My Breasts are Here to Help
Readers, let me educate you about breasts.
Anyone who has ever nursed a baby knows that feeling of what is termed “let down,” which is not the same “let down” as when you show up at a Mexican restaurant in Europe and are disappointed to be served marinara sauce instead of salsa with your chips. A let down, in breastfeeding terms, is when the milk speeds forward from all regions of the breast, nether and otherwise, to the nipple, where it will then squirt out, sometimes on its own, given enough encouragement and/or back pressure. This is especially funny in the early days of nursing a newborn, when you are first establishing the breastfeeding relationship and your breasts are like the novice employee who is also a total genius: “Well, shit, I don’t know, maybe the tiny baby will want to drink, oh, two gallons of milk today; let’s just see what happens…” And thanks to this handiwork, you can walk around with your breasts literally squirting milk out like a sprinkler, all fancy like an elegant Italian fountain.
Months or even years later, you may find strange swaths of tiny dried white droplets patterning the sides of shelves and bookcases adjacent to favorite rocking chairs and on the wall next to the headboard of your bed. And you will again remember those days of uncontrollable spraying milk, where your baby’s face often looked as though he’d been starring in the breastmilk equivalent of a Mountain Dew commercial. (I don’t know — do they spray Mountain Dew all over people in those commercials? I imagine it to be true, but I’m kind of just making this up as I go.) The mammalian body is a mysterious and wonderful thing, is it not? It knows just what to do, once it gets its shit together.
And, I have to say, if I were to write a letter of recommendation for my lactating breasts as we come to the final days(?)/weeks(?)/months(?)/(kind of hoping not) years(?) of our stint nursing my second — and last — child, the letter would be overwhelmingly positive. They are like the loyal best friends who always have your back, for better or for worse. So thoughtful, so well intentioned, so ready to help, and in ways you might not expect.
I do recall one evening in the past six months, having a little argument with my beloved spouse. I don’t recall what it was about, but never mind that: rupture and repair, rupture and repair, that’s what it’s all about, right? Water under the bridge! At some point in the lively debate, though, we each became very angry, voices raised, my hands gesturing wildly in the air, and, at the crux of the argument: boom, the milk just let down. I paused, in awe of my mammalian self. There was no baby around — he was asleep, and this was not a normal time for him to sip milk from the ol’ fountain.
Nay, it seemed as if my breasts were offering up a warm beverage to us, just as one might offer a cup of tea to some upset friends, encouraging them to take a moment to regroup, perhaps even acting as a mediator to the conflict. They were effectively saying to us, “Friends, this argument has reached a point where perhaps it may benefit everyone to sit down, relax, and have a warm, delicious beverage while breathing deeply, and after everyone has calmed down, we will begin again.”
Wow. I mean, wow! That’s really sweet, very thoughtful. Thanks, breasts, I appreciate the gesture. Warm drinks are a nice way to say “I care.” But we’re not really going to go down that road. Ahem.
Another time, I was in the company of three other women whom I’d just met, doing some product testing for a major toy company that shall go unnamed. During a discussion over some delicious sandwiches, the subject of a local facebook group geared toward our local expat community, to which we all had connections, came up.
There was one thing about this facebook group, though: I had started a thread on it a couple of months earlier about this white Danish guy at the local LEGOland theme park who is employed to dress up as a generic Native American “chief.” Somewhat surprisingly, my questioning the appropriateness of his existence stirred up a huge brouhaha in the largely European expat community here; to the point where the thread became a popular topic of heated conversation at watercoolers all across our little town for weeks after. Over the course of this weeks-long internet melee, my intelligence, sanity, and moral integrity was repeatedly called into question, in a very vitriolic way, by a handful of strangers who really seemed attached to the practice of privileged white people dressing up as caricatures of other ethnic groups.
Now. Back to this little lunch meeting with my fellow product testers. One of my companions, who happened to also be an American, mentioned this particular facebook thread (stupid facebook), not knowing at that moment that it was I who had started it. She mentioned it not in a negative way, just in an “ugh, that whole thread was so depressing I had to leave the group for awhile, because I have a grandmother who was Cherokee, and the whole thing got so nasty,” sort of way. And then, just as I was about to say, “Ahem, that was me,” she stopped, and said at the same time, “Oh, wow, that was you, wasn’t it?” and my boobs TOTALLY LET THAT MILK DOWN.
Why? I don’t know exactly. My favorite hypothesis is that they were trying to step in, like a superhero’s sidekick might, offering to squirt milk in the eyes of my unseen internet opponents, who, theoretically, could have been lurking anywhere in the vicinity. This would have given me a bit of an edge while they fumbled about, trying to regain their vision, while I prepared to roundhouse kick the jerkwads and run away. But whatever their specific intent, the breasts clearly wanted to step in and be helpful. “Let us help, by squirting their eyes out,” they called to me. But there were no eyes to squirt out, just the nice lady sitting across from me, who actually seemed to be on my side of the issue, as it were.
The most recent incident of sudden let down happened late in the night, when our four-year-old fell out of bed onto his face and split his lip open. It was rather bloody and the whole scene felt surreal and gnarly to my groggy self at 2:30 in the morning. And apparently my breasts felt the same way. Although I weaned my older son almost three years ago, they still really wanted to step in and help him. I guess they recalled the good old days when he was a baby and they could make everything right, and darn it, they just wanted to help! “What can we do to help? Let us make a warm, healing compress for that lip,” they offered, and the milk came rushing forth. “Oh, that’s nice of you, little friends,” I told them. “But I think I’ve got this covered with some tissue and a cool wash cloth, and the help of my husband, who will drive our boy 35 miles to the ER in the middle of the night for stitches (which he ended up not needing).”
So, you see, dear readers, although the offers of help are at times inappropriate, the lactating human breast always has the best interests of everyone at heart — not just the nurslings. We should all be so fortunate as to have a set somewhere near us at all times. The next time you witness someone trying to shame a nursing mother who is feeding her baby in public, please remember to step in on her behalf, and educate that ignoramus about the peace and goodwill that lactating breasts are here to spread. Perhaps you might even invite this naysayer for a warm beverage of their own choosing over which to discuss their discomfort about this simple fact of mammalian biology.
Or else take another page from the lactating breasts’ playbook: just squirt them in the eyes with a warm liquid and give them a good roundhouse kick to the face.
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