Do you remember, in The English Patient, when Almásy claimed the hollow of Katharine Clifton’s neck as his? I have never forgotten that. I think of it each time one of my children visits their own claimed topography. They each have a preference for a certain section of my body, whether breastfeeding, sleeping, or looking for a snuggle and comfort. They have each claimed their own parcel of Mommy Real Estate.

Bonding with my children has not been just about the breasts. I mean, don’t get me wrong, they were handy and low maintenance, and always on the menu and just the right temperature. By the way, I ask you: when has that EVER happened since you weaned your child? WHEN in the name of God and all His backup singers? Never! Am I right?

Now, each child had a favorite spot, but there was one part of me that all three loved equally: the soft underside of my upper arm. It was a must for any baby of mine to fall asleep with the top of the head firmly pressed into my outstretched arm and body curled into my chest. I think it reminded them of the closeness of my womb, and the security of that pressure.

They have since adopted different parts of my body as personal totems and touchstones. If one of my children is upset, I know that all I have to do is sit quietly and help them to find their secret spot, and all will be well again.

My eldest always nursed as a baby while holding onto my nose. He liked the feel of the tip on the palm of his hand, and no matter how much I discouraged him or tried to distract him, he was never happy unless he could rest his hand there. It was either that or the inside of my mouth, fingers curled over my lower teeth. The nose, I decided, was not so bad. Later, as he weaned and began to walk and talk, he began to rest his hand on the swell of my breast, just under my collarbone. Again, I think it was the sensation of having warm, soft flesh against his palm. It soothed him. I don’t have a single picture of the two of us together during his toddlerhood where he doesn’t have one hand down the front of my shirt and the other around my shoulder.

He never did have a traditional lovey—not a blanket, or a bottle, or a teddy bear. He did, however, carry around a tennis ball. There is just something about a convex surface in the palm of that kid’s hand that makes him feel safe. I sometimes still catch him sidling up to me and slipping his hand under the back of my shirt to rest his palm along my waist for a moment before moving away.

My middle child was always very big on eye contact. Whenever I sang to him or told him a story, he would sit on my lap, hands folded, absolutely silent, with his wide eyes on mine. He would listen until the song or story ended, pull his binky slightly out of his mouth, and say simply, “More.”

And, if we fell asleep together, it was likely as not forehead-to-forehead, smiling at one another. We might turn over and snuggle up back-to-back, our spines pressed together.

My daughter had her own preferences. She was incredibly partial to my left shoulder. She placed her blanket over my shoulder, arranged it just right, and then nestled her head into the soft nest she made, thumb in mouth. She also liked to get right in front of my face, press our foreheads together, look into my eyes and tell me that she likes me, and that I am home. It got me every time. She shared my bed for the first several years (that’s a story for another time), and when we fell asleep together, we’d curl in, facing one another, her snuggled tightly into my chest. And always, just as with her brothers before her, I stretched my right arm out and she pressed the crown of her head into the underside so that she is encompassed within the 90 degree angle of my arm and my body. It was her haven and mine as well.

What was your child’s haven? Do you miss it? Is there some way you have preserved it as they grew?

If there’s one thing I dislike about growing up the daughter of a world-renowned pathologist and public health expert, it’s not being taken seriously by my own doctors when I try to save them some work with the differential diagnosis when I show up sick in their offices. I know my symptoms, I’ve done the research, I’ve paid attention over the years, I know my body, heck, I even own a copy of the DSM-IV. I don’t take medical care lightly when I am breastfeeding.

I digress.

Once, I presented with what I knew to be a secondary, bacterial infection. I was still breastfeeding one of my three children, two of whom were in the examination room with me. After a cursory examination, the doctor was just about to write a prescription for an antibiotic when he looked up and asked if I was by any chance nursing.

“Technically, yes.” I said. “But not much. I can have Amoxicillin, Keflex, or Augmentin.”

He looked at me skeptically and began to thumb through his little reference booklet.

“My OBGYN has prescribed all of those for me before, even while pregnant, so I am sure they would be fine this time.” I could tell he didn’t believe that I was capable of that kind of deduction.

“Um, how often do you nurse?”

“Not often.”

“Well, what do they eat during the day?”

I looked down at my 2-year-old daughter and 3-1/2-year-old son and wondered what he was thinking. “Um, well, they are all old enough to eat anything they want. It’s just a psychological tether and a bonding thing. And it’s just the youngest.”

“Oh, so you aren’t nursing them all?”

“NO!”

“OK, I had to ask. We just had someone in here that nursed hers until they were 6.”

“Ahahahahahaha. No.”

All of this got me thinking. Aside from a 3-month break in 1997, during which time I was actively trying to conceive after a loss, I have been either pregnant or nursing pretty much continuously since December, 1996. Holy little green tomatoes.

Most of my friends’ babies weaned themselves before 12 months, but I seem to be putting out either chocolate milk or crack cocaine, because my kids fight me tooth and nail for extended nursing rights.

To be fair, after my middle child suffered major heart damage with viral myocarditis as a newborn, my pediatrician encouraged us to go as long as we could both stand it to boost his immune system. All it took was for him to mention that it would only take one good, strong cold or flu to kill our son in the first year and I was right there with the program, fully and completely over whatever pressure I was feeling from those who looked askance at family beds, attachment parenting, and extended breastfeeding. They weren’t the ones wearing my breasts, I was, and mine was the only opinion that mattered in the end.

Brief aside: I’m not kidding about the whole family bed thing. If I have to line up syringes on my nightstand for round-the-clock administration to a newborn, I am not walking down the hall to get the baby. Period. I want that little sucker right where I can hear him breathing.

For six months, I carried a clipboard charting out the various medications, dosages, and schedules; believe me, when you are already sleep deprived and suffering from postpartum depression, you do NOT want to confuse the blood pressure medication with the morphine with the steroids with the stuff that makes his heart beat strongly enough to keep him alive.

It seems to be true, though, that some children will want to go on longer than the most devoted attachment parenting devotees, and I actually found myself with tandem nurslings after I fell pregnant again when my second was just 9 months old. Yes, I just said that. Tandem. Nurslings.

Does this sound familiar to anyone else? What’s your experience with illness and breastfeeding? Has an unexpected event or illness changed how you viewed whether to breastfeed or for how long?

For mine, it was more like giving them crack. Wait, let me back up a bit. I love looking back through my online archives for small, unremembered nuggets of family life and recently came across one from 2004, when I was still nursing my children and feeling a bit defensive about what others might have to say about extended breastfeeding.

At the time, I was desperately trying to wean my daughter, but I seem to put out crack-laced milk and she had the same extreme reluctance to wean as my first two children did. Along those lines, I had a very interesting conversation with my two youngest one morning.

We were all having the morning puppy-pile in my bed before we got up to greet the day, and as usual Daphne was clamoring for “mama.” Sigh. I thought, “When is this going to end?” I don’t mind extended breastfeeding, I really don’t. I support it, and practiced it. It was the emotional pain of weaning and taking away something familiar and comforting to my own flesh and blood that I couldn’t stand.

So, as I was telling my daughter that she may not have mama, but that I would happily give her a cup of milk or juice, I noticed that my son had become very thoughtful. “Mommy, she wants mama.”

“I know sweetie, but we’re trying to only have that at bedtime.”

I turned to my daughter. “Can you tell me why you like mama better than milk? Isn’t milk yummy?”

She went into a massive pout.

“OK,” I said, turning back to her brother, “why do you think she wants it more than milk or juice? Do you remember what it’s like?”

His face lit up. “Yes! It tastes like white milk, and it’s sweet, like candy. It’s like candy milk, and it’s very yummy. But I don’t like mama any more. I’m too big.”

Well, there you have it folks. The reasoning behind why some children just refuse to wean. Because it tastes like sweet candy milk.  If someone tried to get me to stop having a raspberry-filled chocolate with my morning coffee after having it every day of my life, I’d get defensive too.

Just think of this, though: even more than a year after his last taste, a little boy still gets all warm and happy and cuddly and smiley when he remembers. How many children have this sort of memory, this visceral connection that stretches from nourishment as an infant, to comfort as a toddler, to warm memory during snuggles as a child and beyond?

What do you think? It there a hard-and-fast upper limit to how long one should breastfeed (assuming of course that she can)? Is there a lower limit, one mothers should try to reach, if possible, before turning to formula?

Do you think that moms like me are just a little crazy, or perhaps are there others out there who don’t feel quite so free to talk about their own experiences with extended breastfeeding?

I’d just come from visiting my friend and her ten-pound, twelve-ounce newborn. I had heard the story of her epic labor, the heroic effort this tiny, five-foot, two-inch Frenchwoman went through to bring this child forth, and I went to see that she was okay. Also? I needed a baby fix in the worst way. Someone needs to invent scratch-n-sniff postcards that smell like a baby’s head.

For the first half hour or so, little Marianna was nursing so her mom and I talked and laughed and I was looking at those little feet and tiny bottom and was just dying to hold her. Finally, she burped and started looking around, so I cradled her in my arms and began the bouncy, swaying, figure-eight move all parents do when holding an infant. It was bliss.

We were in such a trance, looking at each other (her wondering where her mommy went and me remembering immobile children) when suddenly I felt a tingling sensation. In my breast. Holy crackers. I knew that feeling.

“Um, you’d better take her back now… my milk is letting down!” I pressed the inside of my wrist against my breast and stared, wide-eyed, at my friend.

“Eeeeeeeeeeee!” We squealed in unison.

“This is wrong. So wrong.” I hadn’t nursed in ages, and I swear in a few minutes I’d have been asking for a towel and the baby would have been eyeing me with sudden interest once she caught the scent.

I know that eight years of breastfeeding would condition my body, but come on! When will my reproductive and support system finally believe I don’t (and won’t!) have any more babies?

Have any of you experienced this, this ghost of nursing that whooshes through your body after you thought you were past it forever? How long do our bodies keep that recipe on hand, ready to dish up like a short-order cook? Have you experienced around a baby that wasn’t yours??

In my 12.6 years of parenting, I have spent 8 of them breastfeeding my children. That’s 96 months, or 416 weeks, or 2,290 days. Two thousand two hundred ninety DAYS.

I know.

I never thought of myself as a radical parent, one who took natural childrearing to the edges of social acceptability, but in retrospect, speaking those words aloud shocks even me. I have never been able to admit that without receiving a brief yet awkward stare in return. However, I square my shoulders and think of my firmly attached (so to speak) children and thank whatever primal instincts guided us. Let’s all have a moment of silence in thanks to the hypothalamus.

I thank mine in particular for the instinct that told me that something was wrong with my too-sleepy baby after he’d been home with us for only a week.

This Polaroid has been on our refrigerator for over nine years, and is one of my most precious possessions.

It was taken by a nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Lucile Salter Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford on August 18, 2000. My second son had gone into heart failure, stopped breathing, and then been unconscious and on a ventilator while he recovered from viral myocarditis. This was the first time I had been able to hold him or try to breastfeed him in 10 days.

During this time I pumped milk for my 8-day-old child like a maniac, trying both to keep up my milk supply and to keep my poor, engorged breasts from exploding. When you’re spending ten hours a day watching over your baby hooked up to monitors and IVs, with a tiny defibrillator standing ready next to his bed, it’s a little disorienting tending to the mundane, relentless routines and tasks. My breasts didn’t know my baby was sick, and went about their job as if it were he at the nipple and not the industrial-strength breast pumps they keep on hand for exactly this purpose.

About ten minutes after this photo was taken, he actually nursed, something they had warned me he would probably never be able to do. They weren’t sure if his heart could take it, but as it happens, both of our hearts did just fine.

I also found this email I sent to a co-worker later that evening: “Thanks for the good thoughts—they worked! I held Dylan today! They also surprised me by taking him off the respirator just before I got there today…it was just too beautiful to describe. He looks like my little boy again. I made reprints today, and the announcements are going out tomorrow.”