Milk

Last month, when I went down to Tucson for a too short stretch of 4 days, was the first time in forever that I had gone anywhere on my own, and the first time ever that I had been away from Wilfred. Several of my mama friends asked me before, during, and after if this means that I have weaned him, or am weaning him, or something of the sort. To which I think I mostly replied something along the lines of “good grief I hope not”.

I have shared, here and there, off and on, over the course of the last almost 2 and a half years, plenty of details regarding breastfeeding in general and nursing Wilfie in specific. And even so, it is still such a place of mystery and wonder and discovery for me that I am getting the sense that I have only just begun to scratch the very surface of my own understanding of what all of these years of making milk for my children actually is in the bigger, and broader picture of my life as their mother, and even more significantly, in my life as my own woman.

I realized yesterday, that with the turning of the calendar page I have just entered my eleventh year of nursing. Obviously, not consecutive years, and many years just in part, but still, eleven of those whole or part years with a bare chest and a small hand resting (or tugging) on my breast. There is a particular vein, many women know it, that weaves its way across the thin flesh of a sternum toward one tit or the other, whichever one is favored, as one always is. The vein itself is both a physiological feat and a talisman of female fortitude. It is a sure sign of a nursing female, mother or not. And we know it well. How amazing, really. This way that the body can work its ways and will to make love manifest in the form of custom-designed milky nutrition.

Before Wilfred was born I thought perhaps, with some degree of certainty, that I would nurse him only til he turned two. After all, that is a lot! Some might even say plenty. I think that is what I was saying to myself. I nursed the others for far longer but I am older now and life is different and well all of the other reasons a mom tells herself that she can do one thing when she is quite possibly very well inclined toward the other. And so. I was deliberating it aloud this past summer, on the eve of his second birthday, when a wise mother, who is also a foremost Tibetan Buddhist Scholar, might I add, which is oddly strange and difficult to come by in the scope of parenting resources and advice… in other words: when she speaks, I listen deep. Anyhow, she had her daughter when she was a little bit older as well and she nursed her for quite a long time too, til perhaps three or four, and when she looked back on the whole thing it was with magic shining from her eyes at the telling. She exclaimed with so much devotion that she felt like her whole body was this amazing pharmacy for her kid and the milk was the medicine. A complete and wonder-filled miracle of a thing.

Needless to say, she is, of course, completely correct and the whole thing got me really thinking as I took in her declaration, ears wide open at what was at the time the 17th month of a worldwide pandemic. And I have returned to it again and again in the subsequent months especially as new variants emerge and vaccinations for the youngest crowd are pushed back in favor of better outcomes with further trials. Which I am all for. Obviously. (I hope that is obvious.) I do not wish to be haphazard with what is delivered into my child’s bloodstream. But I also do want some protection for him. Of course I do. Which circled me right back to that whole-hearted, full-breasted declaration that my body is a gd pharmacy and is just right for my little one in so very many ways. And we are now seeing that the antibodies in the breast milk of vaccinated mothers is providing similar protection for nurslings. So much so, that mamas whose littles no longer nurse are looking for vaxed breast milk for their small ones. Wisely so in my mind. I mean, that’s what I would be doing if I did not have the milk in my body, in my house. A parent has to do what a parent has to do. And it has always taken a village, in the end, looking out for one another and resourcing ourselves and each other to the best of our abilities.

All of this, and so much more, was in my heart and mind in those days away from my little one last month. And while getting away was so much what I needed and then some, it was physically quite uncomfortable as well. If you know, you know. My rhythm with Wilfred when we are together all of the time, which we are, is easy and natural. My breasts fill and empty, fill and empty, never getting engorged as they did in the early days but in sync with one another now. In the flow. Not so much that way when out in the world on my own. My breasts were heavy and tight and full from 8 hours into my journey and through much of the first 3 days away. I would express a bit in the evenings, as I could, a few ounces in the shower or tub, as I could manage. It felt like such a waste, to watch the milk just drift away, especially in light of what I shared above. The only thing that I can parallel the feeling of engorged breasts with is the feeling of stuffed and stagnant bowels. It is just a gross, gross, uncomfortable feeling.

Until, on Saturday evening, when it just… stopped. It was strange. And horrible. A little bit more comfortable, perhaps, but still so deeply unsettling. It had never happened to me that way before. I had left here and there for several days, even for a week several times with the older kids when they were still nurslings, and my milk would taper. But never just stop like that. By Sunday night, my breasts felt almost normal. No longer heavy with waiting milk. They felt, done. And the subsequent rush of hormones in response to this shift in my biology was sudden and full of weepiness. I knew in those days with complete and infinite clarity that I did not want to be done nursing Wilfred. Not at all. And it felt wholly out of my control. Like my body was making decisions for me and I was at her whim. Completely helpless. A forced surrender.

It is uncanny when the body disobeys the mind, disobeys the desire and longing of the heart. The mind disobeys the body all of the time and we condition ourselves to just take it, roll with it in some way that keeps us relating to the need for forgiveness like an iv drip. But not the other way around. It is much harder to negotiate understanding under those terms.

I have a very wise mama friend whose counsel and comfort I sought while down in the desert and she just held me and laughed and reminded me that “he makes the milk, meg. he makes the milk”. I did my best to trust her and in the end, she was most certainly correct, but at the time I was scared and resistant and so unsure of the capacity of my 44-year-old body to be as resilient to changing circumstance as I was when I was younger. Even once I was back home and he was in my arms chattering to me about dogs and eider and outside and all the other stuff of his world, I worried that he was simply drawing on emptiness, hollow and unreplenished.

I was wrong. But it stirred up stuff for me to be sure. And this whole revelatory and average experience over this stretch of days and years has gotten me thinking more and more and again and again of the stuff and substance of women's bodies. Blood and sweat and tears. And also milk. They are the heart of the mystery and wonder of women. The suffering and the emblem of what we have to bear as well as the gift we are given. My best friend, who is not a mother and yet mothers me, loves to read novel after novel of witches and their ways. She is an aficionado, we could say. I am slow to make it through much more than one of the many books I read aloud to kids, so she kindly sends me her favorites when she is through. For the past several years, it’s really the most of what I have read in terms of fiction. Witch Lit. If you like. And there is something to the desire of women to connect to the magic and the power that lives inside of each of us. What we are asked to bear by virtue of our bodies and how that burden elevates our capacity for clairvoyance and the casting of spells and hexes. We transform everything into some kind of potent elixir that is hard to understand let alone relate to until you have made it yourself. We bleed. We feed. We let run from us whole oceans of tears and sweat in our efforts to both sustain and let go of what is ours/what was never ours. If that is not the magic of something so much bigger than my one life in my one body, I don’t know. I really don’t.

There is a force in me. I feel it sometimes, just below the surface. Not often needed but ready to be called on when it is. Nonetheless.

And gosh, I don’t know. Just a whole lot more words to say I am nursing still. Just not at night thank god. And my milk seems to be just right and my kid seems to be healthy and very happy. And he is my last baby so I will probably keep breastfeeding for just as long as I possibly can. Which is never forever. But in the meantime, my body is a god damn pharmacy.