Weaning

People I know would tell you that I have been a big proponent of breastfeeding. Between baby K and me, it was always our go-to activity every time she had meltdowns, owies, or changes that worried her. I started with the certainty that I’d exclusively feed until K was 6 months old, and then ‘we’ll see’. And over the past 2.5 years, “inga” became “anka”; and hunger cries transitioned to polite “mama, can I please have some sofa anka, now?”. What started as a biological need has since become something that was uniquely our time.

Honestly, I never expected to breastfeed for 2.5 years. That, some folks would tell you, is long.

Breastfeeding was our response to just about everything- sleeplessness, cuddles, growth spurts, new teeth. At some point it was exasperatingly tiresome, especially the multiple night feeds. Some other times, we had embarrassingly funny moments with K asking for boobies in the middle of parties.

What I’m trying to say is that it wasn’t roses all the way: Ever since her first birthday, we’d been hearing things on the lines of “maybe it’s time to stop?” or “she wouldn’t eat any solids if she keeps reaching for the breast”. We went through extremely painful night weaning exercises. But something kept us going, because I’d decided that nobody except K gets to decide when she wanted to stop.

It looks like she decided to stop five days ago, and here I am, at a loss to understand how I am going to cope with this void in my heart. There is a lot of literature on how abrupt weaning affects babies, but nobody ever said how tough it can be on the mama!

I keep trying to remember the last time we breastfed and hold the memory tight- but I guess the tighter you try to hold something, the easier it slips away. Instead, I suppose, I ought to try to remember the other beautiful times we had. How we’d fed when K was just about as long as my forearm. How she’d respond to my questions, teat in mouth, with “umm”. How at one point, her most spoken words in a day were “other side”.

So here I have gained some more time, and have earned a new wardrobe 😊 But the sense of losing something as cherished as this simply doesn’t balance it- and I suspect it never will.