The Edible Parts
Monica J. Casper
Three o’clock in the morning. The bedroom is indigo dark and I'm bone-weary exhausted. I rock back and forth in the tattered, beige Lazy-Boy next to the bed. My infant daughter is curled against my belly like a rosy, plump comma. Her mouth sucks hungrily at my right breast, her eyes are closed, and she breathes heavily through her nose. She clutches my nightshirt in her tiny fist and her kitten feet tangle in the soft fleece blanket.
I close my eyes, drifting into a state of limbo that is neither slumber nor wakefulness. I feel my milk flowing from somewhere deep inside my chest, coursing through my breast ducts, then seeping out of the valve of my nipple into my baby's pink mouth. Her tongue is strong as it massages this magic fountain into giving her more milk. I marvel that her sucking reflex, so natural yet such obvious hard work, keeps her alive.
Soon she slows, continuing to pull gently at my nipple for comfort but no longer drawing sustenance. Her eyes open briefly and she gazes directly up at me, luminescent. What began twenty minutes earlier with frantic crying—piercing shrieks that startled me awake sharply as if wild dingoes were invading the house—ends with her body growing slack, relaxing again into sleep. A droplet of milk, a glistening pearl fresh from the maternal sea, beads on her tender lips.
I hold her for several minutes more, stroking her velvet cheek and corn silk curls. She begins to snore and I slowly rise, careful not to wake her. I tiptoe to the crib and lower her jelly form to the mattress, where she immediately rolls onto her belly and plumps her butt into the air. I stumble back to bed and fall into a deep and troubled sleep, dreaming of tigers and ocean swells and darkened alleyways.
Consider this troubling fact of life: Some people don’t like to see a woman breastfeeding. There are local ordinances in towns across the United States prohibiting this “indecent” and “disgusting” practice in public. Apparently, the sight of a naked female breast with a hungry baby attached to it makes a lot of Americans squirm.
I have a friend whose father refused to stay in the room whenever she nursed her daughters, and even asked her at one point to not do “that” in front of him—as if she were defecating on his freshly waxed floor rather than feeding his beloved grandchildren.
Given that we are bombarded constantly by pornographic and suggestive displays of women’s anatomy, I suspect discomfort with breastfeeding has more to do with context than with content. We live in a culture where titillating images of women are commonplace and breasts are widely recognized as sex objects. Flesh is bared daily and every woman is a potential pin-up; boobs have become banal. What makes people—especially men—uncomfortable is not, then, the mere exposure of female breasts. No, what unsettles people about lactating breasts is being forced to observe these repositories of fantasy in a context that is decidedly not sexual.
One can almost hear the chorus of indignant masculine whispers: How dare women bare their breasts on their own terms! How dare women use their breasts in a manner that does not cater to male desire! How dare some trivial babe-in-arms reap the goods that men are entitled to! How dare men be excluded from any activity featuring an adult babe’s “rack”!
But underneath the collective anxiety and confusion surrounding female breasts, something else is going on, too: need. Or, rather, the extreme distaste that our bootstrap, Lone Ranger culture has for the expression, display, and evidence of one human being’s primordial need for another. Need is one of those unsavory issues that we don’t like to talk about in a nation built on the myth of rugged—that is, manly—individualism. But a hungry baby is raw need in motion, nature carried into the nursery trailing dirt and entrails—or rather projectile vomit and yellow poop.
When I nursed, I used to shed salty tears at the sight of my daughters screaming with their little mouths wide open like “Os” and their urchin fists clenched, bobbing their heads frantically like baby birds seeking a worm. I wept out of grief that I could never fully meet my daughters’ needs. I wept at the delicacy of my infants’ bodies and the power of their want. I wept for my own inadequacies and lunatic desire for perfection. I wept for all the babies and children whose hunger will never be satisfied because we have not organized human societies equitably.
But mostly I wept at the precariousness of life and humanity’s uncertain future on the planet. Two months before Mason was born, the World Trade Center was attacked, thus inaugurating the War on Terror. We have been embattled, building Empire, since my children were born. I have nurtured and sustained their lives, while bullets and bombs have killed other women and children. Disasters both natural and man-made flourish, and our bodies and the planet bear a heavy burden of survival.
I wonder: is the act of nursing a baby viewed as shocking and disgusting by so many precisely because it reveals more than a flash of nipple and a mother’s tender love? Maybe breastfeeding is the new pornography because it reminds us of the ephemeral nature of our own existence. Glossy niche magazines may still get plenty of men off, but picturing the breast as food does something even more daring: it forces all of us to stare Mother Nature in the eye and to blink.
In this context, nursing a baby is a passionate and risky act of subversion.
Breastfeeding did not come naturally to me. I was fiercely committed to doing it, but it took coaching, practice, perseverance, and support to get it right. My first daughter, Mason, figured it out before I did.
She was born after a painful, frustrating thirty-six hour labor and surprise cesarean section. Battered and bruised in the recovery room following surgery, I could barely focus my scattered neurons on the fact that I had just delivered a baby. I was still high on morphine and could not have found my own breasts with a GPS unit.
When my midwife, Cynthia, placed the baby on my chest, my first groggy, cranky thought was, "I had the kid, can't somebody else feed her for a while?"
But of course there was nobody else—not if I was going to breastfeed successfully. So I tucked Mason into the curve of my arm (the arm that was not hooked up to the IV tube), watched as Cynthia guided the baby's mouth to my breast, and winced at the first shocking contact. It didn't help that medical personnel and family members, including Keith and my mother, surrounded me. It was live theatre, only I was the dim-witted understudy who had never attended a single rehearsal and wasn't entirely sure what the play was about.
The adorable seven-pound creature consuming my body like a parasite at first gnawed and nibbled and flailed around in amoebic confusion. My nipple was on fire—and not in a good way, either. I groaned, "I can’t do this."
But then something seemed to click. Mason rearranged her mouth just so and some innate evolutionary skill took over. Although I had no way to know for sure, I assumed she was getting the celebrated colostrum, valuable as gold ingots and full of important antibodies and nutrients.
Cynthia observed, "It looks like she's got it."
My mom exclaimed, "Wow, I think it's working!"
Keith patted my arm and said quietly, "Good job, honey."
I offered a wan smile, or maybe it was a grimace, and replied, "Well, at least something's working out the way it's supposed to."
At that, Mason offered a satisfied little moan, fluttered her long, brown eyelashes, and fell fast asleep.
Unfortunately, although I could not know it then, that first time was the easy part.
I went home a few days later and set about learning to mother a newborn. This was terribly complicated because I was also recovering from major abdominal surgery. Stitches held my puffy, sore stomach together, I was loopy on painkillers, and I could barely walk. I was fatigued and also got slammed with a heavy dose of the baby blues.
In those early days back at home on Whidbey Island, my breasts were a source of aching misery. When my milk finally let down, it was almost as painful as contractions had been. My normally petite, jaunty breasts, which had always been very well behaved and trouble-free, not to mention a fairly regular source of pleasure (my own and others’), were suddenly transformed into large feedbags overflowing with a substance that felt like wet concrete. Huge, white, and tinged with blue veins, my boobs were unsightly, to my eyes anyway, and they hurt like crazy.
Every other day I wailed to Keith, "I feel like cattle!" Not just a single cow, mind you, but the whole bovine species. I desperately needed his sympathy and support, knowing at the same time that nothing I put into words could make him, a non-lactating XY person, understand what I was experiencing.
He did try to offer encouragement, but he also couldn't hide his obvious sexual delight in my pneumatic mammaries. All of a sudden, I was the pin-up girl of his adolescent dreams and I think he was secretly hoping to reap the benefits.
This might have been possible had I any sexual impulse whatsoever. I hadn't. And more than that, I couldn't even conceive of my breasts as anything other than enormous industrial agriculture machines, more at home in a barn than in my bedroom. They leaked milk night and day, and I routinely woke up in a pool of warm, sticky liquid.
Mason wanted to nurse from my swollen udders every two hours or so. This was not an insurmountable problem during the day, as I wasn't doing much else. An average day during these initial weeks was: wake up, nurse, cry, sleep, nurse, wash a dish or two, cry, nurse, sleep, shuffle from room to room to stretch legs, nurse, cry, sleep, nurse, nurse, nurse, return a long-overdue phone call, sleep, cry, nurse. Mostly I lounged in an overstuffed chair, cuddling Mason, dozing, and waking just long enough to feed her.
Nights were even harder. My breasts were larger than they had been before I was pregnant, but sadly not massive enough that I could breastfeed lying on my side. Every time Mason woke to nurse, I had to rise up in bed to hold her.
Sitting up was a grueling, glacially slow process. Keith would have to wake, too, and help me into a semi-vertical position by pulling on my arms while I shimmied up on my corpulent rear-end. Then he would place the by now screeching baby into my arms, where she would immediately clamp onto my dripping, engorged water balloons. The sharp pain of impact would be lessened only after my milk had been flowing for a few minutes, and even then I would continue to feel a dull throb, like a toothache deep in the gum.
Above and beyond the physiological aspects of suffering, nursing exacerbated my depression. Whenever my milk was about to let down, I felt a rush of sadness so profound I believed the world was ending. Cheerless orchestral dirges raged in my head, with an excess of haunting violins and crashing cymbals.
I leaked tears almost every time I nursed my daughter for several weeks, about ten times a day. I was basically a soggy, liquid, disheveled mess of a human being in those confusing, exhausting months of neophyte mothering. To say I was overwhelmed would be a flagrant understatement.
On many occasions Keith came home from work to find me curled up in bed doing nothing at all except cradling my dormant child and smelling pungently of curdled breast milk. The tragic part was that I had been there all day.
Breastfeeding, unlike mothering which is a lifelong project, did eventually get easier. So much so that I nursed Mason for nineteen months, until I was pregnant with her sister. When Delaney was born, I nursed her for nine months, until I traveled without my children to Costa Rica and Delaney weaned herself in my absence. But being milked by my diminutive yet demanding progeny was never fully effortless.
Little did I know that for almost two years I would hurt and be thirsty and ravenous, like a plane crash survivor emerging from an arid desert after weeks of aimless wandering. I drank gallons of water every day, and I didn't eat just for two. I consumed enough food, day and night, to sustain a small Cambodian village. I craved salt and chocolate in equal measure and would have sucker- punched anyone who came between my carbohydrates and me.
Even when I believed I had everything under control, my breasts still managed to surprise me. After I had been nursing for several months, Keith and I planned our first romantic overnight date. My in-laws, in Seattle, watched Mason while we drove down to Tacoma to visit the new glass arts museum there. It was spectacularly beautiful: colorful, creative, and a fantasy world away from the slushy, gray fog of nursing in which I had been living.
Alas, my breasts started to gush halfway through our visit. I was wearing pads, but they could not staunch the torrential flow of milk. By the time we returned to our hotel room, the front of my shirt was drenched and I was in tears. I had not brought a breast pump, so I stood under a warm shower for an hour massaging each turgid breast by hand. I blubbered as I watched all that lovely food spill down the drain, thinking it such a waste.
As Keith spooned me later that night, with strict instructions not to even brush up against or breathe on my tender breasts, I wished more than anything that Mason was with us. I missed her warm little body and innocent soul, but mostly I longed for her technical skill at draining my boobs.
Just after Mason's first birthday, she accompanied me to New Orleans where I attended an academic conference. It was my first work-related trip with baby in tow and my very first experience (as a mother) with institutional childcare.
Before my scheduled talk, I deposited her in a room full of toys and other babies where she promptly began screaming as if her hair were on fire. I could hear her as I walked away down the long corridor, and my body responded by generating the milky white stuff, which began streaming from my nipples.
I made my presentation with soggy breast pads and my addled brain only about ten percent engaged with the meeting. The rest of me was back in that room with a hungry, scared infant who missed her mommy, or at least her mommy's scrumptious dairy bar.
When Mason was fifteen months old, after I had begun working full-time again, I traveled to Las Vegas for another conference, this time leaving the baby and the breast pump at home.
By then, Mason was sleeping through the night and nursing only in the morning and before bed. She was stunningly adept with a sippy-cup and was eating solid food. Plus, I had been nursing her for so long that my breasts rarely filled up anymore unless needed. It never occurred to me that I would need a pump this late in the game. Alas, it was Tacoma all over again, but with more glitz.
I woke up after my first night in the hotel with sandbags on my chest. I was a flood zone. My breasts were spewing like a geyser and I had not even thought to bring breast pads with me.
With a hand towel plastered to my chest, I phoned Keith. "My boobs are leaking," I reported.
"That's surprising," he mumbled sleepily.
I nodded. "Yep. What do you think I should do?"
He asked, "Do you have any breast pads?"
"I don't have anything here. No pads, no pump, no baby, no lover."
He said, "I'm sorry, honey. You must be really uncomfortable. What about the shower?"
"I guess I don't have a choice here. The old hand job it is. I wish you were here to help out."
He was silent for a moment, then, "It is Las Vegas, you know."
"What are you getting at?"
He laughed. "Well, if you can't get milked in Las Vegas, where can you get milked?"
I hung up on him and marched into the shower, where I wrung my boobs out the only way I could—manually.
Just after Delaney was born in 2004, we moved to Nashville and I started a job at Vanderbilt University. A few months later, I was lunching with a new colleague. As soon as we were seated at a Japanese restaurant near campus, my braless mammaries began discharging milk down the front of my rayon dress. Fortunately, the dress was black and soaked up the stain and the colleague was a historian with far more interest in the past than in the present.
But still, I was embarrassed and I felt outrageously female. I ate sushi with my right hand only and planted my left arm firmly across my chest, shielding the succulent zone from public view like it was an illegal oil slick.
I tried to carry on an intelligent conversation. Really. But my colleague was dry as parchment, I was a runny mess, and our dialogue went something like this:
Him: “Tell me about your work.”
Me: “Well, it’s um, largely about, um, women’s reproductive health. And bodies. A lot of stuff on bodies.”
Him: “Sounds interesting. What are you working on now?”
Me: “A project on breastfeeding and toxins, and, um, something on health and national security, and uh, I think I’ll move in the direction of sterilization.”
Him: “Are you using any historical material?”
Me: “Sort of. Mostly I’m interested in irony.”
You get the idea. Even my words were opaque.
Despite the challenges of milk-stained clothes, a chronic yeasty odor wafting from my body, and awkward social encounters, I grew to cherish the profound intimacy fostered by breastfeeding. I delighted in the close physical connection to each of my babies. Breastfeeding was such an intense need-based relationship, equal parts love and survival in the animal kingdom. With my daughters tethered to my breasts I felt like part of a primal dyad, a lioness feeding her cubs on the African savannah.
Whether I nursed many times a day, as during the first few months of their lives, or only two or three times a day as in the later months, breastfeeding opened a magical portal to a place prior to and outside of my normal everyday experiences. Instead of a busy twenty-first century world of telephones, computers, televisions, and airplanes, I was transported through nursing to someplace quieter, more pastoral. With Mason and Delaney cradled against me, I could close my eyes and be anywhere in time, linked to the millions of women across history and geography who similarly nourished their offspring.
I had never been so aware of another being’s reliance on me not just to eat, but more importantly, to live. Other people have needed me, sure, but I have never experienced myself as so essential. I was not just an individual, nor merely a member of my family or community. I felt, for the first time in my life, like a member of a species, a product not just of society and culture but also of natural history, genetics, and evolution.
And no physical experience, not even sex, has ever felt quite like breastfeeding. No lover has appreciated my body as my daughters have, as if his very existence depended on draining my body of its last drop of vital fluids. And while all my lovers have eyed and fondled my boobs with unabashed lust, not a one has whimpered and pawed the air in frantic desperation to have my nipples in his mouth.
Feeding my daughters, I had the sensation that my body was utterly, pristinely right for the job. My breasts produced the kind and quantity of milk that each child needed, when she needed it. I was a living, breathing, meticulously calibrated laboratory for human milk production. Breastfeeding, it seemed, was the ideal bodily arrangement of child to mother, mouth on nipple in a vital consumption of fluids.
The sublime intimacy of breastfeeding made me proprietary about my daughters and my milk. Mason refused to take a bottle from me or anyone else, and thus subsisted only on breast milk for a full five months. I complained publicly and repeatedly about this, but secretly I relished being the singular person in the whole wide world capable of feeding her. She may have been a visual clone of her father, but here was evidence that she truly was my baby.
The female of the species, indeed.
Working Notes
Since the birth of my oldest daughter in 2001, I have been writing a sociological memoir, from which this essay is derived. The book is tentatively entitled True Confessions of Bambi’s Mom: Essays on Trauma, Hope, and Species Survival. It explores my sexual and reproductive experiences through the lens of family trauma, including mental illness, and wrestles with some of the complexities and ambiguities of being a contemporary feminist, scholar, and mother. My passion for the work of Terry Tempest Williams, Dorothy Allison, Sandra Steingraber, Barbara Kingsolver, June Jordan, and other remarkable women who have chronicled their embodied experiences in beautiful prose shapes my creative writing. They inspire, and I aspire.
About the Author
Monica Casper is a feminist sociologist who studies the politics of human reproduction. She is originally from Chicago, lived on the West Coast for more than a decade, and is in the process of moving to Phoenix, where she will be Director of Humanities, Arts, and Cultural Studies at Arizona State University's New College. Monica is author of The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery and numerous articles, and editor of Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life. She is a busy mom to two young daughters, 6 and 4. When she is not teaching, she enjoys reading fiction, writing just about anything, gardening, hanging out with her cool women friends, and hiking with her Australian Shepherd, Bella.
