I nursed my baby for the last time a week ago today.

All the feelings!

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I nursed my baby for the last time a week ago today.

It was around midnight; I was half asleep when I heard Julius’s cries. When they didn’t stop, I managed to tiptoe into his room and lift him from his crib without waking his toddler sister. (Tony and I call this “an extraction,” and it is a miracle when we pull it off. Once I picked him up so fast, in such pitch-black darkness, I realized I had him upside down, his little feet in the air.)

I sat on the couch, wedged into the cozy corner where I nursed him almost every day and night (and at all hours between) for the past eleven months of his life. I kissed the downy softness of his head. I breathed in his soapy scent, so different from the milky baby smell when he was new to the world several impossibly short and impossibly long months ago.

I don’t mean to make it all sound like some sort of maternal fantasy.

I cannot count the times I’ve cried, overwhelmed by the insurmountable mountain of my exhaustion, by the relentlessness of caring for a baby and a toddler who are basically just little vessels of raw need. Postpartum depression. The loneliness of this cruel pandemic. The mindfuck that is figuring out who you are when your life is so different than the one you have spent the first three and a half decades of your life creating.

I nursed my baby for the last time a week ago today.

A handful of hours later, I boarded a plane to Atlanta without my pump, without ice packs and a cooler, without a pile of the slippy plastic storage bags that everyone says are the best for breast milk.

My breasts throbbed and ached.

I felt sad.

I felt happy.

I felt free.

Over the summer, I had pumped in the bathroom at LAX on my way home, fresh from speaking at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, standing up by the sinks. I had waited by the locked lactation room for nearly 20 minutes before giving up. Two well-meaning women told me, “There’s a lactation room.” I thanked them and stood there awkwardly by the sinks in my slightly-damp-from-breastmilk pumping bra, the pump making it’s awful vacuum cleaner sound, my nipples getting squeezed and unsqueezed while women rushed with their rolly suitcases to wash their hands and reapply their lipstick. (Can you tell I loathe pumping?)

On that trip, the TSA agent told me I seemed like a pro with my little bags of breastmilk all separated out, and I wanted to hug her.

This trip, I felt so light with only my carryon and a small backpack.

I missed my baby, but I was happy for the break.

When I got home a few days ago, we curled up on the couch, in the same spot, and I gave him a bottle of formula. He sucked it down contentedly. I kissed his soft head. I admired his thigh chub. I thought about how my heart might explode with the enormity of my love for him.

I thought about beginnings and endings.

My breasts throbbed and ached a little less.

I thought about getting cabbage leaves for them (people swear this helps), but I kept forgetting at the grocery store.

In ten days, Julius turns one.

He won’t be a baby anymore. He will always be my baby, of course, but we are entering a new chapter. I am hopeful (mostly, for more sleep). I am grateful. Today is the first day my breasts don’t hurt anymore, but my heart aches a little. How does anyone hold all this in their hearts? All this love and worry, grief and joy, hope and more love?

feeding Julius on the playground bench back in springtime, with Simone