Weaned

Yesterday I got my toddler to sleep in her bed at naptime without nursing her.  This has never happened before. 

She’s a focused, peaceful, no-fuss kind of person.  As toddlers go, she asks for relatively little during the day.  She’s content to explore, forage, rejoice in her brothers’ good fortune, and create her own purposeful work.  She keeps me in her line of sight, and all is calm.  (With her, anyway.  My three boys are another story.)

But at night, she asks for all of me.  And I oblige, partly because I feel such gratitude for the flexibility she graces us with each day.  But mostly because she is wee, I am tired, and we have a rhythm. 

I’ve felt a gentle pull the last few months to change it.  Because co-sleeping is beautiful, but nighttime nursing is a little wearing.  And my husband is sleeping a room away, and I think it would be nice to be nearer.

But after all the nights my husband was gone during all the years he traveled for work, my little ones and I have perfected our bedtime routine and my husband and I have forgotten ours.

He’s home now.  The long-hoped-for local position at his company became available a few months ago, and after four and a half years of going the extra mile (quite literally), he earned it.  Sleeping a room instead of a state away feels like heaven.

But I am bonding with someone all night, and he is not.  Hence the pull. 

But this means more work for me.  To create two new nighttime rhythms. 

The one with my husband feels elusive.  His frozen shoulder pain dictates his sleeping position.  He likes a fan blowing on him at night, and I don’t.  And the farther out of earshot my children are, the harder it is for me to relax.  When I hear them breathe, I rest easier.  So when I am in the master bedroom with my husband, I lie awake long after he’s fallen asleep.  And when I’ve finally calmed my mind, relaxed my body, and given myself permission to turn down the volume on my internal baby monitor, a child cries out my name, and I know I would have gotten more sleep if I’d stayed in her room to begin with.

Are nights for rest or relationships?  With my toddler I can do both simultaneously, automatically.  But when I sneak away from my child’s room and lie near my husband, I can do neither.  Because he’s already sleeping without me.

I want to jostle him awake, and let him know I’m there.

He claims I have no time for him.  I might just as easily claim he has no time for me.  But where is the purpose in playing that game?  So night after night, I fight the urge to fall asleep with my child, even though that’s what works.  I rouse myself if I’ve drifted off, disentangle my body from hers with my fingers crossed that she won’t wake.

I have time for him!  I’ll prove it!  I walk in the master bedroom and lie down next to him, hoping he’ll sense me and roll over to acknowledge me.  But his breathing is heavy and slow.  He’s in another world.  And I think of how hard he works and how tired he must be, how selfish of me it would be to put my arms around him now.  I cannot steal a moment of his sleep.

In my child’s room, guilt robs me of sleep.   In my husband’s room, loneliness does.  I don’t know why a person can be so close and feel so far.  Like the date night that comes after weeks of fighting for time to talk, only to find ourselves alone together with nothing to say.

Now what?

So I sit in the hallway, bedless in a house full of beds, and write.  I hear the rustle of blankets or the gentle bonk of a knee against a wall as my boys shift in their sleep.  I don’t have to look to intuitively sense and mirror the steady rise and fall of my toddler’s chest in the next room.  But when I listen for something—anything—coming from the master bedroom, I hear nothing.

Travel and babies and more babies and more travel have weaned us off of each other.  Can we learn to synch again?   I know we can, and know we will.  But not tonight.

There’s been a brief window with each of my children that opens when I’ve weaned one a few months after getting pregnant with the next one.  They slowly learn to sleep on their own.  My husband and I find ourselves in bed together at the same time more and more frequently, and after a while, a new rhythm is forged.  Our rhythm.  And it’s nice and I sleep and we connect.

Then the baby is born, my husband says goodbye since there’s no sense in both of us being sleep deprived, and I’m up in the nursery all night every night again.

See you in two years.

Then it’s time for the toddler rhythm.

I’m not pregnant this time.  It feels...unfamiliar.

When my daughter learns something, she learns quickly and well.  Getting her to sleep last night without nursing was not difficult.  She had only one nighttime waking and let me cuddle her back to sleep instead of nursing.  This seamless transition was almost two years in the making, of course, but that’s why it was seamless.  To disassociate nursing from sleep, I knew I needed to wait for her development until she could see there are other ways of being close besides nursing.  I won’t make milk forever, you know.  And she’ll need more than that.

And now I feel double loneliness.

I watched a film once of midwives reflecting on the births of their own children.  One woman said, “You can cut the umbilical cord physically, but emotionally you never really do.”

It’s funny, this attachment to our babies.  So strong, so instinctive, so imperative to their survival.  But the ultimate goal as a parent is for your child to leave, to learn to do without you.

A marriage, on the other hand, is born with no instinct, no shared DNA.  But its ultimate goal is unity.  Some people think it’s impossible.  It can often feel that way.

I write and think and work a lot on growing things.  Growing plants and growing children and growing learning and growing courage.  Child-raising is gardening.  I’m steeped in that world, and getting wiser with experience.

Marriage is welding.  I don’t know much about that trade.  The potential damage of that much heat scares me, and the precision required is not in my skill set.  The vision it takes to forge something new and solid out of two strong, separate things?  I don’t think that big.

But as I write this, I realize that God does.

The cloak of motherhood

My mother once wrote me a letter.  She told me, “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.” 

Those were not words I would forget. 

At the time, I wept with humility.  The words gave me strength to feign confidence I did not feel.

They were with me when I stepped on a plane with my newborn son to begin a chapter of life that would slice me open.

They were with me when I cradled my five-year-old's limp body as his eyes rolled back and his face gushed blood.

They were with me night after night after night with no daddy-came-home! reprieve.

I may have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace, but there was little easy or graceful about motherhood.  So I gripped those words, squeezed them for one last ounce of strength, day in and day out.  They never ran dry, though I often did.

Her words come back to me now, nine years after their writing, with a new layer of meaning.  I wonder at her use of the word “cloak.”

She used to advise me: “Once you have kids, you always have kids."  "Wait as long as you can before you have kids."  "Once you have kids, you don’t exist anymore.”

Her words look harsh and jaded on the page, but they weren’t delivered that way.  She truly meant them as nothing but a service to me. 

As a new mother, I was determined to prove them false.  As a mother of two I thought I had.  When I hit rock bottom as a mother of four, I slumped my shoulders and admitted defeat. 

She is almost always right, after all.

I didn’t exist anymore.

And yet, employing this cloak imagery, she contradicted herself.  Because a cloak is something you can put on and take off at will.

Surely that couldn’t be the case with motherhood.  Could it? 

When I became a mother, I well understood and expected the sacrifice it would demand, and I paid it willingly.  What I was not the least bit prepared for, however, was how it would change my awareness of my identity. 

When a child is born, so is a mother.  Like a child, she follows her instincts, graceful and stumbling.  Like a child, she may cover her ears, but she’s always listening.

Like a child, she cries. 

Like a child, she grows hour by hour, as some unknown hand distils her life-grappling into fuel.

Like a child, she is beautiful without knowing.  And she came into this world with a self that belongs to her and her alone.

With each child I bear, I shed a skin of selfishness.  What’s underneath is new and pink and raw.  It will toughen over time.  But into what?

Am I my skin?  Or my raw, pink underside?

Or something deeper down than that?  

I am my core, unchangeable.  A girl who finds God in the rustle of leaves.  A girl who sees the one.  A girl who is lifted by lifting, who doesn’t know when to quit.

That’s always been me.  That will always exist.

Everything else is just skin.

Words from my mother

I write this with my left thumb, iPhone screen backlight as low as it can go.  My 20-month-old nurses on my left breast on the floor of her dark, white-noise-steeped room.

This week she started saying “mom” in that “But, Mom” tone of older children, who usually follow up the phrase with something like, “Why does he get more screen time when I don’t?”

And the mom says something tiresome and true like, “Because he’s littler than you and has different rules.”  Or even worse, something like, “Because I said so.”

I’m not sure when I became the “Because I said so” mom I never thought I’d be.  Somewhere around the third or fourth child, I think.  I wonder what the mother-of-one I used to be would think of me now.

One Child Me was awesome.  I didn’t feel awesome at the time, but looking back, I see that I was.

My son was weeks old, my pareneum still too swollen to look at, and I was sitting in a chair at the airport near the gate that would take me to a plane that would take me to my husband who was waiting for me in Arizona.  Moving one state away was not in my plans.  But it had been in his.  So it was in ours. 

A few minutes earlier I waved goodbye to my dad, who had waited at the security checkpoint and watched to make sure I got the car seat and stroller through the x-ray machine.  Did his heart break a little at only walking with me so far before he was forced to stop and watch me struggle on my own?  One Child Me me didn’t wonder.  Four Children Me suspects it did, and that after parenting seven children he was familiar with the feeling.

I found my gate and plopped into an unforgiving chair.  I had a few minutes before boarding, and remembered the letter from my mom tucked in the designer diaper bag my sister had gifted me at my baby shower.  My dad had given me the letter when he’d picked me up to take me to the airport.  It was more of a goodbye than I had expected from my mom.  She doesn’t do goodbyes.

I had no idea what it would say. 

I first took in the lovely, neat curves of the penmanship I’d always admired.  As a child snooping in old storage boxes under the house, I’d come across a stack of spiral bound notebooks littered with words in this handwriting.  They were words I knew but could make no sense of.  Poetry, maybe?  Notes from a college class I didn’t know she’d taken?  She was mom, that was all.  Except for this box of evidence to the contrary.  This box, wedged in between other boxes labeled “Susie, size 6,” “Susie, size 8,” “Susie, size 10,” alluded to a chapter in her life without me in it.  I never looked inside again; its existence has captivated, reassured, and haunted me to this day.

But there in the airport was her tidy script, this time on a page meant for me: “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.”

Spaces deep within me filled and emptied all at once.  At the thought that my mother approved of me—a vulnerable novice struggling to learn the ropes of a job she had done for so, so long.

I’m not sure who weeps more: a new baby or a new mother. 

Or an experienced mother. 

What made me get on the plane?  Was it my father’s blessing?  My mother’s confidence?  My commitment to my marriage, its most challenging test just beginning?

No.  What made me put one foot in front of the other toward a place I’d never choose were the big, anxious blue eyes of my newborn son.

I would walk through fire for them.   And I have.

I am guessing that if you are reading this, you have a child with eyes wide open too.  And something in that gaze has pierced you with conviction.  You have stewardship over another soul.  This truth is unmistakeable.  And you know it will lead you to places you never would have chosen.  That’s why you’re here.

And that’s why I’m here too.