What Weaning Looks Like

I've never had a specific breast feeding philosophy except that I knew I would if I could and what a glorious gift  -- a seemingly endless supply of milk and healthy healthy children.

Weaning. Now this is a bit more difficult. 

Attached to the milk is a mom and a child, nourishment and calm. Detaching that is painful. Sore swollen pain. Heart wrenching pain. Headache pain. Crying pain. Temper tantrum pain. Schedule pain. An ebb and flow interrupted. A course that is good and right and freeing for both mother and child but in the middle of the wean, I can't see straight. 

The day seems to tarry on and on. I want bedtime to arrive because we haven't given up that feeding and when that feeding comes the headache, the sore and swollen, the built up energy and frustration all drain away and calm settles. 

It is the morning. The headache is already there. I don't know the connection except that William is making some rather harsh sounds and within my chest there is a push and pull and ebb and flow of blood and water and cells and calories, my body is refiguring and rearranging where to put that which was making milk. I am losing something and gaining another as is little -- okay not little at all -- William. 

We've discovered that William goes to sleep if George will wail away on the fiddle right there by the crib. So his wail is swallowed by another and at nap time, I don't feel like I know what to do. 

It will pass and the sweet calm and quiet of a weaned child will fill the room and the freedom from the deep emotional attachment gives way to William and I working together differently and better.