On Sharing My Body for Four Years Straight

And what it's like to have it be mine again

I remember the day I learned I was pregnant with my first like it was yesterday. Something felt different in my body, so I was fairly certain when I took the pregnancy test on the day I would normally have started my cycle. I remember seeing the lines and telling my husband the exciting news–it happened to be his birthday.

That was just over four years ago, and my body wasn’t again entirely mine for the following four years. It was my body which gestated my daughter’s body, and then I breastfed her for eighteen months. Then there was a month or so of overlapping with getting pregnant with my second while still breastfeeding my first, until the pregnancy nausea and vomiting dried up what little was left of my supply. Then, another sixteen months of breastfeeding my second.

Truth be told, I did not enjoy being pregnant, nor did I particularly love breastfeeding, especially the first time. I couldn’t stand the sensory overload; the constant physical touch was an adjustment. So was the sleep deprivation, and the feeling that I was wholly responsible for not just birthing my child, but nourishing her.

My second pregnancy was far worse, although breastfeeding my second was a breeze in comparison (though he was also more demanding). He had a better latch. My threshold for feeling overstimulated also became higher. And within me, I understood in retrospect that sharing my body is what started to prepare me for sharing my world with my kids, and with an intimacy that–for better or for worse–their father will just never know.

Interestingly, it’s also from sharing my body that I’ve been more boundaried in other ways. I don’t share my bed with my kids–I’m not willing to give up my sleep once they’ve dropped their nighttime feeds. I remember one time my husband tried to offer my water cup to my kiddo, and I shot lasers at him with my eyes. Something about giving the last vestiges of separateness–of what was specifically my source of nourishment–made me irrationally possessive. “I’ve shared everything else; I’m not willing to share my water cup,” I may have barked.

And I did share everything else, for fifty months. And now as of this week, my body is my own again for the first time in four years. I did the last nighttime feed for my little boy, and then the next night it was a bottle with cow’s milk. It’s freeing; I went out to dinner with a friend without having to plan around bedtime for my son first. Yet it’s also bittersweet. When he wakes up and when he goes to bed, he still gives me a long hug and lets me nom on his cheek, but the closeness is a little bit less.

And I suppose that’s how it goes: all of parenting is an exercise in separating. My kids started as little beans within me, completely dependent on me; then, they fed from me, so close to me; then they walked, and then they weaned, and it shows me how they move forward in the world ever so gradually away from me.

My children are mine forever–no, they are not; they are theirs, merged with me for only a short while, and quickly they become separate beings with their own agency, while I love them and watch them and cheer them on from an ever-growing distance.