Weaning the weight of wistful nostalgia

I am in the process of weaning my almost two-year-old daughter. Although I have enjoyed a wonderful nursing relationship with her since she was born, it’s time to break it off. Whereas breastfeeding used to be a tender, relaxing, sometimes-euphoric experience, it has recently become a burden of which I wish to free myself.

I have been pregnant and/or breastfeeding for four and a half years straight, and I am ready to have my body back to myself. I am ready to be able to take whatever cold medication I want. I am ready to wear a normal bra. I am ready for my daughter (the second in succession) to stop trying to reach down my shirt in public. I am absolutely ready to wean her.

And yet.

There is a not-so-small part of me that is not ready; one that, I suspect, will never be ready. It’s the part of me that wishes to deny–all evidence to the contrary–that my baby is no longer a baby. It’s the part of me that desperately wants to cling to this beautiful season of motherhood for a few more days or a few more weeks or perhaps forever.

I am, you see, one of those obnoxious women for whom breastfeeding was relatively easy and immensely fulfilling. I have felt blessed and amazed by my body’s ability to nourish both my daughters outside the womb. I have loved maintaining a biological connection with them long after birth. I have (perhaps selfishly) been gratified that there is something that I–and nobody else in the world–could provide my girls. In short, I have cherished the act of nursing my babies.

And now I’m almost done.

By the time I weaned my older daughter, I was midway through my second pregnancy. I was exhausted, sore, and underweight, so the decision to wean was easy. This time, though, there is no new baby on the way … and I don’t think there ever will be. Though my husband and I never presume to know God’s plan for us, our own is to grow our family through fostering and/or adopting children. So when my daughter nurses for the last time, it is likely the last time I will ever do this thing that has brought me such joy and peace and purpose.

I am ready … But I am wistful.

This reluctant melancholy is by no means unique to nursing mothers. We’ve all felt it at some point, as we’ve stood on the precipice of a major life transition and been assaulted by memories and emotions which threaten to paralyze us. We move forward slowly, warily, weighed down by the wistfulness we carry in our hearts.

We carry this wistfulness because we cannot carry all the circumstances of the past which made the past so sweet. There is a part of me that will always long for the nursing relationship I have shared with my daughters … but that doesn’t mean I want to nurse them into adulthood. And although I might say that I want my little one to remain a baby forever, of course this isn’t really true. I want her to grow into the person God created her to be, which means embracing each new phase of motherhood as it arrives.

And so we are weaning: she from me, I from her.

As I refuse more frequently her requests to nurse, and as I create new routines to replace the old, I find myself returning to a Scripture passage that resonates even more with me now than it did at my wedding years ago:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope, and love remain, these three; and the greatest of these is love. ~ 1 Corinthians 13:11-13

Now I know my daughter only in part. I can think of nothing more worth the weight of wistful nostalgia than the assurance that as she grows, I will know her–and love her–more fully. So, together, she and I will put an end to this particular childish thing, and abide in what remains.

~ Nicole Steele Wooldridge is a friend of Sister Julia’s who lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two daughters. She is aware that writing about breastfeeding is a surefire way to ignite the Mommy Wars, but as she previously blogged, she is a conscientious objector to these conflicts.