Hope & Cells

It is the eve of my little Tinker's first day of pre-school so I thought I'd pop in and update you instead of spending any more time fiddling nervously with her little backpack for tomorrow!

Yes I survived last week, and yes I know I owe you some tales and pictures from our fabulous trip. Alas, real life has the audacity to get in the way of my blog posts.

Someone who read last week's post sent me an email asking me about my miscarriage. They made the point that "in the first trimester it isn't really a baby" and suggested I think not of it as the death of our child but rather a mass of cells.

I appreciate the thought, I take it this particular reader thought their advice might console me in some way, however I couldn't help but share their thoughts with you all. Especially after receiving so many emails from other readers who had suffered similar losses and said they found little understanding from their friends and families.

Everybody is different, and if I am to share with you my feelings about this, it would be to point out that a loss is a loss. It is the sudden end to a lifetime of hopes and dreams for a special little person. Whether that little person resembles a salamander in a sac of a fluid or looks a lot like your Uncle Ned, it doesn't matter. An unborn baby represents hope. From the moment you are blessed with a pregnancy your heart fills with dreams for this little person. If the baby dies before he gets the chance to meet you, he takes all of those dreams with him.

In my case, I had put a lot of weight on the fact that our baby was due around the one year anniversary of my dear friend Alli's death. It warmed my heart knowing that our special little baby would bring so much joy and hope to everyone remembering Alli a year after her death. So for me, losing this baby represents a lot.

It comes at a time when some people are moving on with their lives without Alli and for others, the 6month mark has been a very sad one. I'm in the latter group and after this happening, I am feeling a kind of double-grief. Missing so much, my beloved friend and soul mate and missing also, the hope of this new little life that represented so much for so many of us.

Weaning Baby, Weaning Mama

credit fisheaters.com

I was going to start this post by noting that breastfeeding has been in the news a bit lately, what with the tragic suicide of Katy Isden but then when I thought about it a little more I realised it has been in the news for ages. It is always in the bloody news! Breastfeeding is one of those topics that always draws a crowd and usually an opinionated one at that.

For as long as I have been reading parenting magazines and perusing parenting/childbirth Internet forums I have found the term Breastfeeding Relationship a little hard to swallow. I can't quite say what it is about it that I dislike, but it really annoys me. Not as much as Birth Rape though, that is one term that really gets my goat. I'm getting angry just thinking about how much I hate that term. Don't get me started! Another concept I have never really grasped is the ABA Meeting. I don't feel the need to attend a get together with a bunch of mothers who breastfeed. It seems off to me, like we should also have meeting for mothers who push red prams, or others who feed formula or mothers who don't eat meat. I don't know, it irks me.

My little Tinker is now 16 months old and still breastfeeds. Well, that was the case until I got sick last week and discovered that 2 days of vomiting not only dehydrates a person but it also stops lactation. My daughter has never been a good eater, so she is quite attached to her 4 daily breast feeds. I had no intention of weaning her, my plan was to allow her to self wean when she was ready. I had guessed it would be from around age 2 but I didn't really know.

Now that I have had to wean her all of a sudden I have had to face some unexpected feelings. Guilt is one of them, of course. I think mothers are just programmed to feel permanently guilty aren't they? Feeling bad that the child tripped and fell, feeling bad that the nappy wasn't fastened correctly so it pinched her skin, feeling bad that the garden still isn't finished and the child doesn't have a lawn to run on yet, feeling bad for parking the child in front of Teletubbies so Mama could have a shower alone... It goes on. Feeling guilty wasn't a surprise but what was surprising was my grief.

It wasn't because Tinker was throwing herself at my chest 20 times a day yelling "mama please, mooolk? all gone mama? mooolk all gone? Nooooo!" because that was sad and it did break my heart but I think the sadness that I felt at the loss of... dare I say it... our breastfeeding relationship was actually real and it wasn't felt in response to her being so upset. I felt sad for me. I felt sad that I could no longer be the ultimate comfort for my baby and I felt sad that I couldn't allow her to gradually stop doing something that came naturally to both of us.

Being of average emotional intelligence I can't put my finger on why it is so important to me, but it is. All the other overwhelming feelings you get as a new mother were not surprising to me. I was not surprised at the protective lioness I became nor the completely irrational sleep deprived nut case I became after a year went by and I still didn't have my baby sleeping through the night. However this grief about having to wean her, and wean me has been a real shock.

I'm torn between getting medication to kick start the lactation again or just persevering with this weaning process. So far I have managed to get her to a point where she isn't hysterical about not having the breastfeeds in the day time but she is still hanging on to the 7pm and 7am feeds. For now there is a small amount there but it won't last so I guess in a few days it will be gone and I suppose she will then have to accept that she has weaned. And so will I.

I'm interested in your thoughts on this topic.