Letting Go

Sometimes it feels a little unfair that just as you, as a parent, have fallen completely under the spell of your charming infant, he begins to transform into an autonomous, willful being. You spend minutes, hours, days falling deeper and deeper in love, and just when you feel the relationship is inviolable, your child begins to take his first steps away from you. This is how I feel as I contemplate weaning Mazin. I don't think it will happen in the next few days or weeks, but it will only be a matter of months now. I'm waiting for some cues from him. I know many people who laugh at that and say he'll never be the one to initiate it, but I have a feeling that he will, when it's time. For the first time in the past few days, I've thought about weaning and not recoiled emotionally at the prospect. He is growing and learning and changing so much these days, I really see how it could happen one day. It will happen. Maybe it won't feel like such a big deal when it does--at least not as big a deal as I have made of it in my mind. I try to imagine what that Last Supper at the breast will be like: Mazin gazing up and me returning his gaze, a sad smile, a last glance at the beloved boobie. It is such a beautiful and special thing, nursing. Even when you're doing it, as I was today, on the side of a cross-country skiing trail with the cold snow soaking through right through your long underwear and skiers racing by giving you awkward looks. It is such an intimate, loving act. For Mazin it is everything he loves: warmth, nourishment, comfort, sweetness, being held by mama. For me it is everything, too: the ultimate giving of myself. What takes the place of nursing when your baby doesn't come to your breast anymore? How do you get that time to be close and completely connected? Or is that something you just have to give up? I don't want to give it up.