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The girls will finally be free.
By Elly Lonon — Last updated on May 27, 2023
It's time to hang up the jerseys, engrave the gold watches, book the country club, and order the sheet cake.
After five years of pregnancy and nursing, I'm ready to retire these fun bags and return to a life free from milk-stained shirts. (Or, at least, the milk stains that originate from inside the shirt. I'll admit my kids are still a bit behind on their fine motor skills.)
I'm so very ready to regain sole custody of these Gerber gozangas. The days of tiny Patrick Stewarts draining my body of nutrients are numbered, and I'm already daydreaming about the magical things my boobs and I will do after liberation from a life of lactation.
Did you know you can contract a yeast infection in your nipples? Yup. Seven times, apparently.
Coincidentally, that's the same number of times I was treated for mastitis over the course of my breastfeeding career. To commemorate each infection, I've compiled a list of things the girls and I will do after retirement.
Here are 14 things I'm going to do once I retire my boobs from breastfeeding:
1. Jump rope and ride a pogo stick
Hell, I may even do the occasional jumping jack.
2. Buy an under-wire bra
It better push my sweater meat so high my left nipple could plant a flag on Everest.
3. Use the remaining Lanolin in the fourteen half-empty tubes floating around my house to cover the rusty holes in my used minivan's paint job
Someone's gotta fix that. Best DIY ever.
4. Stop using hardened, discarded nursing pads as coasters for dripping take-out coffee cups and glasses of red wine
While I'm at it, maybe stop using the still-soft ones to twist off beer caps.
5. Take a sledgehammer to my breast pump a la the fax machine scene in Office Space
We won't be needing you anymore
6. Wait patiently for my Hulk-sized nipples to return to their previous Bruce Banner daintiness
It's time for the Hulk to go night-night.
7. Resume breaking into the dance from "Single Ladies"
Or whatever song has replaced that anthem in the five years since I started procreating with abandon and no regard for the optical welfare of those around me.
8. Sleep on my stomach
Or maybe my side. Or at all. I'd totally settle for at all.
9. Resume having the other kind of wet spot in my bed
And no, I don't mean the one my three-year-old occasionally leaves after climbing into bed with us at four in the morning.
10. Tear my nipple-cream-stained nursing camisoles into thin strips
Then stuff them into glass bottles filled with the tequila my metabolism can no longer process, set them on fire, then hurl them at an effigy of Gisele Bündchen and her hideous post-baby body
It's the least she can do for me.
11. Consume a vat of some food composed solely of Red #40, high fructose corn syrup, MSG, and Oxy
I am going to have the most disgusting things in my fridge, like coffee.
12. Choose my clothing based on the weather, my mood, or maybe even appropriateness for the day's agenda, rather than the easy accessibility of my milkshake
Time to make a trip to Target.
13. Create a goodbye montage of my boobs' best performances like they do for those defeated contestants on So You Think You Can Dance and American Idol
Like the time they fed my kid while I stood in line at the DMV. Or that time Lefty tried to shoot boob juice directly into my eye after we read online that it might cure pink eye.
14. Probably have to buy some tampons
That has never changed.
Well, shoot. Maybe I should rethink this retirement thing.
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Elly London is a writer and contributor to Scary Mommy. She is the author of Amongst the Liberal Elite.
This article was originally published at Sammiches and Psych Meds. Reprinted with permission from the author.