Motherscope LLC | San Diego, CA motherscope.com Cover Illustration by Alexandra Harvey | Mothershaped The Mom Salon logo by Samantha Acker | Gemini Designs Copyright © 2021 by Motherscope LLC and the individual contributors. All rights reserved. Leonard, Jackie (editor) The Mom Salon | August 2021 The Mom Salon features the writings of Motherscope’s 2021 Contributors, appearing in rotation from Mar. 2021 through Feb. 2022: Kate Bailey, Eunice Brownlee, Kelsey Cichoski, Heather Cleaves, Laci Hoyt, Micah Klassen, Shanthy Milne, Alyssa Nutile, Holly Ruskin, Kaitlin Solimine, Colleen Tirtirian, Megan Vos, Melaina Williams
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In This Month’s Mom Salon: Kaitlin Solimine | Weaning is a Transitive Verb
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Jackie Leonard | Four 7 Laci Hoyt | Weathering 12 Micah Klassen | The Massage
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Colleen Tirtirian | Fear is a Four-Letter Word
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CONTENT GUIDANCE “Fear is a Four-Letter Word” (p. 24): pregnancy loss, infertility
Weaning is a Transitive Verb By Kaitlin Solimine I’m feeding something from the inside while outside me, the toddler can’t sleep without his mouth on my nipple. The older child, five years old, who can multiply numbers and speak two languages, asks me to put a diaper on her and begs for milk from my breasts before bed. Body is body is body holding body growing body and I don’t know where I am in this. The beginning is obvious: a crawl up stomach to breast, newborn slick with vernix peck-pecking at chest, mouth agape and missing, missing, now finding the nipple. Ahhh, I say the first time. How the sucking is a relief. But when will it end? I read about elaborate weaning rituals, like in Genesis 21:8: “And the child grew and was weaned. And Abraham made a great feast on the day that Isaac was weaned.” I wonder: when will the last day be? What meal will we eat? Whales nurse from inverted nipples nurslings nudge loose from mammary slits; some nurse as long as three years, their young trailing the ocean’s currents, attached like a child to hip, nipple in pursed lips. Kangaroos live their earliest months close to the breast, a pouch literally grown from the body to ensure the nursling stays close, gives the mother two free hands to forage, to fight. Nipple slips from mouth, casual as late night sin but even in the dark the toddler gropes, little tongue a singe, little tongue a hummingbird, little hands that squeeze, milkmaid to teat. “Enough!” I say, because
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there’s another hiding in the gestational sac in black and white on that screen today, the room with the sign that said “No Video Taping” while the ultrasound wand (Is it magical? No: too much power in Western medicine, medical terminology) was probing, not so unlike that doctor’s fingers decades earlier, how at least I got paid $15k in reparations for that. “Enough!” I say again but the toddler doesn’t listen in the dark, is an open-mouthed fish grappling to connect, swimming across the sea of bed sheets and pillows to attach again. *** Weaning is a transitive verb, the transference of acting upon one object to another. Weaning is active, a process, not exactly a state of being as much as a sliding scale, a spectrum — “Is she weaned yet?” they ask, and I shrug, “Just down to the before bed feed.” They want to say she’s too old for “Mama’s milk.” I want to say the normal historical weaning age for humans is four to seven years old. Today, the worldwide average age for weaning is 4.2 years old. She’s sitting on her grandmother’s lap drinking cow’s milk from a plastic margarita glass. My breasts ache but my heart aches more: how could the thing she loved so much — we loved so much — suddenly be gone without any fanfare? Without a celebratory last hurrah? *** In Britain, weaning means the opposite of what it means in the United States; it means to feed a child food. There’s no pulling away. But here in this pandemic era, I feel the suck and draw, the dissent, discomfort. Aversion rising like the bile that meets the antacid, my tongue probing for anything sweet or salty because there’s a yolk sac inside me and the older child is obsessed with the idea there are eggs inside her that were inside me that were inside her grandmother. Generations of deceit: so many eggs just to grow one human. I’m feeding three humans simultaneously. What masochistic vein runs through this mother who cannot wean a five-year-old and a greedy toddler while harboring a new child inside? (Read: infertility journey; read: anxious attachment; read: lazy parenting.) We focus on the nighttime first but that’s the hardest, when the toddler
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