Weaning in the Land of the Midnight Sun
By Sarah Swandell
@sarahswandell
Is there any worse rejection than someone shoving your naked boob out of their face? As my toddler clambers away, I grit my teeth to keep from saying, People would kill for this, kid.
Weaning seems to be in the works, but I won’t admit it. First my daughter skips sessions, then she skips sides, drinking just from the right and dismissing the left like a sommelier pooh-poohing the cheap stuff. Now, at 18 months, we’re down to four nursings a day. Still, I’m content … until we fly to Alaska to visit family and everything is upended.
On the 6-hour flight to Seattle, I bare my chest under the cover of a nursing apron. My daughter pushes the fabric off her head and cries. If our seatmate is judging me for doing the dangle-breast in a toddler’s face, he wouldn’t be the first. My mom-friends have been sending me messages on Marco Polo for months: “You’ll stop once she has teeth, right? You’ll stop at a year, right? You’ll stop when she can say the word for it … right?”
I can’t blame them: I used to read Dr. Newman’s breastfeeding guides and judge the moms he profiled, one of whom asked her 4-year-old nursling, “Does milk still come out?” The child replied, and I quote: “What do you think? Coca-Cola?” I was sure I’d wean long before there was a question of whether milk was being dispensed—ideally long before my child talked like a teen. I knew I’d draw the line somewhere … I just didn’t think she’d draw the line first.
We fly first to Seattle, then Anchorage, then a small propeller plane lands us in Homer. By the time we reach the pale bay with its snowy mountains on the far shore, we’ve missed so many nursings I’m worried we won’t recover. Our bodies are confused by the time change, not to mention the piercing sunshine—still light at 11 p.m.—which makes all time feel like go-time. Distracted and happy, my daughter squirms off my lap to join her 8-year-old cousin for walks in the woods.
***
Spring has finally come to the great north, with fields of horsetail waving in the wind and pushkie leaves the size of pillows. My brother-in-law asks if we’ve ever tried fried fiddleheads. “You have to catch them before they uncurl,” he says, wading into the ferns.
Our Alaskan family is forever teaching us about the signs and symbols of the seasons—how to harvest pink fireweed petals to make jelly, how when the magenta reaches the top and the bloom is at its fullest, winter is six weeks away. Those who endure long cold months here, with only six hours of daylight, get a kind of manic energy once summer comes. Somehow, gradually—maybe even without their awareness—the day grows to hold 18 hours of light. Soon everyone is outside, heeding the injunction to gather ye rosebuds (or fiddleheads) while ye may.
We hunt for the curled green fronds so we can harvest them. Picking our way around moose scat, we search for the telltale look of the fiddlehead, the circle at the top like the scroll on a violin. Finally we find a patch, but some of the ferns have already unspooled. Their season has passed. If we tried to fry them they’d taste bitter and fall apart.
So where are we, my daughter and me? There’s no way to know where we are in our nursing journey, when she will unroll herself from me and spread her branches.
It’s this in-betweenness that I can’t stand.
***
I remember my last in-between time, with the child who came before her—the one I thought of as a boy. We were visiting our Alaska family, this time over New Year’s, and darkness blanketed us till mid-morning. I remember walking through the snow to buy a pregnancy test—how when I took it, later, the second line arrived like dessert. I grinned into the mirror. That night, ice-skating with our niece on a thick, bumpy lake, I saw a star fall. I wished on it, or prayed: that the baby would be happy and healthy and outlive us.
Two weeks later I lay bleeding in the ER, entering a season of grief that was frustratingly imprecise. Could I call my child a son when we’d never know his sex? When would the bleeding stop? I knew I still had hCG—could probably even pass a pregnancy test—but the telltale chemical was ebbing. So when was I, officially, no longer pregnant? What was the date of death: the first pink smear, or when tissue finally passed from me, or back at the beginning, at the site of new life, when chromosomes that should have multiplied like weeds instead crossed and bent and curled into themselves?
There are no answers to the whens, to the how longs—certainly not to the whys. There is only the living in the in-between.
And the in-between is everywhere.
It’s in the woman who gets her period for the tenth cycle straight, who has been testing obsessively and mourning what hasn’t yet been. It’s in the woman whose first pregnancy slowly bleeds out of her, as she puts one more liner in her underwear and wills the bleeding to stop so they can conceive again—or wills it not to stop, because she’s not ready for all traces of this new life, this now loss, to be gone. It’s in the couple who have meticulously, painstakingly created a video about themselves, who now wait to hear if any mother will choose them to raise their baby. These blurry edges are where we all reside, the morphing of the already and the not yet, the melding of the future with the present, the twinning of loss and hope.
My sister-in-law says, when it comes to weaning, “Listen to your body.” But my heart is part of my body, and my heart isn’t yet ready to leave this in-between time. I’m not ready to let go of the closeness my daughter and I share.
I don’t mean to romanticize it. Truth be told, sometimes she pulls on me like a man teething jerky, and sometimes the letdown feels like nursing a wasp. But as much as I complain about how all naptimes and bedtimes are “on me,” I wouldn’t know what to do if she stopped breastfeeding. I’d miss the skittering of her fingernails across my skin, how she gently tugs at the ends of my braids. I’d miss the soap smell of her scalp and the swish of her swallows.
We could be a week away from weaning, or a year. Yes, she has been saying, “down” more than usual, but still she nurses with her hand on my cheek like she’s spinning a globe, her body at rest, nestling in mine, and in this in-between she is closer than perhaps she’ll ever be.
***
When the batch of fiddleheads comes out of the deep fryer, we crunch on their salty green coils. I look at the glaze coat on my fiddlehead and spot something black. It’s a bug. It went through the oil and made it out still attached—though it died in the heat—now preserved under Old Bay seasoning. Is this supposed to be a sign—something about how death and loss and change are ever in the midst of life? Is there some message, here, about these frustratingly imprecise seasons? I pick the bug off and toss its carcass in the trash.
In two weeks, we’ll be home, where maybe my daughter will resume her old nursing ways, and maybe I’ll regain my old milk supply. In two weeks, we’ll fly south, where it’ll suddenly be summer again. But for now we’re here in this season, this strange place of sun and snow, and we’re eating greens that taste like spring. For now it’s the season of foraged fern heads, each one like a chambered nautilus, like a fingerprint whorl, like the fist of a baby, until it unfolds.
Guest essay written by Sarah Swandell. Sarah is a writer and pastor, now on family leave to care for her 2-year-old daughter. Her work has appeared in The Christian Century, 100 Word Story, and Ruminate. Yes, she is still nursing. Find her online on her website.