Bandaid nipples

10 January 2022 | Jono 2 years | Lochie 3.5 years

Jono…

Jono, my little baby. You break my heart. I don’t understand you but I want to, so much, and I cannot wait to meet you as you come out of your prison of knowing what you want but being unable to say it. You are so expressive, your communication is pretty developed… you hold my hand to take me places, you move my fingers to point something out, and you point to the clips on YouTube that you want me to play. But if something doesn’t go your way immediately, you’re on the ground uncontrollably thrashing your arms and legs and screaming without a pause.

I wonder if you will lose your voice but you never do. You just scream and scream and you cry a lot. You cry so much. Sometimes Lochie and I just wait it out. Sometimes Lochie says calmly to you, “Jono, too noisy” or “Jono, stop crying” or “Jono, don’t worry, it’s ok Jono”.

That breaks my heart too.

He really reaches out to you sometimes but in those moments of tantrums you cannot accept anybody’s olive branch. Sometimes you even push me away. In those instances, which can last for 30 minutes, you push away everything: cheese, chocolate, biscuits, daddy, Lochie and mummy. But after a while, when I come around and make my chest available to you, you jump on me and you grab my neck and make like a possum around my neck and your sobs soften. You grab my neck with the emotional intensity of a teenager, and as your miniature fingers grab my hair and your snotty cheeks wash against mine, your sobs slow down and I can almost hear you saying, “Mummy thank you for coming to my rescue, finally! I was stuck in my cocoon, in this body that cannot speak, unable to say the words I want to say so that you can understand me. I want to say it so badly, I want to tell you what I need, what I want, and you can’t understand me. I’m stuck here. I’m alone in this prison and you can’t hear me, no matter how loudly I’m screaming, nobody can hear me. I’m stuck, I’m stuck!”

“Tuck,” you say. It’s your new favourite word. You say it a lot, since you learned what stuck means, you’ve started using it everywhere. And all that I can hear is that you’re stuck.

It’s breaking my heart to hear you cry and be able to do nothing about it. You are inconsolible. My heart breaks when Lochie says, “Mummy, why is Jono crying?” I’m so fed up and emotionally on edge. “I don’t know baby, Jono just cried all the time,” I reply, exhaustedly. I wish I knew what to say. I wish I didn’t angry. I wish you could speak. I wish you could tell me. I wish I knew. Everyone always asks me why you are crying, as if I know your secret language, as if I can tell. I can’t. I am with you more than anyone and I watch you and my instincts are tuned up on highest alerts to your signals, but your outbursts are inconsistent and unpredictable and go for such long periods that it screws with my head. “I don’t know!” I answer frustratedly and retreat. I should know, but I don’t.

I’m so tired, honey, I haven’t slept properly since early 2018. Almost 4 years. You’re still breastfeeding and you’re very intense. You practically rip my top off to get at your boobies. It’s such a mixed situation… breastfeeding is the best thing I’ve done (next to giving birth to you and Lochie) and I have no regrets. After my unsuccessful breastfeeding efforts with Lochie, and going insane in an effort to breastfeed him, I was thrilled about the way things were going with you. You were exclusively breastfed. No bottles (you never learned to drink milk from a bottle, and never used a dummy) and not a hint of formula.

I thought you’d naturally wean off breastfeeding when you started solids. You’re a good eater, you love your meats and your cheeses. You even prefer chicken to chocolate. That’s incredible! No, please don’t chase me like a shark when you’re still chewing chicken… I can see dribbles of chicken fat down your chin and you’re chasing my boobs, and you’re laughing that I’m terrified and retreat backwards, cornered by the kitchen cabinetry! No, I don’t want oily chicken lips around my nipples, and how can you want sweet milk with your salty chicken? And then you get sick and all you want is comfort mummy milk, and you bring my weaning supply right back. You want boobies morning and night and during the day and if you had your way you’d have them every hour on the hour. Sometimes you come over to have a suck just to show Lochie that you can – this part of mummy is still yours. If Lochie comes close to me during this time, not touching me but within reach, you scream and make an effort to kick him.

But you’re nearly 2 years old and you wear size 3-4 clothing. You have a baby face, a tiny head, but a chunky miniature man body. And you bite me. How you bite me!!

At least you’ve stopped biting my nipples. That was a hard period. You learned, eventually, that it caused me great pain, and you learned that I wans’t joking when I yelled out. You initially thought it was funny and you would try to rip the nipple right off. Somehow my nipples became rubbery enough to withstand your teeth. Then you realised you were hurting me, and your empathy kicked in. You don’t want to hurt me. So why do you bite my legs and my fingers and my hands? I’m covered in bruises from where you’ve bitten me. Your miniature crocodile jaws lock down on the target, my skin, and try to rip it right off. I yelp, I say no, I give you bad looks, I even cry. How else can I tell you, stop, you’re hurting mummy?

So imagine my surprise when I finally decide that this is the day breastfeeding ends. I put on a bandaid on each nipple. I do this in front of you, while you’re in the bath, so you know what’s happening. And surprisingly, when we cuddle in your room, I tell you that mummy has an owie so we can’t breastfeed. Have you seen a bandaid before? Why does this work, when “no” has no effect? You fight within yourself but you refrain from sucking a bandaid, or ripping it off, because you know mummy has an owie… how’s that for empathy? You try to distract yourself by focusing on the story I’m telling you but after a minute you’re longing to cuddle my nipples, out of habit and the intense comfort it brings you. I’ve seen you, while sick and desperate for comfort, fingering the nipple of a baby bottle. You twist and pinch my nipples and you play with them like Lochie played with his “special blanket”, rubbing the blanket with his fingers for hours. You draw comfort from this movement, as I draw comfort from wine, and you’re not asking me to stop drinking. I’m sorry that I’m asking you to stop breastfeeding.

It doesn’t take you long to realise the left boob is out of action, and you’re not interested in hurting mummy by ripping off the bandaid. You’re not an animal. You just thought we both enjoyed this moment together and I’m also sad that we can’t do it now. So after a few distracted pages of your favourite book, you try the right breast… and discover another bandaid on the nipple! I tell you that mummy has an owie, sorry, but let’s focus on this book instead?

That’s when you let out the strangest cry I’ve heard from you. A loud and short cry, genuine sadness, loss, exasporation, understanding that all is lost and all effort is hopeless… you will not get boobie milk tonight! Your cry is mature and wise, you’ve always had a “wise old man” vibe about you, like you’re a miniature version of an old man. A few people have made this same observation. Maybe that’s why your tantrums hurt so much… your emotions and reactions don’t seem like a silly baby’s reactions. It seems like you understand everything, you hear everything, you know everything but you can’t say it. Like out of Kafka’s Metamorphasis.

Realising boobs are out of action, you don’t persevere with that line of enquiry. You need comfort and closeness, and the boobies are just proxies. So you grab my hand and my fingers and you make an effort to get close to mummy by holding my hand and pointing at pictures in books. You give up being at my chest level, and climb up to sit on my hands and wrap yourself around my neck so that our faces are closer. And when I tell you it’s sleepy time, you don’t grab my boobs in an effort to prolong time with me. You’ve had enough, you make yourself into a plank and happily let me put you into the cot. You throw a few bottles overboard for fun but you fall asleep anyway and you don’t make a noise, because boobies won’t come.

I tell you that if breastfeeding is gone, we can be even closer. We really can. A new closeness will come… once breastfeeding has overstayed its welcome, it’s become a wedge not a glue between us, and I promise you that so much closeness awaits if you just let it morph into the next thing. Please, please let the boobies go.