As a Breastfeeding Mom, I Have Some Thoughts

A meditation on heaving prosthetic breasts

I.

I want you to know that the reason why you have a smart phone is because of lactation.

The clue is in your name. You are a mammal with a smartphone. The defining characteristic of our bozo/genius species is the mammary gland.

If we had snouts or flat chests, our skulls would have not evolved to carry those notorious brains of ours.

Our lips and palate were sculpted by the nipple and from that—speech. Then tools. Then your stupid phone.

On the godless and hostile plains, the extra fat deposits of our breasts helped us go longer without food. They also continued to produce the perfect food for our offspring: human milk.

This is how natural selection works after all.

The unique needs of human infants and the ability of women’s breasts to meet their needs are the reason for our global domination.

I only learned this when I started nursing my daughter a handful of months ago. I wish before I sprouted these evolutionary organs in junior high some one would have told me. I wish that at 1am, as I sat in hypnotized by undulating body shimmer from ‘Girls Gone Wild’ infomercial oozing out of my TV screen, someone would have whispered: “those are for feeding babies.”

II.

In my adolescence I thought I could offer boys two things: my sexual maturity and a set of perfect C-cups. Starting about 16, my breasts were the only part my body that I had complete and total pride in. The only part of me that fit some sort tantalizing feminine ideal.

Now 20 years later and a number of months postpartum, my breasts are dense, drooping, and flagrantly mammalian. They’ve lost their pert, porno pluckiness. My once exact nipples are more, um, more disbursed. And about 8 -12 times a day there is a bubble cheeked infant clamped on to one of them.

Sometimes we gaze deeply at each other, her eyes conveying an eerie sense of maturity and calm while my brain gets basted in all manner of gooey love chemicals. My daughter, who weighs 17 pounds, has never swallowed food. She has only drank from my body.

16 year old me, with my leopard print bra straps and intense desire to be prized for my uniquely confrontational sexuality, would be revolted.

III.

I read that indigenous tribes in Malawi—where 99 percent of mothers breastfeed for an extended period—that breasts are void of sexuality. Men prefer butts and necks. The notion of a grown man mimicking an infant on by sucking on woman’s breasts is considered bizarre if not perverse.

IV.

Teachers are largely sexless. Particularly the men. I went to a massive public high school with over a hundred teachers and of all the male teachers none were boyish enough to really spark the erotic imaginations of his female students. But there was one professor who made us all insane with sexual intrigue. He was a teacher who married a former student.

The legend went: after this female student graduated and turned 18, she followed the teacher to Japan where he was spending the summer abroad. They came back married, the 12 year age gap effectively scaled through matrimony. Some years later, the former student and now wife, would occasionally work as substitute at our school. If she turned up in your class, the air was always charged with a hint of transgression. The boys would be extra boisterous. The girls would be tittering and furiously passing notes speculating:

Was there an affair before she graduated? What exactly happened in Japan? Did he notice her as a student? Do YOU think she’s hot? Do you think he’s hot? Do teachers find their students attractive? Do teachers find ME attractive?

When the wife came to school visibly pregnant on semester we lost our fucking minds.

No one at school ever saw them in the same room. They never acted unprofessionally but they were like a peephole into the adult world of sex and intensity that we were all starting to grope at.

Now imagine the inverse. Where sex isn’t suggested but declared. Pressingly urgently against a sheer top, swollen and swinging with a desire to be seen. Imagine the feeling in the classroom. Would it be bedlam? Intrigue? Repulsion? Or profound alienation?

Here’s another inverse: a dildo, those sort of gag store, bridal shower ones. Rubbery, veined, oversized, let’s say twelve inches. The testicles, the size of plums, the head as pink as possum’s nose, peeking out from a pair of bike shorts.

V.

I wonder and, of course, worry about the sort of relationship my daughter will with her body. Especially with her breasts. Unlike other primates who have small protrusions that swell during nursing and deflate after weaning, young girls, regardless of pregnancy, grow these confounding blobs just when their sense of self is at its most vulnerable and exposed. Blobs that paved the way for astrophysics, for literature, for the saxophone. Blobs that will embarrass. Blobs that will advertise a certain status in sexual pecking order. Blobs that will be hoisted up, flattened down, maimed, pierced, squeezed, injected and inflated. Blobs that will draw boys and men. Blobs that will endanger. Blobs that will trigger mystical chemical dance between her brain and a nearly helpless human baby.

I think of my daughter looking at a teacher wearing a grotesque cartoon version of the blobs, along with four inch nipples that have their own set of demands. What do they want? What do they want from her?

I think about those forty five minutes in a wood shop filled with hulking machines, greased pistons, and the crazed, insistent scream of a drill.

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