"There is nothing as beautiful as the sadness of one who is blind in Granada."
--Spanish Proverb
You haven’t really lived until you’ve sprayed your breast-milk all over the walls and floors of your local Ronald MacDonald House. At least this is what I tell myself when I’m feeling down. And I don’t just mean losing a few lingering drops to the world, like a beatific cow dripping her last morsels into the grass as she watches her satiated calf scurry away. I mean a full-on spray of milk, enough to give the cracking walls a new gleam and the sandpaper sheets and coil-spring mattress a good, solid dousing.
It’s 2:00 a.m., and my four-day old son is (hopefully) sleeping in his incubator at the Neo-Natal Intensive Care Unit two blocks away. It is my first night away from him. Less than 24 hours ago, we were rushed from our small town hospital to the NICU of a larger “city”-hospital because just a few hours before we were to be sent home, Quinn experienced life-threatening grand-mal seizures which took several hours to remit. The doctors have ordered an exhaustive battery of tests, but until they know the cause of the seizures, they won’t offer the slightest reassurance that our son will live. We’re staying at this somewhat run-down Ronald MacDonald House because it’s the closest available room to the hospital and, besides, we don’t plan on spending our time lounging about.
Until our abrupt transfer, I have been breast-feeding Quinn every few hours, mostly with good results. A large, rosy-cheeked nurse has instructed me on the various holds and positions, and Quinn and I have comfortably settled into the football hold. “He’s such a boy,” I muse, already showing preference for anything with the word “ball” in it. I love breastfeeding. I love it like I love the sun and the ocean and old gnarled trees. It’s unexpected, this love I have for holding a suckling creature to my breast. I’m a somewhat shy person, I was that tall, awkward girl in junior high, the one who was tortured by the idea of community showers and adept at finding the darkest corner in the locker room so she could dress and undress without being seen. I still break out in hives whenever I hear the word speculum. Of course, pregnancy, 38 hours of labor and an emergency C-Section have cured me of much of my modesty, but I am wholly unprepared for the complete abandon I feel when I’m nursing my son. I’ve read about the rush of hormones, I know it’s part of evolution, a bonding process that will ensure the survival of my progeny, but when I gleefully whip out my breast the moment my son cries his hungry cry, even when my somewhat reserved father is in the room, it doesn’t feel like hormones driving me, it feels like a volcanic rush of love wiping out everything in its path: modesty, reason, fear . . . everything. The rush might also feel crushing if it didn’t come nicely packaged with a profound sense of well-being; one little mouth wrapped around my milky nipple and I’m suddenly unaware that I’m 25 pounds overweight, have hemorrhoids the size of Houston, and have never been in more pain in all my life. I make new sense of the noble, gaunt-eyed women in my National Geographics, wasting away with hunger as they breastfeed their children, seemingly too tired to care about the flies swarming around their heads. Maybe, just maybe, in nursing their children, those women are themselves being fed, experiencing a supreme connection to the world . . . to love . . . like Buddha sitting under his Bodhi Tree, at peace with all of the sorrow and all of the beauty of all that is.
Whatever it is, hormones, love, the painkillers, I don’t care, I just want to make the feeling last. I make note to self: “upon returning home, call those intimidating women at LaLeche League and tell them you’ve discovered the secret handshake. Ask how to become a card-carrying member. And have lots more suckling children soon.”
Until our abrupt transfer, I have been breast-feeding Quinn every few hours, mostly with good results. A large, rosy-cheeked nurse has instructed me on the various holds and positions, and Quinn and I have comfortably settled into the football hold. “He’s such a boy,” I muse, already showing preference for anything with the word “ball” in it. I love breastfeeding. I love it like I love the sun and the ocean and old gnarled trees. It’s unexpected, this love I have for holding a suckling creature to my breast. I’m a somewhat shy person, I was that tall, awkward girl in junior high, the one who was tortured by the idea of community showers and adept at finding the darkest corner in the locker room so she could dress and undress without being seen. I still break out in hives whenever I hear the word speculum. Of course, pregnancy, 38 hours of labor and an emergency C-Section have cured me of much of my modesty, but I am wholly unprepared for the complete abandon I feel when I’m nursing my son. I’ve read about the rush of hormones, I know it’s part of evolution, a bonding process that will ensure the survival of my progeny, but when I gleefully whip out my breast the moment my son cries his hungry cry, even when my somewhat reserved father is in the room, it doesn’t feel like hormones driving me, it feels like a volcanic rush of love wiping out everything in its path: modesty, reason, fear . . . everything. The rush might also feel crushing if it didn’t come nicely packaged with a profound sense of well-being; one little mouth wrapped around my milky nipple and I’m suddenly unaware that I’m 25 pounds overweight, have hemorrhoids the size of Houston, and have never been in more pain in all my life. I make new sense of the noble, gaunt-eyed women in my National Geographics, wasting away with hunger as they breastfeed their children, seemingly too tired to care about the flies swarming around their heads. Maybe, just maybe, in nursing their children, those women are themselves being fed, experiencing a supreme connection to the world . . . to love . . . like Buddha sitting under his Bodhi Tree, at peace with all of the sorrow and all of the beauty of all that is.
Whatever it is, hormones, love, the painkillers, I don’t care, I just want to make the feeling last. I make note to self: “upon returning home, call those intimidating women at LaLeche League and tell them you’ve discovered the secret handshake. Ask how to become a card-carrying member. And have lots more suckling children soon.”
I should probably make it clear that the breast-milk incident was not some form of protest, nor was it a vain attempt to garner an NEA grant for a new form of live art. It was, in fact, the result of a simple misunderstanding. I have a breast pump and am supposed to wake myself up every two hours to collect my milk, the milk to go into the hospital’s freezer in hopes that we can feed Quinn with a bottle if he is unable to nurse. I have, however, forgotten the collection containers at the NICU, and by the time I realize this, it is 10:00 o’clock at night. I am bone-tired and a snowstorm has created bitter winds and frightful driving conditions. It’s too late to drive back to the hospital, I rationalize, thinking that I can surely go one night without pumping. I’ll be back by Quinn’s side before sunrise, and if he’s able to be held, I imagine the blaze of joy I’ll have feeding him with a full breast. Besides, after the day I’ve had, I’m convinced the sleep will be better for me than any possibility of “engorgement.” And therein lies the rub. At 10:00 p.m., I don’t yet know what “engorgement” truly means. It’s just a word I’ve read about in my Companion To Breastfeeding book. Amazing what sort of learning curve can take place in a matter of four short hours.
Engorgement, at least in my case, doesn’t just mean breasts filling with milk, until your size B cup has swollen to double D; it also sports a completely uncontrollable mechanism that allows the heavy fruit to rid themselves of the milk, baby or no baby. And that’s where the spray comes in. I wake up confused, dreaming of demonic fire hydrants taking over the world when I realize I’m sopping wet. I peel off my pajamas, weeping, devastated by this startling, and somehow humiliating, reminder that my baby isn’t there to nurse—and that’s when my breasts begin their Jackson Pollock routine. The sheer volume and force of my spillage feels animalistic. I am no longer a human being, I’m nothing more than a spouting nerve of instinct. I want to feed my baby. It’s not a thought, this wanting, it’s all there is of me at the moment. I begin emitting a strange, dark, hollowed-out howl, and the only upside I can see to this little shop of horrors is that I have left a fair-sized puddle of milk for my exhausted husband to slip on when he gets out of his bed to see if I’m “alright.”
“Alright.” I snarl back at him like a possessed parrot. Is he seriously asking me if I’m alright? Doesn’t he know “alright” is a word reserved for a certain subset of human beings, for people who truly care about things like being on time to the movies so they don’t miss the previews, people who root for football teams like they’re performing ancient tribal rituals, people with toddlers who’ve fallen and scraped their knees and Daddy hopes to sway the little guy in the direction of a stiff upper lip with a simple, “you’re alright, buddy.” People so unlike ourselves. How can my husband not know that we’ve crossed the threshold from alright to not alright, never to return again? And that’s when it hits me: he doesn’t know because this is not his experience. He’s still living in the land of alright. I’m completely alone out here. I’m the lone, demonic fire hydrant raging against the world.
I don’t remember much of what happens next. All I know for sure is that I fall down a very dark hole of self-loathing and despair. I am sure that I have done something to cause my son’s seizures. Didn’t I take Benadryl in those first six weeks, before I knew I was pregnant? Surely Benadryl causes brain damage. And there was the fall I took on the ice in my third trimester. I am and always have been klutzy, I should have known better than to go outside that day. And that shiny laptop computer I had to have, the batteries have leaked toxic waste into my reproductive organs. Not to mention my closest friend was killed in a car accident not two weeks ago, and unable to travel to attend the funeral, I have been holding in my grief . . . my poor baby has absorbed the sadness and his little nervous system can’t take it. And let’s not forget the jello. I shouldn’t have asked for seconds in the hospital, but after three days of not eating, it tasted so good. Of course it did, what with all of the neuro-toxic food coloring. If only I’d eaten more broccoli in my lifetime. Then I’d be stronger, better. All of the times I spit my lima beans into my napkin as a child come back to haunt me. Everything “bad” and irresponsible I have ever done looms over me like a nasty bully in the alley of shame. I have done this to myself. And now, to my child. Four days into motherhood and I am a complete failure. God is doing what he thinks best. He is taking my baby away from me. And why shouldn’t he, look at me, I can’t even feed my own son.
My husband seems truly taken aback by my guttural spewing. My adoring, loving, kind, and very wise husband can’t make sense of me. I see myself through his eyes and I hate myself even more. He makes a few tired attempts to comfort me, and in doing so, becomes the enemy. Kindness and comfort are not to be had by a wretch like me. I want to reach for truth, but I’m in a world of funhouse mirrors, and the more I reach, the more distorted I become, and for the first time ever in my life, I truly wish I were dead. And I say it out loud. And I hear myself say it out loud. “I wish I were dead.” Ugliness abounds. I know it is a grave wish, made even more so by the fact that my son is struggling for his tender life, but in that moment, I want to dissolve back into the earth, leaving no trace of my ever having been here. And that’s when it happens. In unleashing my ugliest self, something even more animalistic, more wild, more primitive than this grief rises up in me. Crouching in the darkest recesses of my being is a soul that says, “step aside, sister, I’ll take over from here.” What else is a girl to do—when a beast like that gives a command, you have to listen.
The dirge ceases. Howls turn into silence. My husband looks to me to see if I am still breathing. I feel myself lifted, truly, lifted from my bed and look with compassion at the scene of the crime. Our sad little room, with our single beds worn thin from overuse, the lifeless pillows and the stained walls and my sopping wet pajamas curled up in a ball like a wounded animal. It looks so beautiful to me now, the realness of it all. How many other families have been in this room, plucking thorns from their hearts, walking through walls of fire to get through to the next day and the next and the next? And what strange animal is this, sniffing the ground for us, gathering sticks for shelter and driving us on, the one that guides us over treacherous ledges, paws outstretched, as if to say, “It’s alright, I know the way.” It cannot simply be an instinctual will to live, just as the rush of love for a child cannot be explained away by hormones. We must be more than our biographies, more than our biology, how else can it be that I am able to kiss my husband, glide to the shower, turn on the water, and wash myself clean?
