Weaning 8 comments

By Caroline Langston

Each day, little by little, my baby daughter is going away from me.

There’s a photograph my husband took just minutes after she was born: Her small form is still covered in a slick of vernix, and her eyes peep at the light. Whenever I look at it, even now, my body cries out with a shock of recognition—something instant, muscular, and basic—that it was my body she came out of. That her little alien boat was harbored in me.

Those early weeks of panic. Like my son, five years older, she was a big baby who lost more than a pound in those first few days. A shadow crossed the doctor’s face as she unclasped her from the tiny diaper and lifted her onto the digital scale, the one that measured ounces.

Once again, I wanted to nurse; once again, I wasn’t making enough milk.

One day after another visit to the doctor, I dutifully prepared a bottle of formula—because life is never black and white, and to feed a child is more than ideology—but she only nuzzled it sleepily. Off my husband and I went to the emergency room of the children’s hospital in the city, where we were immediately whisked past the resentful eyes of the families in the waiting room who’d probably been there for hours. The doctor talked us down. The baby wasn’t dehydrated. Just a little tired.

And somehow, we found our way forward. I went to Whole Foods Market five miles away in the city and bought a can of Earth’s Best organic formula. But I was also determined to keep nursing as well: I spent hours in the back room of the Washington, D.C., Breastfeeding Center, talking over with the lactation consultant, Pat Shelly, about the balance of nursing sessions versus supplementary bottles per day. She looked at me with fierce confidence and put her hands on my shoulders, giving me the mothering I wasn’t getting elsewhere. A year later, I can still smell the aroma of burnt soy sauce and coffee from the Korean deli down the hall.

I nursed the baby every two hours throughout the night, then pumped another twenty minutes while sitting on my bedroom floor listening to BBC World Service reports on the Sri Lankan civil war. I bought a book called The Breastfeeding Mother’s Guide to Making More Milk. (It’s good.)

At last, I made an appointment at a midwife-run birthing center out in the suburbs to get a prescription for a medicine that would increase the amount of milk I made, that I would then have to order through a compounding pharmacy, a process that felt something like buying medical marijuana. I wondered whether I was making this into some kind of narcissistic fixation. But when I was ushered upstairs to wait for the midwife to write out the prescription, there were icons of the Virgin Mary on the wall of the exam room, and to see them was a reassurance.

Does that sound heavy-handed, to bring down the machinery of Marian symbolism into my animal desire to feed my baby? Yet it was my spiritual struggle with nursing, like nothing else, that brought home to me the mystery of the Incarnation. “Blessed is the womb that bore You, and the breasts which nursed you” (Luke 11:27). At the Opus Dei bookstore downtown, I picked up a book called Breastfeeding and Catholic Motherhood, lovely but a bit legalistic, that talked about the “self-donative” quality of breastfeeding—like Mary, like Christ.

At the distance of a year, it strikes me how hallowed were those long hours of holding and feeding, of being able to go through a day without doing anything except making bottles, changing, or nursing. Gradually the hard work paid off: I went back to work part-time, and got adept at nursing her wherever I went, the way I’d thought only mothers with lots of milk would be able to do. The labor was like the long anxiety of learning to pray, to focus the mind aside from all distractions.

Just once, I think that a miracle happened: I picked the baby up to nurse her in the middle of the night, and when my milk let down, I could, for once, not only feel it but could hear it, great gulps streaming down her throat as she swallowed loudly. That never happened. I was conscious of a Presence, something, in the hot close air around me.

The sign that things were changing came one day when she was nine months old. She grinned broadly, and sank her small line of top teeth into my right nipple, and I screamed. “Stop!” I yelped, and pulled her off.

That was just the beginning: She began to crawl, she made her way up the stairs as one of her panicked parents followed close behind her. She balked at pureed vegetables and began to grab bits of vegetables and meat directly off our plates as we held her in our laps. After more than a year, with the costs mounting, I stopped ordering the medicine, and resigned myself to the chapter in our lives together ending.

Still she nurses, a time or two a day, half-heartedly, as though it’s something she remembers she loves, but can’t quite remember how or why. And there are surprises: Last Saturday morning, she pulled her mouth off my breast and a white pearl of milk dropped from her rosebud lips. I’d thought it had long since gone.

It’s just a matter of time, though. And I will send her into the vast, terrifying freedom that is, in the end, the way that a parent must love.

The way that God loves us.