Do something to my body, react to it.
on my daughter's milk habit.
She drinks my milk with her whole body.
Our milk.
Her feet press against my thighs and belly, as we lay together, tucked in. I am a border between the bed and the floor. She switches breasts, to feed, before bed, on and on. Her arms up, down, my arms up, down, under her. Her feet kick up and down. She lifts her leg up, looking over at me, shifting her eyes only, as her mouth is stationed on my nipple.
Her looks says, “do something to my body, react to it.” I heed to her. I grasp her foot with my hand, and let my long marine blue nails move across her sole. She bends her leg, retracts and giggles. I stop and look at her. “Again?” I ask her in Polish. She nods and lifts up her leg towards me. We do a call and response for a while until her leg no longer moves and I know it’s time to stop. The play not the milk. Before bed she often takes up to 30 or 40 minutes drinking and drawing on my nipples, left and right, left and right.
We’re there for each others bodies. My whole body produces milk, not just my breast. And her whole body is involved when drinking it.
“Alldone” she proclaims, lowers my shirt, and rolls over to tuck her head between the pillows propped up along the wall and window pane. We share a room and her drawn out bedtime ritual takes place on me and her father’s bed.
She lines up her teddy, her plush doll T, and her doudou P, and tucks them in to sleep on the bed before taking them out and repeating this ritual at least four or five times, before taking them into her crib. Like her other orders (the only phrases she knows), she says tuck in as a single word and pronounces the i like an e. “Tuck-een.”
Her Polish, English, and recent French tongue orchestrate a language.
“Cozy, shhh, sheeeping.”
She puts her index finger over her lips, but usually more like on her chin or nose and looks over at her toutou’s. She does it with me before bed too, pulling the covers over her, up to her armpits.
“What does it feel like when she has your milk?” my 7 year old asks.
“A mix of relief, and a letting go. A release, maybe?”
“A release, how?”
“Like if you have an itch and you scratch it. But not like an intense itch, maybe just a hair against a cheek. The itch isn’t in one spot though. It kind of radiates.”
“Radiates?”
“Spreads out… Sometimes when she hasn’t fed for a while, it tickles. I’ve never thought about how it feels except when it hurts or feels uncomfortable. Like when she’s been doing it too often, or early on when I had more milk than she could drink. I think it’s because my body’s memory was of you, and you were a voracious drinker!”
“Now I just love to snack.”
“Yes, always eating… anyway, it’s a fascinating question.”
Only when I’m out of sorts I consider the feelings of feeding O. Otherwise, it recedes to the background of our daily rituals. Like Sara Ahmed writes,
What is ‘out of sorts’ is striking; something that has receded comes into view when it is missing. This in in itself should be striking: how things appear because they disappear. To be out of sorts is how a body that does not reside properly within a system affects the system.
There’s so much written about motherhood when it is out of sorts, when our bodies don’t work, break down, when they don’t produce enough milk, or too much. But what if it’s a way of sorting ourselves out? It’s not too little or too much, it’s the amount, without judgment. We challenge the system that serves to dominate and dismiss us when we wilfully refuse to sort ourselves out on its terms.
When it’s me and my daughter—her plump body edging its way into toddler-hood and mine into middle age—we have our own fluid system of sorting.
We are each other’s orienting devices.
Dear Reader,
Thank you for taking time with me. I am grateful you are here. If my work moves you in any way, please share it if you can.
xx
I’m so struck by your seven year old asking how YOU feel giving milk. The awareness that you, the mother, providing/giving is also a person having an experience of her own and wanting to know and understanding how that feels for you shows so much empathy and deep curiosity. This is a beautiful piece.