Got Milk?

A Warning: If you are squeamish about mother-type things (most especially that mother of all mother things - the breast) then just stop reading right now.

Okay then. Breastfeeding has been on my mind lately. No plans to take it up again, of course, but I've had one of those odd full-circle moments that sometimes happen in life. My first baby and I had a really tumultuous nursing experience. Her mouth was itty bitty and my breasts were incompetent. We made it eight weeks. The other mom's in my little post-partum yoga group would gasp and avert their heads when they saw my breasts - they were that bad. After several bouts of really severe mastitis (if you don't know, that's this lovely thing when your tits feel like masts) my midwife (MY MIDWIFE!) said, "time to quit, darling. Your health is declining and the baby is losing weight."

So, I became intimately familiar with cabbage leaves. Later that year I was at one of those faculty mixer-type things that grad students who teach sometimes get invited to and the wife of one of my favorite professors was there. We began talking about mother-type things because my friend was about to rush off to nurse her baby. The prof's wife got this look on her face that, for some reason, stuck in my head. It was a look both proud and defiant, with just a glint of malice. She then said, "My youngest is five and I still have milk."

Huh? She then went on to declare that she didn't actually nurse the child anymore, but the milk just never completely left. My brain tucked that little moment away.

Flash forward a few years. I have my second baby and triumph above all nursing issues. I nurse him for nearly two years and even after I cut him off he keeps asking for another three years. Poor thing. The reason I cut him off to begin with was because he was the most acrobatic nurser of all time and I just could not see allowing my nipples to continue to stretch like Cirque props.

I'm haven't been sad to give up nursing. Until recently. You see, there's this baby boom in my neighborhood and our discussion boards are full of all the young mother's giving each other nursing advice and lamenting the stares and shock of strangers.

And now I understand the professor's wife. Saying to women in the full flush of their childbearing years that I HAVE MILK is a certain claim on your own youth. Milk is bounty, it's beneficience, it's beauty, it's the elixir of life (literally!). When you have milk, you are a woman with every piece of your physical passage of life intact.

When it's gone for good, a piece of your youth goes with it.