Blog by Valerie

Some days I feel like I am running a race from the moment I wake up to ensure I use my time carefully to fulfil my responsibilities with my family, around the house and garden, with the animals we take care of (currently chickens and guinea pigs, soon to be a puppy), with homeschooling, roles I’ve taken on in community, the retreats we facilitate, the  UPEACE class I am finishing teaching online, and making sure I am keeping myself healthy and well. It doesn’t feel like a bad race at all, I love my life. But for the last few months I’ve felt near my capacity edge. I have woken during the night many times to do grading or plan the following week’s group homeschool lesson. Some of this was due to what I have taken on, but it felt like something else was a key energy drain.

For some months, I had been feeling that my energy levels were lower than I preferred, and that I needed to stop breastfeeding. I had intended to let Savana decide when she wanted to wean, but I realised that she may be happy to keep drinking milk until she turns eight. I liked that time with her, but I felt like my body was telling me I was done and that energy was needed for other things, many of which were for her benefit. So I started weaning for a few months, and the last couple of weeks I counted to three at night and that was all the milk she had all day. I told her one night that was the last one, and we talked about a new way we can have special time together at night when we stop doing milk. (Image from here)

So I was pretty surprised to have a hard time when we stopped. It took a couple weeks for my body to stop producing milk and to reabsorb what hadn’t been drunk. It felt like immediately upon stopping breastfeeding, the oxytocin connection that Savana and I had been running on for nearly four years had stopped, and my hormones went wild. I felt even less overall energy, and I spent a lot of time in a depressive torpor for weeks. I gave myself a lot of grace. Some things like vacuuming the house felt like way too much effort, so I let them go. When my nose itched and I just had to tackle it, I found the energy more easily than keeping my usual routine. I was also so incredibly tired. I have been going to bed with Savana around 9pm and sleeping until she wakes up at 8am. That is a lot of sleep for me, and I for the first month I was still waking up tired every day.

When the torpor lifted I went through an airhead phase, where I couldn’t keep many thoughts on my mind, and my usual game of putting reminders in my calendar became silly with pings on my phone to return a text message or water some plants. During that phase I reached out to a friend who suggested some herbs I might try. Since then I have been putting chaste berry in my tea each morning. It may be helping, I am honestly not sure, but it wasn’t expensive and it certainly doesn’t seem to be hurting. (It is meant to help stabilise female hormones.) It’s really been quite the wild roller coaster ride. (Image from here)

I don’t know how much of what I am going through is my body stopping breastfeeding, or my body entering perimenopause, or both. I am an older mother, and I remember perimenopause really rocking my mother off her rhythm when I was younger. I have been having interesting experiences since stopping the breastfeeding as well. For one, I am regaining body autonomy, which isn’t surprising, but also mental and emotional autonomy as well. I felt grief about that at first, and Savana was also acting moody and clingy for the first month or so we stopped, but we have settled into this new normal now. It has given me more capacity for Lukas which is nice, and space for more healing to come up from my maternal side.

I recently became an Australian citizen and then did a burial ceremony here on the land where I hope to spend the rest of my life. One of the things that came up for me very strongly during that ceremony was how much caretaking I had received from my mother, and she from her mother (who knows how far back it goes) that was borne out of overwhelm, and therefore filled with resentment. Letting that go felt good, and as I lay in the ground near Gulaga (the mother mountain here) looking up at the stars, I felt more and more like I was being cradled by the earth. I felt deeply supported and grateful. The minute my legs got under the earth they enlivened with such intense pins and needles that I asked Lukas to push some dirt off, I thought perhaps it was the weight of it. I think now it was my body being ready to fully root where I am. Since the ceremony, my dreams have been very vivid, and a part of me that had been in fear my whole life and too scared to trust has opened up and softened. My lower body still feels very enlivened, and this evening I started running around the property, which I haven’t felt compelled to do in many years.

I realised when I finished that I had run an infinity symbol, just like the sacred bush sauna (sweat lodge) we did before my burial ceremony. And I felt joyful to have it affirmed that the things we do to keep our spirits strong really do matter. And they work to support us just as the land/Mother Earth does, the more we let Her.

Big blessings to you and thanks for reading this story.

 If you value this content, please engage in reciprocity by living, sharing and giving.