Hi Friend,
I've been counseling a friend lately on weaning her baby, the American (not the UK) definition, which means ceasing to breastfeed. It's made me realize that, though I have done it twice in the last three years, I am unable to distill much advice from my experiences.
I know that, unfortunately, at least unfortunately for me, it takes resolve. Resolve that I barely had the energy to muster.
When I weaned Cole I was already pregnant with Luca and Cole still wasn't sleeping through the night and I was living at my in-laws' home. It was a very mentally troubling time in my life, a time drenched in unknown and fear about the future. It was also 2020, so that sucked. In colored marker, I wrote on a random manila folder: NOVEMBER GOAL: WEAN COLE and taped it up in my (guest) bedroom.
The last day I breastfed Cole was November 30, 2020.
Luca was born exactly six months later, May 30, 2021, and the breastfeeding started instantly. Luca was eating before my husband Stephen even cut the cord. He ate for about an hour before he was even weighed (9lbs!). (And before I had a postpartum hemorrhage, which is another story for maybe another day or more likely, never.)
Still, even considering the hemorrhage, breastfeeding both times around was harder for me than birth. And weaning was the hardest part of breastfeeding. None of this makes any logical sense, which is my experience with motherhood at large. If breastfeeding was the hardest part, wouldn't ending it be a relief? Kind of. But the work of weaning is painful, emotionally painful, and though labor and delivery is the most physically painful thing I've ever lived through (twice) it has the benefit of being held within a day (for me). Even horror story labors which take four days, are still only four days. The pain is immense, really indescribable, but contained.
My breastfeeding and weaning journeys often felt no-end in-sight, especially because they overlapped with my Holy Shit Why Won't This Child Sleep journeys. When I think breastfeeding, I think four in the morning. When I think breastfeeding, I think entrapment. When I think breastfeeding, I think: Was it worth it?
Luca's weaning was harder than Cole's. Cole was, in hindsight, rather ready to wean. I think part of the reason Cole was so challenging as a baby and young toddler was I had no clue what I was doing, but another part was that he often longed to do things that escaped his capabilities at the moment. I know you're thinking "all kids are like that" but Cole was especially like that. Luca was not as much. Luca could, from time to time, be content, and Stephen and I would look at each other in shock whenever this happened. Though, there was this: Luca would have nursed forever. He made that very clear. But I? I was so fucking done.
And thus, I reached into my innermost depths, found nothing, kept reaching, and scraped up an ounce of resolve. I would wean him, so help me God, and he would be done on his first birthday, regardless of the AAP having the nerve to recommend two years of breastfeeding as if that isn't a wildly enormous thing to ask.
And so, I'd get Luca out of his crib each morning at the crack of dawn and he would scream. He wanted me to sit down and nurse him, and when he realized I was, in fact, carrying him down stairs, he would throw his head back in agony and scream louder. I would, as quickly as possible, get him in the high chair and feed him a banana and he would eventually calm.
But I can still see that baby throwing his head back in agony, demanding what I was not willing to give him, and it still breaks my heart. I can still feel the weight of his angry head in my hand. I don't know if Luca and I did this for four days or four weeks. I really don't. It was sharp and painful and I felt I was failing him and I felt I had to do it. I knew full well this might be my last baby, this might be the last time I ever make milk and, thus the entire experience was heightened and all the more necessary. I needed my milk to run dry. (It took weeks and weeks, even after his last feed, which was on his first birthday. It was as if my body was protesting the development; it was as if my body was clinging to the past.) I needed to remember I existed—independently—again.
Weaning is really just separation. Weaning is letting go. It is deciding that what you're doing now is no longer working, and that you will do something different. Doing something different—something truly different, not just a different manifestation of the same old shit—is, I believe, always painful. In every rebirth, there is a death.
As James Baldwin put it:
"Any real change implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety."
When it comes to motherhood, weaning is the hardest part—and it's all weaning. That might, also, be my take on life at large.
Joyce