To be alone // to be together
On the irreconcilable cravings at 40 weeks of motherhood
Over Mother’s Day weekend, I hide in my bedroom with the door closed, even though my husband has taken the baby and the dog on a walk to give me a precious 45 minutes alone. I try to bang out a few paragraphs while the house is empty, because once she is home, I will be incapable of writing. I will be summoned to the living room floor to admire her while she pulls her toys out of the toy basket one bye one and bangs them together, if not by her explicit command, then by the delicious pudginess of her thighs, her delight in reuniting with me. My need to be close to her when she is home is inescapable. It’s a primal need, a strange admixture of carnal desire (to feel her soft cheeks against mine, to smell her milky breath), fear (that she will hit her head on the coffee table), and guilt (for writing instead of being with her, for leisuring while my husband does not). Though it is hot and I am tired, I will lay on the living room floor and let her climb all over me, and bolt upright when necessary to pull her away from the jumble of devices charging in the corner. I will pull her into my lap and I will nibble on her fingers. She will clap her hands and I will applaud her.
I was supposed to leave my baby last weekend for the first time to attend a friend’s wedding in Austin. I thought I was ready. In fact, I so thought I was ready that when I started to feel not unfamiliar symptoms of anxiety in my body a few weeks ago (a racing heart, shortness of breath), I failed to make the connection between what I assumed was the onset of a heart condition and this impending separation. It was only as the symptoms got worse and the trip approached that I remembered I had felt the same way on the eve of sleepaway field hockey camp 22 years ago. It was only when I got a clogged duct in the lead-up to my departure that I realized my body was desperately trying to get my attention. I am not ready. I need her right now, maybe even more than she needs me.
The recurring clog in my right breast is the physical manifestation of our evolving relationship. When we are together on the weekend, she wants to nurse constantly—before a nap, after a nap, in my lap on the floor. She has newly started burying her face in my cleavage and trying to paw her way down to my breasts when she is in my arms in social situations. I am happy to indulge her after spending the week apart. But in the mornings, during the week, she is increasingly restless and distracted when eating, pulling off the boob to look for the dog or her dad or trying to dive headfirst into the hamper to the right of the chair where I nurse her. Sometimes she will just pull off and look up at me with a smile, her tongue sticking out, and emit a raspy growl. A lion’s breath from my little Leo. This is all to say that I suppose sometimes my breast doesn’t empty, because she has spent the weekend increasing my supply, only to be less interested in eating during the week, or because she has nicked my nipple with her playful bunny teeth and skin has grown over the cut, causing a back-up. On Thursday, another clog tries to correct the oversupply in my right breast. On Friday, I pump a mere two ounces over the course of the day. On Saturday, we nurse seven times. We are together, we are apart, we are together again.
The amount of time and amount of consciousness I am still dedicating to my ebbing and flowing (pun intended) milk supply is unfathomable to a non-nursing mother. It is almost unfathomable to me—unfathomable that I have been a mother for 40 weeks, and even more unfathomable that I have been back at work for 18 of them (almost half her life!), unbuttoning my shirt and changing bras and hooking myself up to the machine multiple times a day. The cognitive dissonance of my days is only resolved in the mornings and the evenings, when she and my body are reunited, when flesh is on flesh and a thin stream of milk connects us where there was once a cord. I have too many jobs right now, but this is the most important. Not because I am irreplaceable, but because she is.
My other responsibilities haven’t exactly shrunken to make space for the approximately two hours and a half hours a day I spend feeding my daughter, pumping for my daughter, preparing her bottles, and washing her bottles and my pump parts. Every day I wonder where I will find the time, and every day I do, because I have no choice, but it has led to the sensation of drowning in all other aspects of my life, drowning in unfinished work assignments, unpublished essays, unfolded laundry, untouched 10 lb. weights, unpurchased life insurance. Until I wean, there is no obvious solution to this problem. More childcare means more pumping. More pumping means more time, more hours of the day in which I need to be close to a private place to pump, more cycles of rinsing of the flanges and rubber membranes and plastic vessels which one day will just … cease to be a part of my life?! I wonder if I will forget the sensation of the pump on my nipples, the sharp tug of air which still shocks me every. single. time.
I wonder if I would feel trapped in a world without a pump. In a world without a pump, would I have weaned or would I have stopped working? Working and breastfeeding would be nearly impossible in such a world, but even in a world with a pump, where I have been working and pumping for over five months, it still feels nearly impossible. I resent the pump, the pump which has made it “possible” for me to work, “possible” to be apart from her when being apart isn’t really an option at all.
When I am anxious and try to inwardly return to the time and place I was most relaxed, I return frequently to a beach on the southwestern coast of Sicily, where Ben and I spent a day of our honeymoon laying on chaise lounges under an umbrella at a rustic little beach club in the shadow of an ancient Greek temple. We drank cheap white wine and ate salty sardines grilled over an open flame on the sand, following them up with ice cold melon. Cigarette smoke wafted and the sound of the gentle Mediterranean waves lapping on the shore was nearly overpowered by the chatter of Italian septuagenarians, their leathery skin hanging off of their bronzed bodies. It was the best day of our honeymoon and maybe one of the best days of my life and I wonder when I will be able to once again doze on a chaise lounge with the salt of the sea and sardines on my lips. I dream of returning and yet returning feels impossible. Returning would require being apart from my daughter—because to truly recreate and achieve this level of relaxation, there could not be a child there, even in the presence of active and watchful grandparents—and it is impossible to imagine relaxation while being apart from my daughter for the length of time to achieve this fantasy. I wonder when my body will be able to tolerate the presence of an ocean between us.
In reference to my love of breastfeeding, my husband jokes that I wish he had not cut the umbilical cord. This is not at all true, of course, since I hated being pregnant, and the baby that I love is the fleshy one with pudgy feet who has just learned how to blow raspberries, not the faceless parasite that pushed the acidic contents of my stomach up into my esophagus for so many months. The cord that I treasure is the milky one that connects us now. Maybe this connection it is all the more important to me since I was too ill to feel that intimacy between our bodies when we were one. By tomorrow, we will have been two for longer than we were one, and soon after that, we will have spent more weeks apart than we spent together. Soon after that, I’ll stop counting in weeks. Soon, I will go away for the first time and wake up in a bed alone, without damp spots on the sheets from my milk, and only I will remember the spool of thread through which I once fed her.
