End of an Era

I'm on my third day without nursing Owen.  Besides being the first time I've weaned where I've felt a lot of physical pain, this has also been the most emotionally painful weaning I've experienced.  He isn't ready, and the rest of my kids were.  This morning after getting smacked upside the head with a phone, courtesy of his cousin Bailey, he was cuddled on my lap, crying and tugging at my shirt, asking, "Nur? Nur?"  My baby doesn't even call me 'Mama' or his Dad 'Dada', but nursing is one (maybe the only?) thing he asks for by name.  And I feel mean not giving it to him. 

But, I think this is for the best.  Stress has been my excuse to fall back into some unhealthy (and some not 'unhealthy', but not on the kids' restricted diets) food choices, and when I 'cheat', Owen 'cheats' by association.  And since he's my one kid who doesn't seem to be improving since his diagnosis, I've got to cut out every last bit, and that includes nursing.  It is too stressful for me right now to manage all of their diets and my own to perfection.  Also, all of my other kids shot up a couple pounds shortly after weaning, and I'm hoping that's the case with Owen.  (Though in the three days we've been breastmilk-free, he has lost a half pound, so um, not working yet.) Also, with nursing being a bit of a natural laxative, I'm hoping by cutting it out of his diet, it helps cut down on the diapers I change each day and how quickly things go through his system.  Also, I just recently finally saw his complete pathology reports from his endoscopy and saw that his gut had far more damage than they had mentioned to me on the phone. Even with Ellie having Celiac, Owen's gut is far more damaged ('villous shortening') than hers, 'causing a lot of malabsorption and digestive issues. I just want my little boy to feel better, but in the mean time I've made an appointment with early intervention, since he's missing milestones and I'm worried about his hearing.  It breaks my heart to think of him in pain, and to think that his tiny body isn't getting what it needs, unable to even absorb it, when we work so hard day in and day out to provide him with healthy food.  I sometimes wonder what damage has been done in the last 18 months, eating things that were killing his own intestinal lining, malabsorbing all the vital nutrients and vitamins he needs.  Is any of it irreversible?  Did we find out some of this too late?  Even knowing, have we changed what we need to, to make things better?  Because things don't seem better yet, and we've made countless hard change in the last several months, and he hasn't gained any weight, we haven't seen any improvements.  In fact, he now is suffering from eczema we'd never seen on him before, and he's losing weight again.

I held him today and read him a story, and eventually he stopped tugging on my shirt and helped me turn pages.  Sooner or later this 'not nursing' thing will become our new norm, and it will be good.  But in the meantime, this is kinda hard. 


Oh, and this is the first time in over seven and a half years where I have not been pregnant, nursing or both.  Weird.