This will probably horrify you but my daughter is 10 months old and I’m still breastfeeding her.  In many respects this horrifies me as well.  She has teeth and she’s not afraid to use them.  There’s a special little look that she gets, a flash of pure mischievous evil, and you know she knows exactly what she’s doing.  She’s a chip off the old block.  Fortunately for me she doesn’t need much milk any more but I’m sure you’re wondering why on earth I put myself through it when I really don’t like doing it.  No, I’m not one of “those” mothers.  The answer is simple, it’s free and this time around I’ve actually been able to do it.

There’s a great deal of advice out there for pregnant women and new mothers.  All of it seems very bossy and patronising and most of it revolves around breastfeeding.  It seems that if you want your child to be intelligent and healthy you MUST breastfeed them until they’re 25.  If you want them to be sickly and a dunce then by all means give them formula milk but it will be all your fault.  And if you want to lose the baby weight quicker breastfeeding will help you with that.  Rubbish.  It’s a cunning piece of propaganda but I can absolutely assure you that’s not true.

When I had number 1 son almost 12 years ago the guidelines were very different.  They recommended breastfeeding until 6 weeks.  When I had number 2 son 2 years later they’d upped it to 3 months.  For some reason it really didn’t work for me, I tried my hardest but they ended up on formula milk so I didn’t have to get up hourly to feed them.  But the guilt!  Instead of supporting mothers who can’t (or won’t) feed their babies themselves the “healthcare professionals” that I came into contact with at the time dished out disapproval and made me feel like a terrible mother who had failed her children.  And yet my boys are both bright children who are rarely ill.  I very much doubt that this attitude to formula feeding has changed, I know of people who have struggled with it in recent years and have been made to feel bad by the breastfeeding Nazis.  Just because it worked for them doesn’t mean it works for everyone.  Surely it’s far better to be comfortable in what you’re doing rather than worrying about it?

It’s not just the professionals that lay on the guilt trips, though.  Other mothers are quite possibly the worst offenders.  There are people in the world who have a baby and become self-proclaimed experts on all things to do with children.  This really annoys me.  Maybe I’m being unfair but they strike me as the kind of people whose weeks are filled with endless baby related activities, storytime on Monday, music and movement on Tuesday, Mother and Baby group on Wednesday, baby swimming on Thursday (ok, I hold my hands up to that one but I’ve explained my reasoning here) and why not a bit of baby signing on Friday?  Baby signing? WTF?

Having a baby appears to remove these people’s identities, their whole lives now revolve around their little poo machine and everything becomes a competition.  “Really? Your baby is 7 months and still isn’t sitting up? Well, little Johnny has been doing that since he was 5 months old. And 2 days later he started walking.  And he can already recite the alphabet backwards.  And he’s just started reading War and Peace.”  Bully for him.  They don’t leave it that either, they like to inflict their advice on you too.  Things like “I can’t believe you’re giving your child a dummy, they’ll get buck teeth”.  Really nice supportive words.  Number 1 son had a dummy and his teeth are fine.  It was a struggle to get rid of it, but he finally gave it up last year.  Only joking, and I suspect he may beat me up for that…

I like to think that my friends with children and I are normal, we are still us, we still like doing things for ourselves and if we go into a shop we’ll look at the high-heeled “bedroom” shoes first, long before we look at kids clothes or toys.  OK, so I do have rather a lot of pictures of my daughter on facebook but that’s mainly because my sister paps her all the time.  And if I do ever start to show tendencies of becoming one of “those” mothers I’m lucky enough to have at least one friend who will be completely honest and point it out to me.

So I will continue to breastfeed my daughter until she is a year old when she can have cows’ milk.  And then I will be free, at least until I pop out number 4…