Babies, breastfeeding, and books

Laura is ten and Will is three but lately I have been reliving my pregnancies and their baby days. I’ve been thinking about this ongoing project, literary representations of mothering by mothers, while I’ve been cleaning up my office at school and trying to plan my summer writing. I realized in the great rush of sort and file that I thought I had just been reading mostly for pleasure, with a little of my academic writing thrown in there, but in fact I have piles and piles of books and research on the subject, too much not to do something substantial with it.

Yesterday I was vacuuming up behind my bedside table, something I rarely feel compelled to do. I’d had a vase of gerbera daisies there and forgot to throw them away before we left for Georgetown last weekend. About the first thing Will did when we got home was start sifting through this puddle of petals and flower fluff, spreading it everywhere. I’m vacuuming away last night, and when I finished, on the floor under the vacuum was one of the little paper stickers that covered the adhesive on my nursing pads—I remember how hard they were to vacuum up now, how slippery they were, how they always ended up on the floor. I stopped breastfeeding Will sometime before he was a year old, so that paper’s been behind the dresser for at least two years (and no thank you, I don’t want to hear any comment on my housekeeping). It just seems so odd to find it after now after this long—it feels like a sign, to go on with this project. (I sure as hell hope it’s not a sign of anything else!)

And then, as I backed up my hard drive yesterday, I ran across an old folder of archived email from graduate school and couldn’t quite resist the temptation to squander a while skimming through them. Aside from (re)discovering that I was a really whiny person while I was on the job market—the patience and forbearance of our placement director was astounding—I also found several email about Laura when she was eight months old. The contrast between the daily life represented in those email and what I wrote in her baby book was of considerable interest—as I think about it more, it’s not that I tried to leave her parents out of her baby book, as much as I felt her book should be about her, when she smiled and pulled up and her first family visits and whatnot, rather than our exhausting daily life when I was trying to find another babysitter so I could finish writing my dissertation and find a job, and how lonely I was because I stayed home with Laura days and Chris kept her nights while I was teaching, and how much I would’ve practically died of happiness if I’d known another woman with a baby or had someone to stroll around with the quad with me and Laura for an hour. I hadn’t thought for years about how I would write in the study and listen to Laura playing with her babysitter and hate writing, and how one reason I was so determined to breastfeed Laura was that I was afraid we couldn’t afford formula if I couldn’t.

I’d had this happy notion that small babies slept a lot, that I’d be able to read and write while I stayed home days with the baby. And because my classes met Monday and Wednesday nights, and she was born over a holiday weekend when Monday classes were cancelled, I actually only missed one class. I doubt I was very effective the first night back, but I was determined not to shirk my job, even when it meant I had to teach a beautiful, terrible story by Cynthia Ozick called “The Shawl,” about a nursing mother in a concentration camp watching as her milk dries up and her baby begins to die. TAs had a set syllabus to follow, and I followed it on the verge of postpartum tears that night. I have never been able to read that story again; I’m not sure even now if I remember it rightly, but I literally cannot revisit that story. The first couple of months of Laura’s life—before my grandmother volunteered to pay for a sitter so I could work a little more easily—is a series of blurry memories of breastfeeding my new baby between classes. Chris would bring her to my office hours with two Chick-fil-a sandwiches for our hurried dinners—about the only time we saw each other that semester. Home alone with the baby during the day, I built a nest on the couch with student papers and a pen on my right-hand side, and articles on my left. While my daughter nursed from my left breast, I graded quizzes or wrote lists, and then would read for my dissertation when she switched sides and I had to hold her with my writing hand. This scenario probably wasn’t what the person who coined the metaphor of juggling for motherhood had in mind, but it was certainly very applicable nevertheless.

Of course things settled down, and generally when I think of Laura as a baby she’s older, when Chris and I had found all the malls that had department stores with the good bathrooms with couches, the changing rooms and family bathrooms, when we were able to go out together, three of us now instead of just two. I remember how easily she fit into our life then, but I had really forgotten so much of that earlier time. I had the same kind of maternal amnesia with Will, my friend Lisa pointed out to me the other day. He was born at the end of a semester, and I taught my class from home. It was tough, but we were closer to home and arranged for a grandparent to come spend Fridays taking care of Will so I could grade papers—during the week I would email students and write lectures and assignments while he napped, but I still needed at least one full work day a week, and it was those Fridays when I would only come out of the study for lunch and to nurse Will. Although I was very very tired, I really didn’t think it was too bad at the time—and I still don’t—but that lasted only a few weeks, and the semester I went back to campus while he went off to daycare as a little four-month old was a nightmare.

In fact, there’s no contrast between the email I wrote that semester and his baby book, because I am still seven months pregnant in his book. I couldn’t write about that time. I loved William, but work then was horrible, for reasons far too complicated to go into here. I hated my breast pump, disguised as a briefcase and full of ice packs with its one little picture window flap over the pump itself—the one element of the whole system that wasn’t totally mechanized and measured. I felt literally consumed. And I was constantly upset by how the staff at Will’s daycare handled his feedings—and he was difficult to bottle-feed, let me tell you. My breast milk became a crucible, a measure of love, a way to hang onto William and somehow to what was important to me as a mother and a person too—I have this image of that semester as a freezer full of bags of breast milk; bottles of separated milk in the fridge, the thin clear layer on the bottom and the cream on top; the little Igloo lunchbox cooler I used to carry his bottles back and forth everyday; rushing to daycare after class to nurse him so they wouldn’t waste another bottle; how sometimes I would literally cry over split milk.

So this contrast, then, between these two genres of my own experience of being a mother, my work email and the two baby books. Is there a way to reconcile those, to bring baby’s first steps together with mother’s? As I read anthologies of women’s experiences of parenting, and blogs about being a mother, and poetry about pregnancy and birth, I am looking I suppose for some answer to my own questions, a mirror of my own experience. Something to me in the act of writing an event down makes it permanent; I wrote the narrative of Laura’s eleventh month, which included her first word—hey, as in the southern version of hello—and so I remember it. Maybe this summer I can finally write a bit of Will’s baby book, go through my old notes until I find his first word, remember his babyhood more completely, reclaim his past—and my own.