Weaning

 

In a less healthy time, when I still wanted scads of babies—face after face dimpled with some impress of myself, and of my husband too I supposed—I met her. Isn’t it often the way: she had what I wanted but didn’t yet have—seven children—and so I thought I needed her friendship. She had other things, also hungered for: smooth pregnancies every time, an air of knowing what she wanted, perfectly orderly children. During the forty-minute sermon at our church each Sunday, my eighteen-month-old, a fairly agreeable little girl, often howled (understandably) and thrashed when made to sit through. Her children sat in their pews in a somber, dark-haired line, still as listening cats with their ears perked up. There was no fidgeting. (Even I fidgeted.) There was no crying. Not even the youngest cried, a sober six-month-old with tiny gold studs in her tiny pierced ears. No toys were used. Seemingly no bribery, nor threats. I’d never seen anything like it. Surely, I thought, she and her husband are consummate parents, and she the consummation of motherhood.

At a church open house we met, among sweating, snow-cold jugs of home-brewed peppermint iced tea, and watermelon. A few years before, she and her husband had lingered shortly in our small country church and then left. They had joined this party to catch up with old friends.

“You should meet her,” said our pastor’s wife, before introducing us. “You have a lot in common.”

Her hair was the first thing I noticed—dark auburn, intricate configuration of braids wreathing her head. Underneath, a dark peasant top and swinging, broomstick skirt.

She was, she told me, eight weeks pregnant. With her seventh. No ultrasound yet. At the time, she didn’t believe in them. “I hope it’s twins,” she said, breathless. Her blue eyes widened and began to shine with a fully-alive excitement of almost romantic intensity. “It’s just the most wonderful thing…Imagine, to have them nursing, one on each breast, at the same time…”

Okay, pretty much weird, I thought, put off.

Almost a full year lapsed before their white fifteen-passenger van began squatting over a spot in our church’s parking lot every Sunday. Once again she and her husband and children were visiting our church for a while. Seemed they visited many churches for just a while. Despite the pastor’s wife’s prediction, little commonality bridged between her and me…until she intuited that I was pregnant with my second baby. Then we became Exactly Alike. Or I became Exactly Like Her, dropping into line with whatever she wanted me to do. Because what would happen if I didn’t?

Soak your grains to clear up your yeast infection, she told me. (Grains dutifully soaked.) Cut out sugar. (Sugar dropped.) Here, use this tea mix. I blended it myself. A whole mason jar full. I steeped some and drank a gallon a day with every pregnancy. Helped nausea, everything. Take care of yourself and get well. Let me know how you’re doing after a while.

(Yes, mother.)

I did not drink the tea, at my midwife’s caution, until the last three weeks of my pregnancy. Every time I saw Her, though, I feared, jittery: Will She ask me if I drank it? What will I say?

She never asked. For each conversation that could have been thrust down that canal towards birth—blood, and defecation spurting with it—I was there, down below, shoving upward to ruthlessly block.

When I was around twenty weeks full of my second child, I and my husband and small daughter agreed to drive up to Her house after church one September afternoon, to visit. While I’d been pregnant-sick, they’d left our church.

It was my duty to reach out to Her. They were now going to another church. Soon they stopped church altogether. I became the sacrificial umbilical cord feeding Her pulsing lifeblood from the Church universal.

Her grey clapboard house, indented with numerous windows, seemed to stand largely alone, isolated, though only a short toss back from a road, and near a neighbor on one side. Inside, what have historically been specified as “womanly” touches, made by Her own thin hands. A red fabric cubby dangling from the side of Her bed, filled with her Bible…a folk-art-flavored paper mobile twirling above the baby’s changing table…and the food: gluten-free, sugar-free, stevia-sweetened, frugal yet complex. Inside one of their refrigerators, jars of murky greenish whey, strained from raw milk from a local farm, lined one side of the top shelf. Opposite were mason jars, tall and proud, filled to the little line just under the lid with homemade yogurt.

What didn’t She do, I wondered, and when did She have the time? Boiling dry beans from scratch, whipping cream and soaking nuts…As a baby gift, She gave me a white jar with a handwritten label: Homemade Diaper Rash Cream. Ingredients included extra virgin coconut oil. She made the cream, of course.

She made her children, too, by her own hands: “home-educated” each one. “I don’t believe in homeschooling,” She told me, the space between top and bottom of Her blue eyes shrinking until the eyes became snapping slits. “I believe in home education. There are times for specific lessons. But the lessons really never stop. Everything is home education.”

Her opinions were strong as a well-worked pelvic floor. We don’t celebrate Christmas, She told me in a letter that appeared after I’d sent a Christmas note and photo. Pagan origins. Exchanging presents and celebrating was sinful homage to Druids and plain-old waste of time. “You can stop being friends with us if you want,” She wrote in firm, rounded print. “We’ve lost friends over this.”

But not us. Such a sacrifice, being that cord. More trips to Her enchanted bungalow, and more opinions, and more stomachaches (mine) following. It seemed, at least when we (She) talked, that our opinions were identical twins thrust apart at birth, reunited now. We both hurrahed over natural childbirth, having many children, homeschooling (er, educating), natural lifestyles and healthy eating, over, well, so many other things that who need bother naming them…after all, what if they are not as many as we think they are…and so came the stomachaches. Because I was the one who was Exactly Like Her, except only in her presence. Once at home—such relief to be away, to be Me again—I gulped Seltzers. And shame at the enormity of my compromises. My views were never so much like Hers as she believed. Thanks to Her, they were quietly pushing apart further—and further—from Hers.

Then came an afternoon when we were at her house and She spoke out, vicious with hate-mangled face, teeth almost gnashing in vehement disapproval, against someone I knew.

About which I said, Nothing.

“I can’t stand Her,” I began to lament to my husband. He was shocked: “I thought you liked her.”

Her phone calls went unreturned.

One day, a letter. Her address on the envelope, Her rounded, firm print, quivering in my hands as I read, “This is one last attempt to reach out to you. ‘See you in six months,’ said your husband. How right he was”—phrases so bitter I felt poisoned on reading them.

I wasn’t an umbilical cord. I never had been. I had made myself, competent wife, adult mother of two, into a helpless infant, child of codependency, and made her my mother-rescuer. I had been suckling on her approval of me, she who was everything I thought I needed to be vicariously, the consummate Christian mother, pregnant with true womanhood. Now the breast milk was laced with heavy metal of disapproval. I had to pull off, or wither.

But what do I do about the letter? I agonized. “What about the letter?” I asked my husband John, again and again, months apart, slow, but a weaning from her…and a learning-to-wait, laying my questions to rest, by the side of the true and first Life-Giver, most motherly of all:

Lord, my heart is not haughty,
Nor my eyes lofty.
Neither do I concern myself with great matters,
Nor with things too profound for me.
Surely I have calmed and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with his mother;
Like a weaned child is my soul within me. (Psalm 133:1-2)

Sometimes I wonder, Should I have talked to her instead of mutely letting the friendship go?

I cannot shake the sense that a muteness of calm and quiet in my soul, and nothing more, was the best I could, right now, give.

I never did anything about the letter, except lose it accidentally, or on purpose.

O Israel, hope in the LORD
From this time forth and forever. (Psalm 133:3)