Since about Isaac’s second birthday (seven months ago) I’ve been trying in various ways to wean him. The thing is, I have been reluctant to make it into a full-blown confrontation. I’ve read a lot about it, talked with a wide range of nursing mothers, and also delved into my own conflicted heart. What I wanted to have happen, and which DOES happen to so many lucky people, was for Isaac to come to it peaceably. To simply move on in life to the next phase and to feel that this aspect of our relationship has run its course. I wanted him, in effect, to wean himself. But it hasn’t happened that way. Well– in some ways we’ve made great progress. He used to nurse 50 times a day, bearing a close resemblance to many infant marsupials, and now I can count them on one hand. But my weaning timeframe is different from his, and at this point I’m feeling that I need to press the issue.
The thing that’s really getting to me is the all-night room service aspect of it. Isaac wakes up, calls to me, I come and nurse him, and he goes back to sleep. We got back into this bad habit, after having banned it pretty well, when he was so sick in March in NYC. In a strange location and battling a horrible flu (especially since he refused to eat or drink much else for days on end) I let him nurse whenever he wanted, bar none. We brought this habit home with us, and it tends to self perpetuate. Getting up every two or three hours exhausts me, and in my state of exhaustion I am loath to do anything but the fastest route back to sleep– i.e., nurse for five easy minutes. However, the other night, something shifted in me. I just felt a new resolve and a new desire to enter the battle, come what may.
I think I was emboldened by a conversation I had a week or so ago with one of the most skilled and experienced mothers I’ve ever met. She’s my age, but has spent over 17 years pregnant, nursing, or both. She tended to nurse her children until they were 3 or 4, and by then she’d have a new baby and start nursing that one. Five (home schooled with great success) children later, she looks fabulous and exudes confidence and calm. Anyway, she and I were talking about the weaning situation and she in effect encouraged me to take a stand. She said, “So many babies don’t get any nursing, or just get a few months. He’s had two and a half years, and it’s not as if you’re taking away all your physical affection or anything like that.” Then I also remembered the remark of a friend who weaned her little girl at about three and a half. She said, “His timeframe may not mesh with yours and that’s all there is to it. At some point, you may have to do it by force.” Or words to that effect. She said this to me a few months ago, and it stuck with me.
I’ve tried explaining things rationally to Isaac. I’ve tried saying, “You know, someday you will be all done nursing. You will just drink milk from a cup and water and juice…” I name various of his friends who no longer nurse. But as I say this I get the feeling that what he’s hearing is something like, “Someday the sun will die, the world will grow dark and cold and we’ll enter a new ice age.” Like all this is just too massive and abstract and terrible to really absorb.
We’ve made a lot of headway on the random daytime nursing events. He does still ask, but when he asks he has a wry smile on his face, a look that shows that he knows this is a very silly question. we’ve gotten it down to basically wake-up time in the morning, before or after a nap (which is getting phased out along with the nap itself), and bedtime… AND those irritating little interludes at night, which also come and go as he sleeps longer stints. He could go several nights in a row without waking up at all (and thus without nursing at all). But lately, for some reason, he’s been on this 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 5 a.m. schedule that is purely awful.
So– I think it was Monday night that I bit the bullet. I just said no– no nursing until the sun comes up, and Daddy gets up and grind the beans (all this happens at 6 a.m. or so– beans being coffee beans). the result was horrible HORRIBLE screaming that went on and on. I don’t really know how long, but it was to the extent that he was near vomitting a couple times and also looked a lot like what was going on was more of an exorcism than a simple phase in the weaning process. I thought, “Hmm… maybe this is why I didn’t want to really do this in the past– it’s HELL.” Also he used every strategy he could think of– ranging from violent physical rage to heart-breaking pleas, (“Mama, mama, I need you!” etc.) I held my steely resolve through all that, somehow. I felt strangely calm, at the eye of the storm. Finally I got him back to sleep. I stayed with him and he clung to me like a drowning person in his sleep. Then of course a few hours later the ordeal repeated. And then again.
Last night, when I was putting him to sleep I told him very clearly that when we were done with nursing at bedtime, we would be all done nursing until morning. He seemed to understand and to be okay with it. Until… 1 a.m. rolled around and I refused to nurse him once again. Again I was dealing with ear splitting screams of agony that went on and on for a full hour (it seemed even longer than that). I tried offering water, rocking in the rocking chair, telling stories, etc., etc., etc. Little worked until after an hour or so he just faded out due to exhaustion. I did not give in! but then– he woke up again, and later again around 5. Is it getting any easier yet? I guess the screaming episodes are getting a little shorter, maybe?
In many ways he’s in this phase of demanding limits all over the place. He’s pushing it all the time, throwing tantrums at a daily or semi-daily clip. Yesterday I had to cart him out of a gift store, screaming, and all the way through a series of loud echoing barn-type spaces (we were at this sort of petting zoo complex), screaming, and all the way to the car WITHOUT seeing the trains. (He had already seen the toy train set up they had, but he wanted to see it some more.) His crime: screaming hideously and throwing a toy across the room in the store– the toy being one we had not bought and would not buy, that being the source of the dispute. He’s taken to throwing lots of things… not good things… like, say, shovels. I gave him a time out today because while I was in the thick of cleaning out the fridge, he walked right up and pushed the garbage can over 100% on purpose.
So I guess in a way this nursing dispute is part of the whole picture. He’s pushing, and I have to push back. I have to say, this much and no more. Tonight, just now, I put him to sleep. I told him again about the no nursing until morning thing and he said okay. What he was focused on at that moment, plainly, was nursing NOW. Anything was okay with him as long as the bottom line was nursing now– yes.
Coming up to night three of the policy.
Wish me luck.