Bad Milk
When I was four years old, my two oldest sisters demanded that my mother stop breastfeeding me. It was weird, they had decided. I was the last of her seven children and I was too old. My mother was being selfish, they said, unwilling to relinquish her nursing duties because it was too comforting for her. The pediatrician assured my mother it was quite okay, but my oldest half-sisters were grown—18 and 22—and they insisted they knew what came next in my mother’s drawn-out breastfeeding career. She was to take a bow and be done with it.
At bedtime, my mother would lay beside me and read me a book. She was the best narrator with an impressive repertoire of voices that ranged from cranky old witches to tired British dogs. She’d turn out the lights and allow me to nurse until I fell asleep. I shared a room and a twin trundle bed with my third sister, Laura. Laura had quit breastfeeding cold turkey at four years old, approaching my pregnant mom one day, her face stoic and thoughtful, ready to lay her letter of resignation down on the table. She had decided that, while she and my mom had had a good run, she was going to “save the milk” for the new baby—me. She was a tiny breastmilk benefactress and had come to the decision on her own.
Leading up to my birth, there was a complicated collective attitude about my impending existence amongst the blended family. My parents had one high school degree between the two of them, six kids, one beat up station wagon, and almost zero financial security at any given time. And one additional kid on the way. My mom was turning 40 and had cried in the shower for two weeks when she found out she was pregnant with me. Seeing my mother in that distress, my dad, who had been raised Catholic, had started to think about the obvious solution but was nervous to even say it out loud.
Corinne, maybe we should consider abor—
My mother shushed him.
No, she said.
And that was that. She stopped crying in the shower. I was coming.
My oldest sister was less than sentimental when my parents shared the happy news with the kids. At 17 years old, my sister knew the house was already crowded. She had already “helped out” my parents enough. She was two parts full-time nanny, one part high school junior. Don’t you know how to use a condom? she told my mom, her face deadpanned.
Nevertheless, by the time I arrived in late September of that year, the house was abuzz with more excitement than anything. When my parents arrived home from the hospital and pulled into the driveway with me in tow, all my siblings gathered outside on our front lawn, along with our neighbors. Little Laura held a pink It’s A Girl sign on a wooden picket, waving it back and forth and chanting We want the baby! as my siblings had coached her. The nonexistent strike against me was officially over, replaced by a welcome wagon. As the story goes, my sisters scooped me up out of my mother’s arms and carried me inside, leaving my parents in the driveway.
Growing up, there was a nameless war raging on in my household. A battle between my mother and oldest sisters had already taken hold by the time I came around, my mother having thrown most of the initial bombs-- neglect, a hasty second marriage to my father a decade earlier, vitriolic shouting matches, money struggles, evictions, emotional immaturity, and a complete failure to instill structure or boundaries in the household. The perfect storm had been brewing by the time I came into the world. I became a pacifier and a weapon for the family— a little thing to cuddle and radicalize against each other.
My sisters, traumatized and angry, fed me a narrative that my parents were fuck-ups. My parents, embarrassed and angry about fucking up, fed me the narrative that my sisters were poisoning my mind. Both things were true. Both truths were harming me. No one fed me that narrative.
Throughout my childhood and into my adulthood, I struggled to figure out with whom to place my alliance, each party vying for my vote and angry if I countered their arguments. There was never any safe space to seek refuge. I did not know which of my opinions were my own and which were propaganda.
It’s difficult for me to separate which parts of my childhood were loving, which parts were dysfunctional, and which parts were both. Each pile has shifted in size and weight over the years. As I get older, I am still sifting through all of it, moving memories around as I discover new context for my experiences. Some memories remain enormous. Some never seemed important until, one day, they were. I wonder if I should just stop sifting.
Years later, I would joke around with my college friends at parties about how long I was breastfed, conveniently saying I had taken my last sip at three-and-a-half years old, instead of four. (Three-and-a-half, while still older for a child to be breastfed by American standards, sounds less weird than four.) It was the kind of material you try out on your early peers, not realizing that you’re just handing them a box of uncomfy truths that you want someone else to hold for a minute. I wanted them to open it, expose it to some light, and finally let it breathe. They would usually laugh, then go grab themselves another pineapple and rum from a plastic bottle about a half hour before we’d all end up puking on the front lawn.
It became clear to me as an adult that no sane person cared how long I had enjoyed my mom’s milk, affectionately referred to as téte in our household. Yet, I could not help feeling like my mom and I had buried a body and took an unspoken oath of silence all those years ago. When you’re grown, it’s all too easy to forget just how little you were—and how little you could comprehend—at four.
My last months of breastfeeding contain some of my earliest memories and marked feelings. The warm comfort of laying next to my mother, nestled under her arm, with an assuredness that our bedtime ritual gave me when so much of our household rhythm was chaotic. And with that came my first memory of shame. The first cast of judgment.
I’m not exactly sure when it started but towards the last of the feeding months, my sisters, still living at home, began to ambush me and my mother at night in an attempt to stop the nursing sessions. They would creep down the hall, stand at my bedroom door, listen in, then quickly swing open the door to catch my mother in the act. Gotcha! The hallway light would flood the room, a spotlight on me and my mother. If they caught us, my sisters would hiss at her to stop. My mother would whine and tell them to leave her alone, my sisters shaking their heads as they closed the door and retreated.
My mother and I got a little smarter. She would hear them coming, put her shirt down, whisper to me to pretend to be asleep. I’d close my eyes and lay still, hearing the door burst open, then close. We resumed once the coast was clear.
Their intent was to find her and shame her. But there I was, too, learning to hide the first thing that ever felt safe to me.
I did not understand that their contempt was only reserved for my mother. They did not understand that, by casting judgment on the behavior, they instilled a deep sense of wrongdoing in me that would come to haunt me. My mother made me her accomplice in something that was never a crime. The last moments of something so normal and nurturing became seedy and humiliating. Judgment would come to terrify me and, even now, remains something to hide from and fear, yet carry and own. I am still putting down all the things that were handed to me but never belonged to me.
I have come to know that my mother was, in many ways, still a child in the midst of her own motherhood. Her inner child was oftentimes the unspoken matriarch of the household. She didn’t know how to plant her feet into the ground and protect her own heart, let alone mine. Had my mother protected herself, she would have protected me. I learned to crumble at the first sign of criticism, so sure I was a part of something terribly wrong. So sure I was terribly wrong.
I don’t think I will ever know how to divvy up the blame. On my best days, I stop trying to. On worse days that are fewer and farther between, my chest swells in grief, for I imagine what my life would look like if my mother had stopped hiding and learned to breathe fire. To steer her daughters away from judgment, to stop judging herself, to protect her small child and herself—one and the same. And I imagine what would have happened if her own mother would have done the same, halting the familial pain that would carry on for at least another seven decades.
Most of all, I both cherish and mourn those last moments— my eyes shut, cradled in darkness, as I turned over a bedtime story in my mind. There is a part of me that still grasps at the feeling of my tiny body nourished and content, my squishy little heart tucked under the covers, blissfully unaware in that moment that the world was on the other side of my bedroom door, waiting to tell me how to be.
