My baby is turning 3.  The fact of her birthday slams into my hot sunny summer like a dump truck full of depression.

Why am I not celebrating this milestone– the final 12 months of The Baby Cave, which, I’ve been told, lasts till the youngest is 4?  Why am I not running full-tilt to the mouth of the Cave, eager to frolic outside in high heels?

Because the Cave, in hindsight, is a snuggly place– a safe, uncomplicated nest of love.  Suddenly I’m overwhelmed with Baby Nostalgia.  I indulge in a fantasy about a third child: a mellow, sound-sleeping baby boy.  How my girls would love their little brother!  How boys (I’ve heard) adore their mothers!  This time I would be wiser. I wouldn’t get trapped in the Cave and half-crazed with sleep-deprivation. Maybe it’s not too late to remove the IUD, chart my ovulation, and get pregnant ASAP.

Then I remember the letter I wrote myself on a particularly dark night with a newborn and a toddler.  “Dear Diana, Don’t ever, ever, ever do this again.” I shake off my daydreams and examine the crux of the matter: my youngest is turning 3, and we’re finally going to stop nursing.

I thought about weaning her at Two. I tried to do it at Two and a Half. One by one, my friends weaned their toddlers– in private, without fuss. When C. demanded Snackies at a playdate, I blushed and looked around for support. Surely there must be some die-hard attachment-parenting moms in this neo-hippie Vermont town?

“Oh, we’re all done,” said one friend.  “It was easy, once I made up my mind.”

“Don’t you feel like a doormat?” asked another, who had briskly weaned her babies at 12 months.

Call me a pushover, but I’ve taken the path of least resistance. My daughter loved nursing, and I had no pressing reason to stop.  In truth, I loved breastfeeding as much as she did.  Nestled in the warm quiet, her whirling dervish body finally still, she’d stroke my waist with one hand and rub her Ducky’s beak with the other. I’d nuzzle her head– my tawny lion cub– breathing in the baby musk of her hair. Nursing was a primal intimacy, one I won’t experience again.

When I weaned my first baby (at 19 months), I was already 5 months pregnant with the second and desperate for space. I cringed every time she latched on to my sore nipples. She was a hungry little monster causing me pain, and my wolf instinct reared up and cut her off.

This time around, there’s a spontaneous upwelling of grief, even though I have no desire to keep nursing a 3-year-old.  C. is a fidgety rascal, often kicking me in the groin or stubbornly refusing to stop after I give her a Count-to-Ten warning. In most ways, I am ready to end the relationship. Still, the grief is vast– the end of an era, a shift into the next phase of mothering, whatever it may be.

The last nursing, like the first menstruation, goes largely unacknowledged in our culture.  But the two moments book-end a woman’s childbearing years.  If only there were some way to mark this transition, rather than muddling my way through it alone.  In ancient writings, the word “wean” meant “to ripen,” like fruit on the vine, and weaning was a festive occasion.  A weaned child was a fulfilled child, ready for more independence. In the Bible, Abraham says he will “make a great feast” for the event of Isaac’s weaning.  In Hawaii, I’ve heard that weaning is celebrated with a “Milk Party,” where young children sit together at tables drinking ceremonious cups of milk.

The common age of weaning for ancient Hebrews was three. “The median age of complete weaning worldwide has been estimated at three to five years,” states The Nursing Mother’s Guide to Weaning. I may be an anomaly in America, where some women have been accused of child abuse for nursing older children, but on an international scale, I’m average. The La Leche League says that most children will self-wean between age 4 and 6.  I’m afraid C. would nurse till she was 10, if left to her own devices.  So for the months leading up to her third birthday, I ask her, “When will you ready to be done with Snackies?”

“When I’m THREE!”

The birthday becomes a source of joyful anticipation– vanilla cupcakes with pink icing, a princess doll, a piñata.  Surely breastfeeding can be relinquished amidst all this excitement.

C’s last nursing came on a Tuesday, her final day of being Two.  I lured her upstairs for Quiet Time with the promise of Snackies and then puttered about folding laundry, delaying the occasion. Many times that day I’d found myself on the verge of tears– overwhelmed by late summer, the melancholy of August, cricket-song and goldenrod, sunflowers and tomatoes, everything ripening too fast, going down the long slide to the first hard frost, the season turning, the daylight fading, another reminder of death.

I drew the shade and lay down with C., pulled the sheet up over us.  She had her Ducky and Blanky and she smiled at me, ordering “First the little bubbie, then the big one.” I realized I wouldn’t miss those commands.

I burrowed my face in her hair and tried to absorb the moment. How rarely we know that something is ending even as it happens– the last time in bed with a lover, the last time talking with your father.  Usually, the knowledge comes in hindsight. But this nursing was a privilege, and had a ritual gravity.

I cried briefly as I drew her squirming, sturdy body to mine. She drank milk from both sides, I counted to ten, and she stopped. She offered some milk to her Ducky and grinned.  Then she hopped out of bed and went off to make mischief with her sister. We were done.

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