Mother’s milk is best. Oldest of ten, I grew up in a homebirth family, one in which my mother nursed all of us and it seemed the entire time I was growing up there was a nursing baby. Ripping at my mother’s shirt at the grocery store or on the church pew, always she was nursing a child in our living room when my friends came to visit. This was happening throughout the eighties when most other mothers used bottles from birth. With each consecutive child my mother nursed just a little bit longer and the questioning looks probably began when these toddlers were called in for nap, running and starting to ride bikes.
Me too—I nursed all four of my children beginning with my first-born just a month after I’d turned seventeen. I nursed him for twenty months despite his pediatrician telling me it was verging on sexual abuse? The second was two years and the third for two and a half. I was nursing her while I was pregnant with my last thinking that I’d try tandem nursing—two at once--even though my great-grandmother worried about my health in doing so.
But, during the seventh month of pregnancy, I felt an instinctual urge to chase her off in the same way you see mother cat’s biting at teen kittens who won’t leave her alone. My youngest, well, I nursed him until he was nearly five! We had a cute little nursing song, “Your cocoa nurrey’s, come get your nurrey’s,” and he’d come running for love!
All in all, I had a baby at my own breasts over a decade!
