The Weaned Child

Carreen Raynor

The Weaned Child

‘My heart is not proud, O LORD,

my eyes are not haughty,’ says the psalmist. ‘I do not aspire to great things or matters too lofty for me. Surely I have stilled and quieted my soul; like a weaned child with his mother, like a weaned child is my soul within me.’

I have two children. One is weaned; the other is not. 

My weaned child is five years old and not known for leaving untouched those subjects which are too weighty for her. From the moment she could put together a full sentence—which was earlier than I could have possibly imagined—she has been asking questions. Not only childish ones, either; many of them  are weighty, lofty, expansive. They send my mind staggering, because I know that if she is not answered, she will not let the question drop. Easier for a camel to enter the eye of a needle than for a grown-up to avoid the inquiries of a determined child…is that not how the saying goes? 

And so it is curious to me, this embodiment of the psalmist’s posture. Given my experience of motherhood thus far, I would never have chosen the image of a preschool-aged child to convey the idea of quietude, contentedness. And yet, as I ponder this, I acknowledge that while my daughter is a child of turmoil, she is also a child of peace. She is not anxious. She does not ‘wake in the night at the least sound/in fear…’ as I do. She wrestles the angel and then she rests. She asks and asks and asks and then she sleeps.

I find myself wondering about the mother of the weaned child. How many times did she feed her child from her own safe body before this moment of content? How many times did the child ask for comfort and find it in her? How many questions did she stretch herself to answer, and for how many more did she hold expansive space around the echoing void of unanswerability? 

My daughter is five years old and can sleep now without nursing, unlike her little brother. But those nights of nursing are still a part of her personhood. Each night she falls asleep in her own big-girl bed, alone—but rocked to sleep by all the multitude of nights she once spent in my arms, with milk dribbling from the corners of her pink mouth. 

I have been in circles which looked down on spiritual milk in favor of theological meat. I am reminded by my motherhood that milk is a necessary and deeply nutritious food. Formula is literally life-saving, breastmilk healing in ways we are still discovering. The bond nurtured when a baby is hungry and given food, thirsty and given drink, is what lays the table for all that comes after. A weaned child is not a child who does not drink milk, but a child who has drunk milk for as long it was needed. A weaned child is one who knows they are loved and provided for. A weaned child is one who does not need to feed every two hours, not only because their body has grown but also because they know their next meal is coming.

My daughter is asleep now, her hair spread over her dinosaur pillowcase, pink lips pursed, breath heavy and slow. The moment her eyes open tomorrow she will begin to ask. But for now, she is sleeping so heavily that she will not wake when I take her to the bathroom before I try to coax my grown-up-self to sleep…

I have questions, too, you see. Questions big enough to be worthy of a five-year-old’s insistence. Are you there, God? If you are there, are you good? If you are good, how can I know? Are you going to make things right? How long? How long? How long? Are we there yet? It turns out, even millennials need to drink milk sometimes, and not the Oatly kind. I always used to think that the psalmist condemned this type of questioning; it did not fit my Mary Cassat image of the mother and child. But then, neither do my children, with their thousand whys and their insistence on existential questions and their lashes curling on their cheeks when they sleep. They are more wild and precious than I could ever have imagined, and they make me wonder if maybe, just maybe, I can be, too. 

Perhaps this is what it looks like to be unconcerned in matters too lofty for us. Perhaps the posture of childlike faith is not that of a child shushed and unambitious—

but that of a child questioning and cared for, 

filled and fed and now simply held

in the arms of an expansive 

and patient Love.