As a mother, you're going to hear an endless barrage of opinions and "facts" and other people's opinions that, honestly, you'd be perfectly fine never hearing ever. How you choose to feed your kid definitely tops that list, and you'll inevitably hear all the things about breastfeeding and bottle feeding and how long you should breastfeed and why you should or shouldn't breastfeed. If you choose to extend breastfeeding into toddlerhood, the unsolicited vitriol becomes all the more unbearable. There are things moms who chose extended breastfeeding are tired of hearing, yet those things seem to be part of the parenting experience and it seems like they're (sadly) not going anywhere.
As a child of the 80s, when breastfeeding rates were lower than they are today, I didn't have a ton of exposure to the practice, but I had (arguably) more than most. While my brother and I weren't breastfed, our mom did ditch the formula for our younger siblings, who were both born in the 90s,when breastfeeding was on the rise. As such, I had a pretty favorable attitude towards nursing (or at least a familiarity) and knew that it was something I wanted to try when I had kids, once that day (at the time, hopefully) arrived. Breastfeeding was just something I knew, and the things we know are usually the things we try to recreate, or avoid, when we grow up.
My mom nursed my siblings for under a year, which is the current American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation. So I told myself, "Okay, I'll nurse my kids for 9 months, too. Everything else is weird and wrong because reasons, I guess." Those reasons, looking back, really just boiled down to: I wasn't familiar with anything else, so anything else struck me as "weird". After all, breastfeeding for 9 months worked for my mom, and since breastfeeding is a largely private activity, I didn't see anything to disabuse me of the idea that breastfeeding for an extended period of time was "weird," because it was weird to me. So, imagine my surprise when, after I'd done research and had a successful time nursing my first child and got into the swing of things, I realize that extended breastfeeding was the right choice for me and my children. I nursed my son for 17 months and my daughter for a wonderful 21.
Of course, as you can imagine, people had a lot of feels about it. I heard from many people on more than one occasion that it was time for me to stop breastfeeding or that breastfeeding my toddler was wrong or [insert something equally annoying, here]. If you're a mother who has gone this route, you have, I'm sure, heard lots of truly precious comments regarding this decision, too. Here are just a few that I, for one, would be so happy to never hear again: