By Maria Lockard 
As I prepare to leave for my “weaning moon,” my older daughter wants to help pick out my necklace. She chooses a tiny gold chain with three interlocking rings in the middle, two small and one large. It was gifted to me sometime during the hazy postpartum days by somebody I can’t remember, and to be honest, I’ve never really worn it.
“Do you know what these rings are for?” I ask her. She shakes her head. “You, me, and your sister,” I tell her, pointing at each one.
She looks into my eyes. “Will you wear it every day?”
I laugh. “Well, I’ll only be gone until tomorrow.” I study her face. “Do you mean every day forever?” She nods, and I smile through my wet eyes. “Of course I will.”
We all agree that it’s time.
My baby, now two, tells me not just when she wants to breastfeed but how. “On the couch.” “On the other side.” “Again.” Or, my favorite, “Let’s do it!”
She looks to me not when she’s hungry but when she’s scared, tired, uncertain. Sometimes she even seems to know when I need a break during social events, offering me a free pass to search for a private spot away from the chaos, just for a few moments.
We arranged for my husband to stay with the kids the first night of weaning while I booked a hotel for myself. My weaning moon, I called it. The idea seemed like a dream. I eternally long for time alone, to sleep without disturbance, to be somewhere my kids can’t come running after me.
But as my selected date approached—sandwiched between my husband’s business trips and my race schedule—my throat tightened whenever I imagined the final moment. The gnawing stomach pain that comes with doing anything for the last time. I pictured her balking in the face of my sentimentality and doing her usual routine of bouncing up and down while nursing for no more than 20 seconds.
After a morning swim lesson, we snuggled into the rocking chair that has come to know the shape of my body, the bend of my elbow. I couldn’t have hoped for a better goodbye. She clung to me for a heavenly 20 minutes, slowly drifting in and out of consciousness, drinking in the scent of my milk and chlorine.
When her breathing slowed and her grip on me loosened for the final time, I turned to the darkness of her room and gasped back tears. I couldn’t quite say why. This had been my goal for so long. I’d been pregnant or breastfeeding (or both) for close to five years, and I was desperate to have not just my body back but my time and my mind.
And yet, it felt like the end of everything I’ve ever known.
Since my second daughter’s birth, I’ve struggled to find the strength in my mothering. I floundered, became angry, became resentful. Breastfeeding was the one way I knew I could comfort her, nourish her, be the only person for her. It was the obvious solution to nearly any problem, the only one that didn’t make me question myself. Leaving this stage behind means letting go of the easy answers.
I’ll confess that I chose to have this child, in part, because I don’t know how to say goodbye. During the weepy, sleepless nights after having my first daughter, I remember looking around her room and staring at her tiny clothes, the walls we’d painted pale pink, the pictures of rainbows and sunbeams we’d hung, and feeling unable to process any of it. My only comfort was in the idea of doing it all over again. Next time I’ll really feel it, I told myself.
And I did. Well, I felt all of it, and I felt absolutely nothing. I felt the rage, a boiling from within that I never knew existed. I felt helplessly inferior and incapable of mediating between my two daughters’ needs and emotions. I felt the cascade of tears behind closed doors, and the numb stoicism when I emerged.
I struggled to manage my girls and my household as pieces of my mind betrayed me or left altogether. I didn’t remember taking the photos on my camera roll. I packed away the outgrown clothes I had no recollection of them ever wearing. I developed a nagging fear that they were not in their car seats, even as I stared at their faces in the mirrors. There was a growing chasm between what I knew and what I believed, and I could never be sure which side I was on.
So I clung to the pieces I was sure were good: swimming lessons, vaccination schedules, breastfeeding. I expected my baby to self-wean just as her older sister had, and my expectations laughed in my face. As the little one grew, she became more assertive, more defiant, every day a more exact replica of me.
I spend way too much time wondering how I have shaped each of my children individually. My first daughter, who was raised by strangers while I worked full-time, had every ounce of my energy and attention in the too-infrequent moments when we were together. My second, born two months after the end of my decade-long career, arrived to a mom with no clue how to raise children and an older sister who was still a baby herself. She never had a chance to miss me, and I was constantly looking for an escape.
I’ve always been warned about the postpartum loss of identity. But motherhood, to me, was the identity I never knew I was missing. I would spend a million years nap-trapped on the couch or chugging coffee after the 5 a.m. wakeups. I would be pregnant forever. I would nurse forever.
Yet life isn’t always conducive to motherhood. My needs and mood aren’t always conducive to motherhood. I feel heavy-hitting shame around my hunger for space, my desire to be freed from having to read every warning and safety label. I struggle to balance myself, my children, my home, and my career, and I have yet to invent a formula that doesn’t feel like it’s failing all four.
Breastfeeding was the Band-Aid on that problem. It gave me a single power fuse when the rest of it was zapped away. It was my concrete reassurance that yes, these are my children, and yes, I am the only person who is their mother. I needed that. And I don’t know if I am strong enough to survive without it.
But the truth is that if it hasn’t taught me yet that I’m enough, it never will. No amount of extended nursing or denying that my girls are outgrowing this stage—that I’m outgrowing it—will restore my confidence or repair my mistakes.
As I cried to my perinatal therapist about my grief over my children growing up, she asked me a question. Would I want to keep them babies for the rest of their lives? Would I sacrifice seeing what comes next if it meant I could hold onto these moments forever? Because there’s no way to truly see everything happening right in front of us, and the vast future ahead, without letting go of that which came before.
Motherhood requires blind faith. It requires a trust that what’s ahead is even better. And so, I surrender myself to the fear of saying goodbye. I allow myself to see my kids not as babies but as the smart, brave, hysterical little people they are becoming. And I close my eyes and believe that we will all be together for a long time to come, and that the memories may soften but the love will grow stronger than ever, and that even when they are no longer a part of or sustained by my body, they will forever know: I am here. I am their mother.
by Traci Rhoades 
by Ana Bright 
by Karen Lesh 
