I've never experienced someone else owning my body like this. Zi crawls over to me while playing, pulls down my top's straps and launches her mouth, and now four teeth, toward my breasts. She twists against me, feeds, sighs, then drags herself away and crawls off. She acts like I am killing her if I try to put her back to sleep late in the night by patting or with water instead. She gets offended and vexed. Eventually, I turn over and she wraps herself around me, clamps onto my breast, begins to kick her foot in the air and hypnotically feeds. Eventually, I wake up, pry her off and try to unlock my hunched shoulder.
Having had someone survive solely off my body for more than six months, I feel a kind of awe for breasts that I did not before. Breastfeeding can be a burden, but it also makes you feel important, like you are doing something that makes you special to this baby. Babies think your body is theirs with such full and genuine innocence that it's easy to see yourself in their eyes. It's not quite, but it feels like love, this unself-conscious claim on you. That's also why you are the one that they want in the night. It's a double-edged sword. Breastfeeding for what seemed to combine into about five hours was how Zi sat through three days of a regional academic feminist meeting in Jamaica. Sometimes she played with her toys on the desk. Sometimes she napped in my arms. But when she fussed, I stuck her on and she was perfection itself. Like an addict with a fresh fix. Bliss. She was with her mama and had unlimited access. Either that or she has a high tolerance for meetings and will do well as a future bureaucrat. For working women, breastfeeding is both super-easy and seriously challenging.
When I was recently in London, where the hotel rooms (apparently) don't have mini fridges, the management refused to keep my bags of breastmilk, in the case I provided, in the kitchen freezer. Something about "leaking" and "not near food" and regulations. Seeing my tearful response, overflowing with despair and loss, the workers volunteered to take the bags of milk to their freezers at home. They did that for five days. On the weekend, when the manager was not on shift, they brought my little case back, kept it in the kitchen and I travelled home with seven full bags of frozen milk, precious as gold. And it would have been more had I not had to throw away a few over two ten-hour plane rides and at a two-day workshop where there were no provisions for breastfeeding mothers. I had a friend who used to say that her god has breasts. Too true. Women who breastfeed multiple children for multiple years are everyday goddesses walking the earth. I guess now that I'm wondering how much longer I can do this, I am also pausing in a phase that makes me see and appreciate my taken-for-granted body anew.Babies think your body is theirs with such full and genuine innocence that it's easy to see yourself in their eyes. It's not quite, but it feels like love, this unself-conscious claim on you.
