Attached

This week in my yoga class I talked about klesha, the root causes of suffering.  We are taught that once we eliminate one of these root causes, we burn them away and they don't come back.  There is 5 of them and they are ignorance (I definitely haven't burned that one out completely yet - you know when you act like you know something or think you do and you really don't), ego, attachment to pleasure, aversion to pain, fear of death (which doesn't mean necessarily death with a capital D, it can mean the death of a relationship, habit, pattern, etc.).  I have been thinking quite a bit about them lately as I feel like I, myself, am suffering a bit and am definitely the one creating it.  I have been working too much, find myself really tired all the time, am having trouble getting out of bed in the mornings, staying up too late because I am sitting at the computer catching up on work that I couldn't get done during the day and by the time I'm done I want some down time with my husband, cool dude that he is.  I'm not eating as healthy as I'd like to be and not moving my body nearly enough.  We all know how this vicious cycle goes round and round and it can be so hard to break it even when we see it.  The next 2 weeks are equally as busy...ugh, I did it to myself.  I absolutely set my own schedule and I know I don't like to be too busy, but I must also not like to disappoint people or something because I keep saying yes to things.
Enough on that...my real source of suffering isn't all that, well it is, but not what I sat down to write about.  It's about nursing.  I nursed my older children until they were both about 2.  There are many things I love about nursing and for some strange reason with the first 2, I attached some measure of motherhood success to being able to exclusively nurse them for the first year, no formula.  I am not sure why and it made me put a lot of pressure on myself, was stressful at times, and kept me tethered to them for a good long while.  (Just for the record, I don't measure other mothers by their ability or choices around nursing.  I am an advocate of it, I do believe breast is best, but I get that it doesn't always work out that way for everyone.   )
Elsie is just 9 months old and she is already kind of over nursing, I think.  I find myself literally wrestling with her to try and get her to nurse when she doesn't want to.  Inevitably, it ends with her starting to cry and me having a conversation with myself that always starts something like this "What ARE you doing?  Stop force feeding that baby."  I know why I am doing it, I want her to keep nursing.  I want to nurse her until she's 2.  And what if that doesn't work out?  What if she decides she is done?  I forget she has a say in this. 
I had a conversation with my mom about this the other day and she said I decided I'd had enough at about 6 months old and she grieved the end of nursing, too.  I apologized for what I put her through 36+ years ago.  We laughed about it, but I meant it.  It's hard.  I don't know that Elsie is really done, done, but she is nursing less and less frequently and I am fretting about it more and more. 
She has an independent little spirit about her.  When we started solids, she only wanted to eat things she could feed herself.   She's content to play in a room by herself for 15 minutes or more.  I lose her sometimes around the house, and our house is not big, by any means.  She finds little spaces she can tuck herself away into and then gets very quiet as I wander around the house calling for her.  She gives me this enormous smile when I finally find her, and it's usually behind a door in a dark room.   I walked in to the living room the other day and she was standing next to the coffee table holding a flash card in her hands.  She was not leaning on the table, standing freely.  I am afraid one day I am going to walk in the room to find her taking her first steps and not be the one she is walking to. 
I know she is my last baby and I am probably going to grieve and suffer a little bit at each stage, letting go little by little.  You'd think it would get easier with each child, you know the drill, they grow up - even when you tell them not to.