Some day in the spring, my second baby stopped breastfeeding. One day, he said, “Nah, I’m good, ma,” and that was that.
I had expected it to be a battle like many of my friends had described, where it was the battle of wills, buckets of tears, and potentially few choice graffitis on choice body parts.
But no. He suckled for a few seconds, shrugged, and that was that. He stopped, and never asked for a feeding again. What a bittersweet moment. Breastfeeding was both extremely excruciatingly stressful, and yet at the same time one of the core bonding experiences we shared in his first year of life.
Few months later, I gave him his last bottle. He was completely fine with being cut off and switching over to a straw mug for cow’s milk. I was more emotional at saying good bye to his Pigeon bottles we’ve used daily for over half a year than he seemed to be. What a bittersweet moment. I’ll never see him laying in my arms, sucking on a bottle.
This post was originally published on Hiroko’s Words, a Substack Newsletter I have been writing since end of 2024, thinking out-loud about finding a new identity postpartum.
A week after his first birthday, he started daycare. Within a week, he began walking. Simultaneously, he stopped crawling. What a bittersweet moment. We had so many new things he could explore and do now that he was a biped, but it also meant another sudden closure to one of his core seasons.
One day last week, I realized that he knew how to use a fork. A fork! He must have been observing his classmates at school, and figured it out. I had never even attempted to teach him how to use a fork, because in my mind, he was still a baby baby.
The “last times” of babies’ activities come so suddenly, and then, as if a switch flips, they go on to do something else like they’ve been doing it all their lives.
Every time it happens, I feel like I’m experiencing whiplash, simultaneously overwhelmed with joy at the development, but also grieving yet another loss of my baby’s “baby” self. A bittersweet moment, again and again.
Soon, he’ll start using words, instead of saying “Dah???” for every noun, verb, and adjective. Soon, he’ll be riding his bike in the trail with his brother, while we yell for them to slow down.
My first pregnancy and postpartum year was extremely difficult, and when the second time came around just a year and a half later, I wasn’t sure I was up to the daunting task of doing it all over again.
But contrary to my fears, the second postpartum period was so much easier and blissful than the first. It allowed me to relish in the newborn and infancy phase, giving me the opportunity to re-experience the process in a much more positive light.
I don’t know if it’s because I had done it all before, and I just had so much more mental bandwidth to really be present and enjoy the process, or the second baby was just a much “easier” infant to raise, but I felt like I got to “redo” the postpartum period that I missed out on with all the anxieties and exhaustion the first time around.
Having both kinds of experiences have allowed me to really appreciate how different every pregnancy and child rearing experience is, and how no one really knows what you are going through. If my two experiences could be so different when the kids were born barely a year and a half apart from same DNA, someone from a different family would be going through experiences I can’t even imagine.
While I wasn’t sure if we were up to the task of raising 2 kids under 2, in hindsight, I’m very glad we have both of our tykes. Every day is exhausting, but every day is a blessing. With both types of experiences, I feel like I’m better able to talk to other new mothers about their experiences, and better emphasize with what they’re going through.
Every day, one or both of them acquire a new skill, and every day, they did something for the last time. I am probably going to continue mourning the loss and basking in the excitement every single time, until they graduate college.
And maybe, one of the benefits of having children is that you get to experience these firsts and lasts over and over again, when it’s so difficult to experience any firsts or lasts with our own selves.
Watching them grow is like watching miracles happen right in front of my eyes every single day. Tomorrow is another new day, with another set of miracles.
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