Can a baby be addicted to nursing?
I wonder. My daughter, my first child, is a few weeks old and gaining weight steadily. And it’s no wonder: she eats, she sleeps, and she cries. Nursing is our precious time, our time when she is content and quiet. It is a relief from her otherwise relentless cries. In the hospital, she latched on and didn’t stop. I wondered, could she be that hungry? After 45 minutes, the nurse came in and showed me how to release the latch, assuring me my newborn had gotten enough.
My little girl, it turned out, didn’t have an “enough” when it came to nursing. For months, our sessions closed with me removing her or, more often, with her drifting into unconsciousness. But her need for me didn’t stop there.
…
It’s six months later, and my fingers tap way on a keyboard next to her sleeping head on the queen-sized mattress in her nursery. Leaving her to nap alone is not an option. A first-time mom, I am tense with anxiety about her rolling off the bed, suffocating from SIDS, and above all, her supernatural ability to sense the proximity of my body and wake in fitful tears upon finding my absence. It is less stressful to bring my laptop into the room, to work as she rests next to me on the bed, and gaze wistfully at the crib I had ignorantly painted in blissful joy just months earlier. I wonder if it will ever cradle a sleeping bed, or if it will permanently become the decoration it now serves as. I had known that she would be born helpless. I hadn’t anticipated her need, her attachment, her hunger not only for my milk but for my arms, my touch, my nearness.
…
“Mommy, will you lay with me?” It is three years later and she finally sleeps alone, in her own bed, crib outgrown. She has long since stopped nursing, but her need for my touch continues with surprising intensity. She wants my hands to hold hers as we walk, my lap to perch on as we read, my kiss to cover her pain. My nearness is comfort, and I suppose now I understand. What could be more powerful than being enveloped by love?
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I am pregnant with another son, bump bruised and tender from daily injections that reduce my risk of blood clots. A mess of arms of legs scramble over me on the couch, more interested in coming close to me than whatever cartoon flickers across the TV screen. As they clamor for cuddles, vying for a seat in my quickly disappearing lap, the bruises on my belly sting in protest. I wince, but my arms envelop my snugglers anyway.
…
My body is not my own. It can be frustrating and overwhelming, this call to give when I’m exhausted, to open my arms and my lap when I’d rather lay down. I stoop to pick up and carry kids with outstretched arms, kids who can walk but reach out to me anyway, “Up!” Although they’ve learned to balance, they are still learning that they’re loved. Aren’t we all?
Motherhood is a call to be touched. Our bodies are a living sacrifice. Little hands and little hearts depend on us. Long after our milk runs dry, our bodies mysteriously continue to feed our hungry children. “This is my body, given for you,” we say, and even before they are old enough to receive the Eucharist, they know what it means to consume our love.
Yes, it is exhausting and its physicality is overwhelming. But the physical sacramentally points to a deeper reality. Our is a call to be not depleted, but to give out of our poverty like the widow who gave her last coins. This means giving our bodies again and again. It means giving our love, patience, and attention, even when the inner bank seems empty. Sometimes, we choose to put more stock in our own emptiness than in serving these little ones in need. But more often, we experience the miracle and mystery that is love: in being poured out, it only grows. Like the flour of Elijah’s widow, or the oil that burned in the temple for the Maccabees, love is actually inexhaustible.
And what is a mystery to me is plainly clear to my children: love is in these hands, and that is why they reach out again and again to grab them.