Taming The Wild Heart
On heart trouble, breastfeeding, and sex
My heart is not peripheral to me. —June Jordan
I’m already wearing the heart monitor, weaving around other parents dropping their kids off at camp as if we’re on a go-kart track in a nondescript provincial town. A techno-corporeal mother like the kind of feminist cyborgs I used to write about in grad school. Except I don’t have the heart monitor on yet. It’s next week that I’ll be outfitted in electrodes—the summer’s end best. Perhaps I’ll wear them with my sheer silk cream-coloured mock neck?
My collagen-enhanced nails press up against the steering wheel, driving up Pie IX back home. Joni Mitchell’s River comes on the radio, taunting me as it did to Marx when he was in the hospital, in Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow.
I wish I had a river so long / I would teach my feet to fly
Geez.
They’re installing the Holter monitor test on my partner’s birthday. The email for the appointment called it a fitting, as if I’m going to get a bespoke Ann Demeulemeester dress. I hope I can have sex in it. The Holter will monitor my body for 24 hours. It will monitor how I am kept alive and how my body keeps score, to quantify if my heart’s rhythm isn’t like the syncopated drums my partner creates that made me fall in love with him, but more like the four to the floor rhythms of convention.
Taming the wild heart.
Last time I had a heart monitor for an extended period of time was when S— was a toddler, maybe even O—’s age (2 1/2). I went to the hospital in the morning and was done in time to breastfeed him to sleep with the electrodes (that look like metal nipples) still attached to my body. S—’s soft plump fingers played with them as he nursed. There was no time to take them off and I wanted a photo of us in that state. I love trauma’s performance on and with the body (Catherine Opie and all that), especially if it can be mediated with a camera so I don’t genuinely have to acknowledge why my heart keeps causing me trouble. I don’t remember what the doctors determined other than their confusion about how a young woman with low-blood pressure could have such elevated troponin levels. I forgot about it like most things with my physiology.
Academia is really good at training you to dismiss your body beyond thought. It trains bodies of thought.
These days, when we make love, my partner moves his hands abruptly avoiding my breasts. There’s no delicate process in that gesture and I’m annoyed. But his hands don’t betray my desires, they respect me repeating how my breasts and nipples belong to O— and her drawn out suckling and fondling—a habit I loathe with every part of me.
A reasonable person like my friend C— would say just stop it, motherhood is not martyrdom. Or another friend like M— would say, yeah, it sucks, but I did it until my daughter was 5.
I have Breastfeeding Aversion and Agitation, a phenomenon some chest feeding people get, especially as their baby gets more active in the process. Since it differs from Dysphoric-Milk Ejection Reflex and is hormonal, it often ebbs and flows at different times of the menstrual cycle.
Just another aspect of mom rage given its own category! Yay!
O— is not ready to end nursing.
Despite her delicate and loving touch during the act that’s like a spasmodic scraping of 40 grit sandpaper just below my epidermis. Despite her suckling making me want to rip off my breasts and pummel them against the “Be Calm” Louise Bourgeois print donning our off-white bedroom walls.
Somehow neither am I.
O—’s gulps also provide simultaneous relief. We make jokes with our gestures and expressions, pushing up against each other’s bodies, building a mother-daughter nest tucked in under a shared, “soft blue blanket” as she calls it.
When I make love with my partner, I try to ignore these contradictory feelings emerging but it’s difficult to separate the pleasure I and his hands or her hands find in my body. O–’s hands are partially his hands. That’s probably why I’ve never allowed him to have any of my breast milk; a fantasy my body anticipated for years before birthing my children.
After a 5 day writing trip in February, I began physically disassociating while O— fed, which made me more angry with her and with my partner. 30 minutes of my day, being a cow! I’d shout. Any time I need to get back to me Magda, I begin to read. This time as she breastfed. I didn’t want to keep dismissing my body.
The discomfort is still there but I can re-orient my focus. She’s now witness and participant in a pleasurable act of mine: reading. Sometimes she asks me to read out loud, restoring my heart.
This summer so far, with links to my brief reviews on Goodreads:
Iggie's House by Judy Blume
I’d Like to Say Sorry, but There’s No One to Say Sorry To by Mikołaj Grynberg
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
Pick-Up Sticks by Sarah Ellis
A Land With a People: Palestinians and Jews Confront Zionism, edited by Esther Farmer
The Christmas Revolution by Barbara Cohen
Whose Torah?: A Concise Guide to Progressive Judaism by Rebecca Alpert
As always,
thank you for subscribing and supporting my work. All the money I make on here goes right into childcare so I can have time to think and write.
While not a mother for reasons I’m still unpacking, I often wondered how I would deal with all the bodily changes and the necessity of constant touch - something I have an aversion to. I’ve heard of parents getting ’touched out’.