Mama Milkies

You inched your way towards my breasts and latched beautifully. Your small mouth knew exactly what to do, but I sure didn’t. I didn’t know how long to keep you on each breast, if I was holding you in the right position, if you were getting enough milk, if my nipple soreness would go away, if my milk would eventually flow like my tears that streamed each time I looked at you. At your first pediatrician appointment, they told us you had lost too much of your birth weight. You were three days old, and my milk hadn’t come in yet. The doctor had me pump after each feeding and “finger feed” you extra colostrum through a syringe with a thin tube attached. My first moment of guilt as a mother: I wasn’t nourishing you. I pumped and cried and pumped and cried and by the end of day five, the milky river flowed into your mouth.

I fed you around the clock, almost every hour. We were both swimming in a sea of milk. Milk all over your face and body, milk squirting across the room, milk in your eye, milk all over every inch of me and all furniture. We started to get the hang of it, and the soreness dissipated. The way your soft hands explored my face and heart-space as we nursed healed the deepest of wounds. It was very hard to stay hydrated and satiated. I often nursed you in uncomfortable positions, not wanting to break your latch and interrupt your soft newborn grunting as you ate. I'd always forget to keep a rag close to me, which was inevitably somewhere across the room. It wasn’t long before I ditched the “trying to be modest for others,” and stopped covering up while nursing in public. I got the hang of side-lying nursing, which was a game changer. We lost a sense of time and space in our milky world. We were still one.

You started to sleep longer stretches at night, which resulted in engorgement and clogged ducts for me. I nursed you through fevery, painful mastitis. I then began to start each feeding with the breast that had mastitis, and it became much larger than the other—an imbalance I’m not sure will ever quite go back to “normal.” I dabbed all your cuts from your ever-growing finger nails with milkies and took solace in the fact that you were getting all the nutrition and antibodies your little body needed. 

Your papa went back to work and then it was the four of us for eight hours a day: you, me, milkies, and our rescue dog, Roi, who had the greatest needs out of the four of us. We found our flow, and then it was time for me to also return to work. Your papa and I kept putting off feeding you from a bottle, and when the time came that we actually needed to, you refused it. To be fair, I don’t blame you. You never drank more than an ounce from a bottle, which meant many things for me, one of which was that I had to work from home to be able to nurse you between clients. We lived in a tiny tree house in the Berkeley hills and there wasn’t any private space besides our porch. Rain or shine, I worked under the covered area of our porch as you, our nanny, and Roi were inside. I wore my winter jacket, hat, gloves, put an extension cord out our bathroom window, and was late to every client. It was totally unprofessional, but I had no choice. As I reflect on it now, I laugh and say thank you! I wasn’t ready to be away from you, either. 

You were growing beautifully and had a whole new range of emotions. You wanted milkies when you were sad, angry, hurt, frustrated, overstimulated, startled, scared, or just plain hungry. You started to enjoy eating solids, but always preferred mama milkies. When you were eleven months old, we packed up our tree house to spend some months traveling around the world. We nursed in airports, airplanes, jet-lagged nights, busy markets, cafes, beautiful parks, oceans, rivers, mountains. You were so adaptable and enjoyed all the new places and new foods, with mama milkies as your familiar anchor and safe place. We were in Jerusalem on Oct. 7, 2023 when the air raid sirens started to wail. We had no safe room in our old apartment, so we went back and forth to the building stairwell. You had no idea what was going on, but sensed my dysregulated nervous system and felt my trembling body, and would gaze up at the ceiling when you’d hear an explosion overhead. I nursed you through nine rounds of bombs exploding in the sky that morning. You eventually fell asleep in my arms, somehow sleeping through much of it. The next few days were a blur of trauma. Nursing you suddenly became my anchor, my safe place. 

In the weeks that followed, I kept you close to my body, as I was needing you as much as you were needing me. We traveled onward and found solace in one of our ancestral homelands–the Island home of your great-great grandparents–and swam and cleansed in its salty waters, as your ancestors once had. We kicked Papa out of the bed so that we could nurse on-demand in spaciousness. The war dragged on from a distance now, but my nervous system still felt as if we were watching from the front row. I gave thanks for the privilege to nurse you in beautiful, safe places. We made our way back to the United States a few months later, tired, sick and ready to ground and set down some roots. We went back to the place that I grew up, so that we could have some family support. It was soon very clear that the patterns we developed over the last months were not serving either of us, and it was time for support. I hired a lactation consultant and a baby sleep consultant, and we moved you into a crib in your own room while simultaneously night-weaning. You didn’t like it, but we moved through it and found our new groove. We eventually had a schedule of feeding three times a day, and then twice, and then once. Now, when you desire connection or comfort, you say “huggie!” and come over to me for a big hug. 

This brings us to the present moment. Our bedtime ritual of mama milkies. “Milkies!” you shout in glee, after we get your jammies on after bath. We go towards your favorite stuffie, and squeeze it through the slats of your crib–a ritual that cracks you up every time–and we make our way to the chair in your room. I stare at your beautiful face in awe, as you do acrobatics on my breasts. Your long body no longer fits snug on my lap as it used to. “More!” and “That one!  And “Two,” as in, I have two breasts, you shout. It’s clear that my supply is very low now, but you don’t seem to mind. Nursing an almost two-year-old is comical. We are in my self-determined last week of nursing, which feels like both an opening and a closing for me. I could gladly and lovingly carry on as we are now, but I know it is time to close this chapter. Thank you, my incredible child, for the most sacred experience of my life. 

—Amy R.