You should be grateful

Is gratitude a gilded cage?

I’ve decided to stop breastfeeding for the first time in almost four years. It’s ironic because one of the reasons I was hesitant to move forward with our recent pregnancy is that I didn’t want to have to stop. I wanted to keep my youngest the baby for as long as possible and the thought of taking that away from him before he was ready broke my heart.

Yet here we are. Just a few weeks later, and it’s already time. I weep at every feed now, knowing I won’t hear him suckling or feel his breath against my chest like this ever again.

All I can think is, “You should just be grateful.

How dare you mourn this experience when you had the amount of time you did? So many women struggle to breastfeed. So many people can’t bear children. What is wrong with you that you linger in what is lost instead of all that you had? What an ungrateful woman you are.”

I went in for my follow up to the abortion and saw the fetal doppler machine and panicked. I will never again hear the rapid thump-thump-thump of a baby’s heart beat in my body. I will never again feel the crippling anxiety leading up to every scan. The obsessive checking for kicks and poking for movement. Is he safe? Is he alive? At least I got to experience it though, right? I should just be grateful.

This ring on my finger sometimes feels like a cage.

A beautiful gilded cage, in which I am safe and warm and surrounded by all of my favorite people and things. Where I should just be grateful.

But I can’t shake this feeling that my wings are being clipped to keep me here. Or maybe it’s more like the elephant raised with its ankle bound to the ground as a calf. Unaware that it it is no longer anchored, now that it’s fully grown. Still, it stays exactly where it is because that’s all it knows.

Image by Pexels from Pixabay

I desperately want my freedom back but at the same time, I am trying to keep my kids as young and as close to me as possible. I panic when my eldest pushes away my hand or my littlest opts to be a boy instead of a baby. I panic and I mourn, but I should just be grateful. They’re growing up. They’re evolving. They were never mine to begin with.

This is the great paradox of motherhood. Society says, “You are mother. That’s all you are now. Stop having feelings, dreams, personal desires. Focus entirely on the children, the family. Stay in your cage. You have so much to do. People need you. Be grateful.”

But then a day comes when your little birds leave the nest and you are left all alone without purpose or direction, and because so much of your time and energy was given to others, you’re tired. You feel lost and empty, and people scoff, “Just be grateful!”

Why is grief for what once was so uncomfortable for others? Why are mothers, in particular, scorned when we show any emotion other than gratitude? It’s not the home or the family structure that keeps us trapped. It’s the expectations that we should only ever be grateful.

I know gratitude is magic. I know it can be an elixir, a nectar, but I also believe that it’s potency is only truly activated when we allow it to exist side by side with our grief.

The more we allow ourselves to mourn, the more grateful we can be.

When I first started breastfeeding, I was grateful to be able to feed my children from my body, but I also mourned my autonomy.

Today, I am grateful to have gone for as long as I have, but I am also incredibly sad that it’s coming to an end.

My gratitude is greater when I honor my grief.

Humans are more complex than any one emotion or one role or one responsibility.

Look down at your feet. Are you really trapped? Or is it just the heaviness of expectation?

There is freedom in feeling it all.