imposter, prurient and faintly scandalised. Her self-involvement, her emotional vulnerability alarm me. I inhabit her loves, her concerns, with the detachment of a descendant piecing together family history, with the difference that these concerns still live: I am importuned by them; they require my involvement. Love, expectation, anger and resentments flow in their accustomed channels towards me and though they fill me with a strange aversion I struggle to contain them, to avert disaster. I am like a spy, bent upon the maintenance of an outward appearance while my existence revolves covertly around the secret of my daughter. I long to talk to other spies, to unburden myself to them. When I meet women who have children the truth spills indiscreetly from my mouth. I donât care about myself, I say. I have no subjectivity. They could do anything to me and I wouldnât care.
Threads of association hang from me, as if I were unravelling, entangling themselves in the worldâs weakness. I see elderly people, people in wheelchairs, people begging for money or crying in the street, and they tug at my fibres: I feel I should provide for them, should gather them up, should put them to the breast.
Breastfeeding mothers must remember to take good care of themselves
, a hospital leaflet informs me,
and should drink an extra liter of fluid each day, at least some of which should be milk.
I cannot drink. The story of my need is over. I believe myself to be immune, with the immunity of a dead thing, to everything I once felt so deeply. Instead I have become a responsive unit, a transmitter. I read that my daughter is receiving my antibodies, my resistance, through my milk and sometimes I imagine I can feel it flow out of me like a river of light. I imagine it lining the little hollow of her body, strengthening her walls. I imagine my solidity transferring itself to her, leaving me unbodied, a mere force, a miasma of nurture that surrounds her like a halo.
The feeding goes on for hours. In the old days, I am informed, women breastfed their babies for strictly twenty minutes every four hours. They werenât âallowedâ, they say, to do anything else. Those who adhered to it were, I imagine, delighted with this imaginary prohibition. It has a sort of Marxist appeal, and hence has since been discredited. The modern regime is all supply and demand. It recommends feeding the baby whenever she is hungry, by which means the breasts will produce the amount of milk she wants. You may be surprised by how hungry she is; you may find yourself feeding her twenty or thirty times in twenty-four hours, but donât worry!
It is impossible to over feed a breastfed baby.
This last claim suggests to me that feeding is entirely meaningless. I leaf through books on the subject looking for some mention of myself, some hint of concern for me as I sit pinioned twenty to thirty times a day in my armchair, but there is none. I begin to feel like a stretch of unprotected wilderness, ringing with the shriek of chainsaws, the drill of oil wells. Even the glimmer of hope offered me in the hospital is snatched away. In spite of the midwifeâs assurance the practice of timing or limiting feeds is, I learn, frowned upon. If you end the feed yourself, how will you know whether sheâs had enough? The customer, it seems, is always right. Something in the science of all this disturbs me. How often should I feed her, I ask another midwife when she comes to the house. Whenever sheâs hungry, replies the midwife. How do I know when sheâs hungry? Youâll soon be able to tell, she replies with a glint that I think is meant to be conspiratorial. But in the meantime, I persist, how do I know? The midwife looks worried. It is clear that I have a problem. She gives me the details of a breastfeeding clinic run by the hospital. Her handwriting is round and cheerful as a childâs.
The clinic is in a large room on the top floor of the
Threads of association hang from me, as if I were unravelling, entangling themselves in the worldâs weakness. I see elderly people, people in wheelchairs, people begging for money or crying in the street, and they tug at my fibres: I feel I should provide for them, should gather them up, should put them to the breast.
Breastfeeding mothers must remember to take good care of themselves
, a hospital leaflet informs me,
and should drink an extra liter of fluid each day, at least some of which should be milk.
I cannot drink. The story of my need is over. I believe myself to be immune, with the immunity of a dead thing, to everything I once felt so deeply. Instead I have become a responsive unit, a transmitter. I read that my daughter is receiving my antibodies, my resistance, through my milk and sometimes I imagine I can feel it flow out of me like a river of light. I imagine it lining the little hollow of her body, strengthening her walls. I imagine my solidity transferring itself to her, leaving me unbodied, a mere force, a miasma of nurture that surrounds her like a halo.
The feeding goes on for hours. In the old days, I am informed, women breastfed their babies for strictly twenty minutes every four hours. They werenât âallowedâ, they say, to do anything else. Those who adhered to it were, I imagine, delighted with this imaginary prohibition. It has a sort of Marxist appeal, and hence has since been discredited. The modern regime is all supply and demand. It recommends feeding the baby whenever she is hungry, by which means the breasts will produce the amount of milk she wants. You may be surprised by how hungry she is; you may find yourself feeding her twenty or thirty times in twenty-four hours, but donât worry!
It is impossible to over feed a breastfed baby.
This last claim suggests to me that feeding is entirely meaningless. I leaf through books on the subject looking for some mention of myself, some hint of concern for me as I sit pinioned twenty to thirty times a day in my armchair, but there is none. I begin to feel like a stretch of unprotected wilderness, ringing with the shriek of chainsaws, the drill of oil wells. Even the glimmer of hope offered me in the hospital is snatched away. In spite of the midwifeâs assurance the practice of timing or limiting feeds is, I learn, frowned upon. If you end the feed yourself, how will you know whether sheâs had enough? The customer, it seems, is always right. Something in the science of all this disturbs me. How often should I feed her, I ask another midwife when she comes to the house. Whenever sheâs hungry, replies the midwife. How do I know when sheâs hungry? Youâll soon be able to tell, she replies with a glint that I think is meant to be conspiratorial. But in the meantime, I persist, how do I know? The midwife looks worried. It is clear that I have a problem. She gives me the details of a breastfeeding clinic run by the hospital. Her handwriting is round and cheerful as a childâs.
The clinic is in a large room on the top floor of the
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