Boob Cake Party, Part I
The weaning ritual has begun
In a previous post titled, Art Therapy, I mentioned I was about to start weaning Hawk, my two years and three-month-old little babe. This is something I have been thinking about for over a year now, knowing the inevitable needed to happen at some point. I was kinda hoping that he’d just stop nursing by himself at the exact moment when I needed him to, and while I am sure given another 6-8 months, that may have actually happened. But I can’t really wait that long so here we are.
I had looked around at several books about weaning your toddler and while they were cute, they weren’t going far enough to where I wanted to go - the land of the mythic imagination. Even before he was born, I vowed to myself that I would raise our son firmly rooted in a mythopoetic view of the world, where initiation and ritual mark his life’s transformations and transitions, and that he would never lose his innate animistic understanding of everything around him. In my heart, I knew I had to make this first real transition important and honor how large it is not only in his life, but how significant it was in my own life as well.
For almost three weeks, I worked daily on creating him his own book, The Four Elements of Booby Milk. What started out as being a simple idea quickly turned into my own Jungian Red Book of Weaning.
The concept of the eternal return is a perennial philosophical motif that exists in religions worldwide. It’s the idea that all endings have beginnings inherent in their nature and vice versa and that the cosmic inhales and exhales itself into being in perpetuity in both the macrocosm and the microcosm. This idea is translated into the foundational symbol of the book: the spiral.
The spiral and double spiral is one of the oldest symbols known to humanity, present on rock faces in the very first efforts of permanent art-making tens of thousands of years ago. It’s the idea that time isn’t perfectly cyclical and definitely not an arrow, but instead, an ever-evolving eternal return that simultaneously changes and also repeats itself.
I want him to hear the words but also take in the images into his unconscious mind where he can actually feel what I am saying rather than relying on his understanding alone.
The following two images are where I introduce that Booby Milk is coming to an end. The pages fit together so that the ending on the baby dinosaur page continues into the loop on the next.
I broke down his main nursing times into four “elements.” Daytime nurse is Love, symbolized by a Dragon. Nap time nurse is Strength, symbolized by a Bear. Bedtime nurse is Stability, symbolized by a Lion and overnight nurse is Comfort, symbolized by an Eagle. Each of these animals has major significance for him. For example, when we fall asleep in bed together, I’m his Mama Eagle, and we are the Eagle family in our giant nest.
Here is where the ritual element comes into play. Like every good magical ceremony, it started with a party. I invited just a few close beloved friends to share in this epic Boob cake I made and celebrate the two years and three months of nonstop Milk.
The cake was a Swedish princess cake and here’s the recipe if you want to check it out. I just subbed my gluten-free flour mix and it turned out amazing. It’s a genoise sponge (yes, I had Paul Hollywood’s voice in my mind from British Baking Show the whole time I was making this) with custard, raspberry jam, and whipped cream all covered by a thin layer of marzipan. Swoon. This may be my new favorite cake ever even if I probably won’t make it a boob next time I make it - although never say never, right?
Once we celebrated our accomplishment, the next morning we went out to Hakw’s tree, a Sant Rosa Plum Tree that his/my placenta is buried under, and did the first part of the ritual. I have some milk left over in the freezer from when I used to pump, so I took one of those and we offered it to the Great Mother saying these words:
We poured the Milk onto the tree roots and then I had him feel the energy rise back up through his body, fully becoming the dragon and taking that in.
TO BE CONTINUED…
I’m leaving you with a cliffhanger here as this post is getting too long according to the Substack overlords. Stay tuned for the ritual itself, more art from the book, and a video of the full text in next week’s post.
🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍🤍