Breast Feeding: The End of an Era

Breast Feeding

I bow to you each morning,

bend to the degree of your need,

curve along the line of your ear,

boneless as our breathing.

It’s fathomless, the cord

strung between us like a rope bridge,

the drain and suture

of holding my breast to your hunger.

When you tap, tap, tap 

your foot into autonomy, 

unstitch your fingers 

from my hair, I reel—

a whirling top, or flightless bobbin. 

How to stop a centrifuge?

 _________________

 REFLECTION:

My son stopped nursing two weeks ago—on the day of his first birthday. I had been preparing for months, but it felt more like a severance than an occasion. 

Weaning my son has been a different kind of grief than I’ve been writing about recently. It’s less documented than bereavement, less acknowledged, less… overt. It’s amorphous—holds a deep level of complexity. My son is still here. This is natural. In fact, it’s the goal of raising small children: to help them develop. Beginning to drink formula or milk is a normal, and even celebratory stage that marks the beginning of autonomy. My son is more independent, more his own little being. Less tethered to me.

And yet, it’s the end of the invisible umbilical cord that still attached us—life-giving and unique. My body produced the exact nutrients that my son needed, when he needed them, and it was my purpose to facilitate his growth through the act of giving—"bending to the curve of his need.” As I held my breast to his ready mouth, I gave and he received. It was more a life system than a contract. We were a synchronistic unit bound together through a flow linked more to human mystery than human control. 

* 

When my son was born last June, I nursed him under the stars. When he peeped from his bassinet in the night, eyes wide open in the big, dark, room, I would lift him into a swaddle, put on my slippers and carry him to the Adirondack chair under the Big Dipper. Often his eyes stayed closed, like a tiny mouse, and he would suck and swallow while sleeping. I would tuck the corners of his blanket under his chin to make sure the cold didn’t disturb the necessity of his nursing.

When he was six months old, I moved him into his own room, where he would sleep through the night and wake with a start, as though propelled awake by the promise of milk. Before daylight, I nursed him by candle—the shadows flickering over his cheeks. He would look directly into my eyes as he gulped with intention. I felt fully alive and needed in those moments—able to comfort, feed, and aid him in his only job: to grow. I was essential.

When he learned to crawl, and therefore became aware of his own agency, he would tap his foot while he nursed, as though to remind me that he had things to do beyond our arrangement. I’d gently rub his foot, as though to keep him from running, and he’d pull the ends of my hair as a way of playing—a game to occupy his energy while feeding. 

As soon as he learned that he could also drink formula from a bottle—a stopgap system put in place while I was at a wedding, when he was nine months old—he never fully returned to nursing. Our time dwindled from every three hours to before naps to before bed to just the mornings. It was a gradual recession over the following three months, but I felt sad, a little rejected, and resistant to his other-ness. As I watched his eyes and curiosity and independence gaze beyond me, I found myself pulling him back to my breast, asking him to do the thing most contrary to his physical, spiritual, and emotional growth: to stay small.  

He dutifully nursed each morning before he turned one, but his energy pattern was clear: I am doing this for you. I knew it. He knew it. I could feel the clinginess in my own body and yet, I did not want to do the work necessary to process and release it.  So many questions rose within me: would he still need me? Was his pulling away premature? Was it somehow indicative of future patterns—interrupted bondedness? And beyond my son: was this my last experience nursing him or my last experience nursing a baby? 

I was awash with uncertainty. My difficulty was not only about his need to move on, but about who I was—my identity: from nursing Mother to Mother and, eventually, back to Woman. I felt the changes in my body before I became aware of what was going on for me. My breasts were less full. I was not as hungry. I felt inexplicably empty and deflated, quite like the moment I gave birth to my son, when all the makings of a human were inside me, and then in a series of pushes, outside me.

The shift from nourishing my baby to being a steward of his nutrition left me reeling. I went from providing all of his needs to providing most of his needs. From being his one-and-only, to being an important part of his many. It all begged the question: who am I outside of you, which is of course, the very question with which he was wrestling.  A mirror, as so often parenting is. While these shifts are only-so-slight to the outside world, they are monumental to the evolution of Mother: they, in fact, threaten the core and even divinity of being a life-bearer, the role around which we orbit in a baby’s first year. 

*

Once, our pediatrician commented that she didn’t understand why we let our children drink [cow’s] milk from “another animal.” I winced. Her words struck me as jarring, the language even a little crude. But over time the emotional truth started to ring true. Another animal. It was so… alien. The other-ness, the distance, the separateness – the handing over and almost irresponsibility so implicit in the phrase. It all felt true. And Darwinian. The jolting quality of this concept later helped me understand my difficult in letting go: to end breastfeeding betrays a mother’s instinctual drive to protect and nourish her baby. It is one of the first moments of being asked to step away from our child’s livelihood. 

*

But, the truth was, my son was thriving. He was not in danger of perishing—quite the opposite. He was gaining percentages on the growth chart at every appointment. The felt experience was different than the science. The change, then—the loss, as I experienced it—was mine to process, not his. My son was ready to move on. 

“This is the same as any other grief,” someone said when I told her how sad I was to stop nursing. “You’ll need to deal with it in the same way.”

As soon as she named the experience as grief, something clicked for me. I knew that I needed to return to the spiritual space of ritual to let go and move forward. 

To externalize the sadness and nostalgia, I wrote the poem above, and then wrote a letter to give voice to the contradictions that made this ending so complex and complicated—about how much I both cherished our bond and sometimes felt constrained by it, how much I would miss the tenderness of touch and how much I wanted my own body back, how much I wanted him to grow up and to stay small. I wrote about how I both resented the bottle and supported his longing for efficiency and autonomy. How our breastfeeding was both a gift and a loss. Each sentence was a “both/and” as the conflicting desires co-existed and coalesced. The letter was as intricate and complex and knotty as my feelings. It was gnarled. And raw. And helped me to see why I was having trouble moving on.

A few days after I wrote the letter, I took it to the beach along with a drop of breast milk in a bottle. As my son crawled over rocks, ate seaweed, and tossed sand in his hair, I read him the words he would never hear again—in essence, giving us both witness to this stage. He had no idea what it meant, but I did. There was a finality to it for me, an honoring of our era before casting it to the sea. 

I released the breastmilk into the ocean, watching white swirl into black—into the many, many tides that connected my experience to other women’s. I was comforted by the knowing that my story, my grief, is as old as time. I am every Mother, saying goodbye to the old in the same breath that I welcome the new.