On Weaning

This weekend we sold my baby’s crib. She is 16 months old and never slept in the thing. She has a big girl bed now. And she has me barricading her in it night after night as we have not weaned. My back is tired. I long for my own sheets and thick mattress, not to mention the snuggles of my very neglected husband. My body is rail thin with all the nutrients going to my sweet happy baby girl. She is healthy. She is stable. She eats food like a champ and only nurses for comfort and habit. Everything is telling me it’s time. But I cannot bring myself to wean.

On deeper inspection of this situation, I discover a few things.

1. I have a very high tolerance for discomfort if I want to. Blame growing up with tough circumstances? A masochism streak? Got me.

2. Breastfeeding is a great excuse to cocoon from the world. I have needed this cocoon. Pandemic happened, my mother died, I got pregnant then married, and then had an intense postpartum recovery from a c-section. My entire life changed at 40. I needed this cocoon.

3. I love the sweetness of sheltering and nurturing my daughter at the most primal level. It’s amazing to me that my little body can do this at all. Also I’m pretty sure I didn’t get much breastfeeding time as a baby, and something deep in me is getting healed by being able to give it to my wee one.

4. The whopper—the pain of weaning my daughter is bringing up the pain of feeling I must wean from God. Let me explain.

There is a school of thought that says that we are never separate from God. Dig around in the mystics of just about any religion, and they’ll say the same thing. On a deep level, we are never separate from the mystery of many names; our good, Love Itself, the Universe, or God— the Divine Mother of us all.

Those cryptic mystics also say that our journey in this life is to release the places in our consciousness where we believe we are separate from God. This is where any spiritual path leads— a journey through facing fears, releasing the illusion of ego, and ultimately realizing like Dorothy that we never left home. We’re never separate from God.

Lately I think of God as a parent. Maybe we all do, subconsciously. The mind says there’s a big grandpappy in the sky, and we’re running around like Monty Python trying not to get smited by his capricious whims. I have to challenge this notion often. What if God were an unconditionally loving parent? What if it was female?

My heart melts at anything “Goddess” or “Divine Mother” related. Perhaps Mystery is genderless and not a personification at all. It’s more a consciousness and an energy, a Zen vibration, a cosmic force. But having lived in southern Christian patriarchy all my life, and being a human whose brain can only grasp so much, a female mothering God is medicine to me. Divine Mamma. My best friend and love. The source of all my good. Goddess, healer, shy origin of all beauty, creation, Love, sweetness, alignment. Just like a baby sees her mommy. This is Divine Mamma to me.

And so. Weaning my daughter feels so hard to me. Because it brings up the pain of feeling I must separate from my Divine Mother in order to exist on this planet. I’ve been operating under the assumption that I don’t get to be with my Mom, and everything in my life is some sort of consolation prize. I have no choice, and that’s just how it is. So I walk around with a deep nameless sadness that I try to deny until I can’t.

And then for the first time in my life, I realize what the sadness is. And I realize that it’s based on something not true.

What if I never have to wean from my Divine Mom? What if we’ve never actually been apart, nor do we ever have to be? If Love is what we’re made of, and if that Love is God, Goddess, Goodness Itself, then as the mystics say, I and the Mother are one. I never left the farm or the garden or home. I just keep falling for the illusion that I have.

If this is true, then maybe I can teach my daughter that even when physical things and people come and go, the love underneath them, that they channel and represent, remains. And physical things changing are just a form of that Love expanding. In other words, the milk might go, but the love won’t.

It’s a hard sell for a toddler. We’ll see what we end up doing there. It’s a hard sell for a daughter missing her deceased earthly Mamma, too. But like my little one, I am learning. And I signed up to be a pilgrim in this life, not a tourist. (So I will put on my pilgrim hat, Mamma. Love you.)