in my new size.
It took nearly two months, and another solo trip away, for my hormones to settle – and my mood with them. I am beginning to make peace with the fact I stopped breastfeeding and instead reflect on the pride and happiness that it brought me while I did it. So many of us are swimming, silently, in similar waters. Imagine how much easier it would be if we didn’t have to do it alone.
