Kaitlin Solimine | Weaning is a Transitive Verb

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

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

screams as if there’s been a murder in the bed, thrashes and kicks, and I instinctively curl my arms around the new one inside, bird-like embryo nesting in uterus, how the older child is desperate to find a Google image where the baby doesn’t look like a worm but has eyes. She only likes the ones with eyes. We crave the familiar, eagerly forget our origins.

They say to write a weaning letter only this is the end of her nursing, not mine. But when was the end? It’s been two weeks and I’m still waiting for her to ask again —

My daughter and I lie on a swinging hammock, examining the night sky. The stars that look like they’re jumping are binary stars, I tell her.

“I know!” She exclaims. “I learned that on Wild Kratts.”

“They’re two stars dancing around each other,” I say.

But binary stars aren’t always just two celestial bodies, I learn. As many as ten percent of binary systems may be three stars, wide apart but rotating around each other’s gravitational pull. As astronomer Bo Reipurth explains:

The group starts their lives close together, but interactions between the three eventually result in one of the stars being hurled from the group. A strong enough push could remove the star from the system completely, but a weaker one results in a distant orbit. Sometimes the system may last for tens of thousands of centuries before losing the distant star; other times, it may stabilize enough to last billions of years.

I had envisioned an elaborate weaning ceremony, the two of us standing together in the back garden, planting a new tree, scattering old, defrosted breastmilk to help it grow. I’d pull her close to my breast for the last time. We’d both cry.

But no: it was a dental surgery that prevented nursing for a few days. It was a flight east for the first time in two years. It was a forgetting, a turning of the page, a loosening of thread and off she spun, away, away,

away —

The day the third child was conceived, the oldest found a baby zebra dove on the roots of an acacia tree near the horse barn, the overheated horses indifferent to another creature’s suffering, prostate to the thick grass they mulled between hearty teeth.

My husband bent down with his daughter, affirmed the species, but cautioned her not to touch the bird.

“What can we do?” she asked.

“Nothing,” he said, while in the nest above, the mother chattered and we wondered if the baby fell or was pushed. A day later my husband returned and found the baby dove unmoving, dead. He carefully moved the corpse to a patch of grass further away so our daughter wouldn’t know of its passing.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him. “We never shield her from the realities of life and death.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t know why but I didn’t want her to see the bird like that.” And I realized we all protect our children in unexpected ways.

The third star is key to the ejection, the astronomer Reipurth explains. “It’s a fact of nature that, if you have two bodies alone, then they move in a completely deterministic way — it’s possible to say exactly where they will be later on in their orbits,” he is quoted. “As soon as you put a third body in there, the system becomes completely chaotic.”

In other words: Two bodies together will simply orbit one another, if not otherwise interrupted. But a third body creates a “kick” that eventually results in the ejection of one of the stars to a distant orbit.

Sometime into the third week of weaning, she falls into the habit of falling asleep at night in a swivel chair at her grandmother’s house, her long legs draped over the sides, her cheek to my chest.

Is this sadness? Relief? I can’t name what I’m feeling as she wraps her arms around my waist, burrows inward, but there’s comfort in knowing my heart is still there, beating for her, a rhythm that will always be more familiar to her, trailing her somewhere, no matter the span of universe quietly expanding between us.

Source quoted: https://www.space.com/18777-binary-triple-star-systems. html

KAITLIN SOLIMINE is mother to Calliope and Rafael, author of awardwinning novel Empire of Glass, cofounder of Hippo Reads and Hippo Thinks, and a childbirth and lactation activist. Her writing has been featured in The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, Guernica Magazine, LitHub, and more. She lives in San Francisco where she is at work on a second novel, The Blue Lobster, which explores themes of midwifery, climate change, and New England Native American history, as well as a book of essays on home and motherhood.

Engage with Kaitlin’s Story:

Reflect on your unique feeding experiences with your child(ren). What was your reality and how did you navigate it, taking into considerations your expectations before, and feelings during and after.