Nursing my son
A month before my nineteenth birthday, I gave birth. My husband and I were young, poor, stupid, and enthusiastic. That’s probably not such a kind encapsulation, but I’m 37 now, and when I see people that age now I think, Children. My son is now the age I was when I gave birth. I shake my head in wonder or disgust, knowing full well how young couples end up with kids, even though we all went through the same health classes. Our animal natures will somehow overcome the intellectual arguments for caution. If it weren’t for young fools in love, most of us wouldn’t be here.
Through my pregnancy, I got regular prenatal care at a Medicaid clinic. Each visit, I waited with the other expectant mothers, some of them farm workers, for my turn to pee in a cup and push it through a small door, and have an ultrasound wand poked into my belly. I worked as a research assistant on a university agricultural extension. For the early months of my pregnancy, I worked half-days. I threw up every morning, heaving with force until I brought up bile. Then I would get brush my teeth and get dressed, walk down the hall from our bedroom, and the smell of our roommates’ cold buttered popcorn, still littering the kitchen, would send me hurrying back to throw up again. I would brush my teeth again, and make breakfast.
I had a variety of chores on the farm: watering seedlings in a greenhouse, babying an elderly pressure cleaner through the process of sterilizing batches of speedling flats, measuring the diameter of petunia blooms. As the season progressed, the work changed: I set seedlings in fields, worked with crews picking and grading tomatoes. If I was in a field taking measurements and saw the spray rig coming, I would run. I asked my boss a question about pesticides, brought home a note with one word on it, “tetratogens,” and a phone number that I never dialed. It remained pinned to the corkboard in my dining room, next to the phone. I didn’t even look up the word.
One day I was struck with fear of the day when my baby would be outside my body, somewhere that I could not be certain he was safe. For all of the days previous, I had been struck randomly, either with tenderness and curiosity at the turning and thrusting from within, or the sense of having been invaded by an alien life force that would take what it needed, first, and to whose demands my body would submit.
After our son was born, everything between my legs felt like a horror: bloody, septic, a nauseating, painful reminder that when I was in hard labor, nothing else had mattered but to push, push this out, or we would both die. In this way, birth was like sex. I was a bookish sort, but when I got involved with the man I would marry and have a child with, the books went out the window, replaced with the single-minded urge to do this very physical thing, as if I was some other person, someone without a thought for the future. The birth ripped me open, requiring stitches that I had to bathe with a staining brown solution for weeks after, standing over the toilet with a squeeze bottle like a cut-rate bidet. Waddling through the mall a week after, I met a woman who claimed to have given birth in approximately the same time frame. I looked down at her skinny jeans and hated her for not having been similarly maimed.
Bucking tradition, I breastfed my baby boy. My own parents were not much older than I was when they became parents, but in the 1970s, liberated women had jobs, smoked cigarettes, wore jeans and fed their babies infant formula. When I nursed in public---and I took it as my political birthright---older people smiled and nodded encouragingly, but people my parents’ age looked away, uncomfortably, and people my own age were openly fascinated. To be a mammal was somehow at odds with full humanity, which should be ideally as like an alpha male as possible: free to stride into adventure, not tethered by hormones and mutual need.
I couldn’t wear jeans comfortably for at least a month after giving birth. A long time nude sleeper, my leaking breasts forced me to wear a nursing bra to bed or wake in a puddle of my own milk. My body was meat and milk that could hold and soothe, and for long periods, I did not mind, as long as I didn’t have to do anything else. If I managed to cook a meal, my husband applauded, or would, if he wasn’t holding the baby.
Nursing was its own act. While pregnant, I would regularly drive between work and a college writing class, eating fast food lunch while driving (stick shift) in city traffic. Once, at a celebratory dinner, I nursed him under a lobster bib while my husband and a friend fed me crab meat. But usually, I did nothing else while I nursed. I meditated. Sometimes I dozed. It felt deeply pleasant, like massage. It relaxed me, and softened my tight breasts. I could watch his spidery fingers as they clutched my breasts in the rhythm in which he fed. When his eyes opened, they fixed on mine, and I returned his wondering gaze. This was mindless, animal love.
In the first months, I sometimes took my two hour breaks between feedings for myself, to shower, eat, or read a book. Other times, exhausted, I slept alongside him. For a time, at night, I would have dreams, all night long, of nursing him. I would wake from the dreams to him crying, nurse him, fall asleep with him nursing, dream it some more, wake and put him in his crib, two feet from my side of the family bed, and continue to dream of nursing. I started keeping a notebook on the floor between us, next to the alarm clock, and writing the times when I woke, to reassure myself that I was not nursing him all night long. The dreams were like the ones I had before I was married, when I was working as a cashier. All night, groceries would slide past me on a conveyor belt, in a species of anxiety dream.
My milk was a precious gift for my son. I made it and gave it to him from the very best of myself. So when my father, who was uncomfortable with breastfeeding, made a rude joke, saying that my son looked at me like I was the Golden Arches, it went beyond mere bad taste. I was deeply offended. It seemed an unbridgeable gap, to explain to my father what it meant to be a mother in this way. Even my own mother had not chosen to do this.
When my son was three months old, I took a temporary job in a clothing distribution center. It was an enormous factory space with tracks running everywhere for boxes and hangers full of clothes, for loose clothing, for empty hangers, and the endless matter of paper tissue, clips, and pins. Everything was painted the same shade of matte gray as the steel. There were hierarchies, at which temps like myself were at the bottom. In the area where I worked, still within view of the time clock and the exit, there were precise protocols for each garment’s furling or binding. I stood in one place and clothing came to me to pin or unpin, hang or remove from hangers. My area’s supervisor boasted loudly that she was marrying soon and would get to leave this place.
I joined the line and worked. From somewhere beneath the incredible noise, there were buzzers that went off: I hadn’t noticed the first one, but every one after, I listened for. They were like the sound played in junior and senior high school to signal the change of classes, first to dismiss one, and then to find you, either tardy or in your chair in the next class. These told us when to line up to punch in for work, when to take our paid ten minute break, when to punch out for lunch, and then when to line back up to punch in again.
We were all poor. I saw the others getting dropped off by partners in rusting cars, the ones who hung out on the curb outside on breaks, sitting through lunch because they didn’t have anything to eat. The line of people for the pay phone in the break room told me I would never get to use it, because I had only one mission, for each and every break, and that was to relieve the tremendous pressure on my breasts.
A nursing newborn will suckle every couple of hours, sometimes more often, and a mother’s breasts will adjust milk production to meet demand. When my son took one nipple, the other would gush, also, so I had to hold a towel over it, or later, when I worked, a cup to try to catch it for later. When I went to work, my bounteous resource suddenly became restricted, measurable. When he nursed at my breast, I could not know how much milk he got, only how long he worked at it. Yet I didn’t have to worry about him: I could see that he thrived. For the hours I was in a factory, away from him, my breasts did not know how much formula he drank, could not adjust to the demand that varied from day to evening, weekdays to weekends. When I could not nurse him, they swelled and stayed swollen. They became so hard I could feel the skin crack, imagined the crushing and bruising going on in every part of my heavy, sore breasts.
When the buzzer went off, I broke for the women’s bathroom. I took off my lifting belt, which looked on the women like corsets, pushing up our breasts and flattening our stomachs. I had so few conversations on the line: it was usually impossible. Women usually asked me, “Estas casada?” “Are you married?” Then it was, do you have children? If there was time. Usually, there wasn’t.
In the women’s room, I took a stall, greedily. Locked the door, did not think of the women lined up to pee. I got my breast pump out, pulled up my shirt, unlatched the hook from the triangle of fabric that fronted one side of my nursing bra, and affixed the cold suction cup to my breast. Turned it on and watched my nipple thicken and lengthen, a dark pink-purple. This is what it would do in my baby’s mouth, if I were not sitting on a toilet in a factory, trying to think of my baby’s face. As the days wore on and I found myself in this stall, time after time, I began to imagine pasting a picture of my son’s face to the door, to meditate upon as I sat here, trying to will my breasts into letting down their milk. Then I imagined other mothers pasting their children’s faces here, too, decorating it with glitter paint, writing their names, the dates of their births. Over the months and years, there would be so many of us, we could cover the door.
A lovely image, but for that moment, I was alone. In that time and place, there were no lactation lounges for blue-collar moms, comfortable places with chairs and a dedicated refrigerator. I was a failure at pumping. I could barely work up a dribble to bag, tuck into my lunch bag to keep cold, and give to the nice lady who took care of my baby all day so I could work. What I could pump was always insufficient to feed him when I wasn’t there, so he had to drink formula. His bowel movements became firmer and smelled bad, like a carnivore’s.
When I lost that job at the end of the month, I was angry, like I always am when I lose a job I sacrifice for, but this time, I also felt relief. I would work another temp job the following month, more of a disaster than the last. I wished there were jobs as flexible as my own body when it came to production, work, and care. I wished I could return to my old farm job and put my son on a papoose board on my back while I measured petunias and picked tomatoes. When he cried I would have nursed him, there in the fields, and when the spray rigs came, I would have dashed away with him safely in my arms.
Through my pregnancy, I got regular prenatal care at a Medicaid clinic. Each visit, I waited with the other expectant mothers, some of them farm workers, for my turn to pee in a cup and push it through a small door, and have an ultrasound wand poked into my belly. I worked as a research assistant on a university agricultural extension. For the early months of my pregnancy, I worked half-days. I threw up every morning, heaving with force until I brought up bile. Then I would get brush my teeth and get dressed, walk down the hall from our bedroom, and the smell of our roommates’ cold buttered popcorn, still littering the kitchen, would send me hurrying back to throw up again. I would brush my teeth again, and make breakfast.
I had a variety of chores on the farm: watering seedlings in a greenhouse, babying an elderly pressure cleaner through the process of sterilizing batches of speedling flats, measuring the diameter of petunia blooms. As the season progressed, the work changed: I set seedlings in fields, worked with crews picking and grading tomatoes. If I was in a field taking measurements and saw the spray rig coming, I would run. I asked my boss a question about pesticides, brought home a note with one word on it, “tetratogens,” and a phone number that I never dialed. It remained pinned to the corkboard in my dining room, next to the phone. I didn’t even look up the word.
One day I was struck with fear of the day when my baby would be outside my body, somewhere that I could not be certain he was safe. For all of the days previous, I had been struck randomly, either with tenderness and curiosity at the turning and thrusting from within, or the sense of having been invaded by an alien life force that would take what it needed, first, and to whose demands my body would submit.
After our son was born, everything between my legs felt like a horror: bloody, septic, a nauseating, painful reminder that when I was in hard labor, nothing else had mattered but to push, push this out, or we would both die. In this way, birth was like sex. I was a bookish sort, but when I got involved with the man I would marry and have a child with, the books went out the window, replaced with the single-minded urge to do this very physical thing, as if I was some other person, someone without a thought for the future. The birth ripped me open, requiring stitches that I had to bathe with a staining brown solution for weeks after, standing over the toilet with a squeeze bottle like a cut-rate bidet. Waddling through the mall a week after, I met a woman who claimed to have given birth in approximately the same time frame. I looked down at her skinny jeans and hated her for not having been similarly maimed.
Bucking tradition, I breastfed my baby boy. My own parents were not much older than I was when they became parents, but in the 1970s, liberated women had jobs, smoked cigarettes, wore jeans and fed their babies infant formula. When I nursed in public---and I took it as my political birthright---older people smiled and nodded encouragingly, but people my parents’ age looked away, uncomfortably, and people my own age were openly fascinated. To be a mammal was somehow at odds with full humanity, which should be ideally as like an alpha male as possible: free to stride into adventure, not tethered by hormones and mutual need.
I couldn’t wear jeans comfortably for at least a month after giving birth. A long time nude sleeper, my leaking breasts forced me to wear a nursing bra to bed or wake in a puddle of my own milk. My body was meat and milk that could hold and soothe, and for long periods, I did not mind, as long as I didn’t have to do anything else. If I managed to cook a meal, my husband applauded, or would, if he wasn’t holding the baby.
Nursing was its own act. While pregnant, I would regularly drive between work and a college writing class, eating fast food lunch while driving (stick shift) in city traffic. Once, at a celebratory dinner, I nursed him under a lobster bib while my husband and a friend fed me crab meat. But usually, I did nothing else while I nursed. I meditated. Sometimes I dozed. It felt deeply pleasant, like massage. It relaxed me, and softened my tight breasts. I could watch his spidery fingers as they clutched my breasts in the rhythm in which he fed. When his eyes opened, they fixed on mine, and I returned his wondering gaze. This was mindless, animal love.
In the first months, I sometimes took my two hour breaks between feedings for myself, to shower, eat, or read a book. Other times, exhausted, I slept alongside him. For a time, at night, I would have dreams, all night long, of nursing him. I would wake from the dreams to him crying, nurse him, fall asleep with him nursing, dream it some more, wake and put him in his crib, two feet from my side of the family bed, and continue to dream of nursing. I started keeping a notebook on the floor between us, next to the alarm clock, and writing the times when I woke, to reassure myself that I was not nursing him all night long. The dreams were like the ones I had before I was married, when I was working as a cashier. All night, groceries would slide past me on a conveyor belt, in a species of anxiety dream.
My milk was a precious gift for my son. I made it and gave it to him from the very best of myself. So when my father, who was uncomfortable with breastfeeding, made a rude joke, saying that my son looked at me like I was the Golden Arches, it went beyond mere bad taste. I was deeply offended. It seemed an unbridgeable gap, to explain to my father what it meant to be a mother in this way. Even my own mother had not chosen to do this.
When my son was three months old, I took a temporary job in a clothing distribution center. It was an enormous factory space with tracks running everywhere for boxes and hangers full of clothes, for loose clothing, for empty hangers, and the endless matter of paper tissue, clips, and pins. Everything was painted the same shade of matte gray as the steel. There were hierarchies, at which temps like myself were at the bottom. In the area where I worked, still within view of the time clock and the exit, there were precise protocols for each garment’s furling or binding. I stood in one place and clothing came to me to pin or unpin, hang or remove from hangers. My area’s supervisor boasted loudly that she was marrying soon and would get to leave this place.
I joined the line and worked. From somewhere beneath the incredible noise, there were buzzers that went off: I hadn’t noticed the first one, but every one after, I listened for. They were like the sound played in junior and senior high school to signal the change of classes, first to dismiss one, and then to find you, either tardy or in your chair in the next class. These told us when to line up to punch in for work, when to take our paid ten minute break, when to punch out for lunch, and then when to line back up to punch in again.
We were all poor. I saw the others getting dropped off by partners in rusting cars, the ones who hung out on the curb outside on breaks, sitting through lunch because they didn’t have anything to eat. The line of people for the pay phone in the break room told me I would never get to use it, because I had only one mission, for each and every break, and that was to relieve the tremendous pressure on my breasts.
A nursing newborn will suckle every couple of hours, sometimes more often, and a mother’s breasts will adjust milk production to meet demand. When my son took one nipple, the other would gush, also, so I had to hold a towel over it, or later, when I worked, a cup to try to catch it for later. When I went to work, my bounteous resource suddenly became restricted, measurable. When he nursed at my breast, I could not know how much milk he got, only how long he worked at it. Yet I didn’t have to worry about him: I could see that he thrived. For the hours I was in a factory, away from him, my breasts did not know how much formula he drank, could not adjust to the demand that varied from day to evening, weekdays to weekends. When I could not nurse him, they swelled and stayed swollen. They became so hard I could feel the skin crack, imagined the crushing and bruising going on in every part of my heavy, sore breasts.
When the buzzer went off, I broke for the women’s bathroom. I took off my lifting belt, which looked on the women like corsets, pushing up our breasts and flattening our stomachs. I had so few conversations on the line: it was usually impossible. Women usually asked me, “Estas casada?” “Are you married?” Then it was, do you have children? If there was time. Usually, there wasn’t.
In the women’s room, I took a stall, greedily. Locked the door, did not think of the women lined up to pee. I got my breast pump out, pulled up my shirt, unlatched the hook from the triangle of fabric that fronted one side of my nursing bra, and affixed the cold suction cup to my breast. Turned it on and watched my nipple thicken and lengthen, a dark pink-purple. This is what it would do in my baby’s mouth, if I were not sitting on a toilet in a factory, trying to think of my baby’s face. As the days wore on and I found myself in this stall, time after time, I began to imagine pasting a picture of my son’s face to the door, to meditate upon as I sat here, trying to will my breasts into letting down their milk. Then I imagined other mothers pasting their children’s faces here, too, decorating it with glitter paint, writing their names, the dates of their births. Over the months and years, there would be so many of us, we could cover the door.
A lovely image, but for that moment, I was alone. In that time and place, there were no lactation lounges for blue-collar moms, comfortable places with chairs and a dedicated refrigerator. I was a failure at pumping. I could barely work up a dribble to bag, tuck into my lunch bag to keep cold, and give to the nice lady who took care of my baby all day so I could work. What I could pump was always insufficient to feed him when I wasn’t there, so he had to drink formula. His bowel movements became firmer and smelled bad, like a carnivore’s.
When I lost that job at the end of the month, I was angry, like I always am when I lose a job I sacrifice for, but this time, I also felt relief. I would work another temp job the following month, more of a disaster than the last. I wished there were jobs as flexible as my own body when it came to production, work, and care. I wished I could return to my old farm job and put my son on a papoose board on my back while I measured petunias and picked tomatoes. When he cried I would have nursed him, there in the fields, and when the spray rigs came, I would have dashed away with him safely in my arms.