Weaning

Almost a year since I've posted--the last time with promises to write here about S's birth and how she got here. But that, it turns out, was as good a fiction as any. Still, I've got to come here without excuses to this place that was created to be about the tangled crossover of beginnings and endings and the stories that spring out of them, whenever they come, whatever form, without apology.

The welcoming hardly starts before you’re saying goodbye. The quick chirps of a newborn impossible to catch by any human machine (because even if you kept the recorder going all day, how could you capture the utter, repeatable surprise of that sound of alchemy of new breath and tiny body and outer air?). The hand discovered at the end of an arm as MINE! (Such joy to a clumsy baby to find this out, that one belongs to oneself). The suckling latch of lip and tongue, the fiercest and gentlest thing there could be, that goes lax, giving way to distracted eye when infant goes over to toddler.

A baby is still. Rolls. Crawls. Stands. Begins first steps to walk. In this, becomes a child.

Call them the stages of human development if you want to be technical. But call them by their other names, the gaining days, the differentiation days, the stand on their own, by god days--each inch they take on their own can feel a distance traveled that's downright irretrievable.

If I am celebrating the one year birthday of my daughter, it is a quiet little fete, in the aftermath of the grandparents’ big noise. It comes long after the big sheet cake with buttercream icing and bright green frosting around the edges and plastic Pooh Bear and Tigger atop the cake and cards and presents (wrapped and then unwrapped) and a mylar balloon and general overwhelm. Mine is a party she doesn’t even attend. Here it is, 12:24 at night, more than a week after the actual date, and she’s in her crib, nuzzled into deep sleep. I am in my study, typing a whole room away from her, separate and feeling it sharply, while so happy for her to be here alive and sleeping that soundly on her very own that I know full well there will never be such words for all of this except to wonder aloud at how it is possible she has been with us for a full, unbelievable, marvelous year.

I'm not kidding. I say it out loud: one, simple "How?"

I’d have to nudge myself into the high spirits real celebration requires. Because there’s a kind of recalcitrance underneath all of this that I’ve come to comes to understand as motherhood. How you watch, hardly breathing so as to make everything as silent as possible, forcing stillness, stealing just a moment before time takes over everything and the child ventures further out into the world without you.

Of course I couldn’t be more pleased to see Squiggle growing into her strong will and standing, literally, on her own two feet. It’s exactly what I want for her.

But still, this is a week of putting away--outfits she’s outgrown, the dreaded breastpump, the last of my own pregnancy clothes, her infancy. She turns her cheek away from me in daytime, too enamored with the world and its shiny promise to bother with the time nursing takes. She is full of food from jars and yogurt cups and began self-weaning a few weeks ago. Only at night does she come back to me for milk, and each night I remind myself that it might be the last with her for breastfeeding. I am heartbroken in a way there is no word in English for. Every drop of mother’s milk shared between us comes on borrowed time with her, and in the same second I scold myself for being overdramatic, I also catch myself mourning how our bodies get pulled away from one another by the bright world, yet again.

Even before I had her, I was a woman of, according to the medical terminology, “advanced maternal age.” I can’t say whether there will be another child or whether I even want--or dare--to hope for one. Having one baby and working full-time in an intellectually demanding profession has just about driven me crazy, not to mention the trouble and sorrows that preceded my pregnancy with her, this old body and the losses. Most days I can hardly remember my name, dizzied by the clock that spins itself like a fast gyroscope loosed wild from its winding string, at a speed so demanding I blink and lose whole hours in the time it takes for me to sit down, still, at my desk and straighten the stack of work I have before me.

It’s a perplexing thing for first and last to be so indistinct but moreso to feel that I’ve been losing hold on the firsts and lasts and inbetweens. The clock, the year scatters me. I make myself sit in this old green armchair and take back, if not into my hands, then into my will, what I may have packed away too fast. Just be thankful, so thankful for her birth, I tell myself, for this first, a whole year, for the fact that her growing up is a mark of survival. And how I, of all people I do not take this for granted. Because not to see her merely survive but thrive--now that’s the present she gives me in return in the center of May, 2008, here and now and nowhere else. And so it is.

Bless her. As if she’s heard what I’m thinking, she calls out from the crib, hungry. I break from writing this, go to her and find her there, swaying up into her sleep-sit, past groggy, half-dreaming, ready for me. Does she know I need her right now, rather than her being the one needing me for this late-night feeding? She is all arms and legs. She takes up my whole lap these days. It takes some adjusting to get her in place. But once she settles in, latched, in this moment, I know she is still my baby, back to my bird-sweet creature, making that noise of hers impossible to capture beyond what we drink in together--Remember, treasure, keep, know.

Let go.

Comments

[Cindy]

I stumbled upon your website looking up something pregnancy related, and I read this post. When I read your paragraph containing:
"Only at night does she come back to me for milk, and each night I remind myself that it might be the last with her for breastfeeding. I am heartbroken in a way there is no word in English for. Every drop of mother’s milk shared between us comes on borrowed time with her, and in the same second I scold myself for being overdramatic, I also catch myself mourning how our bodies get pulled away from one another by the bright world, yet again"

I too had similar feelings with my daughter, and then my son. It was harder with my daughter because I knew at 19 months that I'd have to wean her since my milk was leaving (I was six months pregnant with my son). She probably would have nursed much longer if she could have. And when my son self-weaned at 16 months, I mourned another ending nursing relationship. It is so bittersweet - sweet that they're becoming their own person, bitter because you can not reclaim that sweet baby-stage.
Your post touched me, and reminded me, and I thank you for that.

Cheers,

Cindy

[Ms.Once]

Thanks, Cindy, for your kind comment on those words, which were not easy to write. I still have moments of not just nostalgia, but ache, even--and simultaneous to--as I recognize her and her body's independence.