What
I found with breastfeeding was both a forgetting and a remembering. Had I lived in my head, even if passionately so, and now was being
taken into my heart by my children? My babies were teachers of another
kind of time: not linear, the ‘to do’ list that stretches
to infinity, but the time of the infinite, where space opens to
an oceanic vastness. Of all the years spent breastfeeding I never
wrote the flow of thoughts during those times; instead, it was like
the dream you didn’t record in the morning, murmuring of something
indefinable yet almost articulated, but gone. Only once, perhaps
a year after my daughter weaned herself, trying to put words to
the wordless, to remember where I was in those endless sessions
of breastfeeding, I wrote: “milk flowing– your tiny
body, baby smells beautiful–soft, warm, love–flows–milk
flows– love into your body–i am so tired, my body heavy
under the sheets–milk flows–drink darling–grow
strong on my love–the nite light, soft, warm, your glow...”
“It means I love you all the time” says Kyra at three
years old, when I read it to her from my journal, and whose words
I wrote next to the entry.
Writing
on the map of milk ducts, rivulets of milk, pouring not down the
mountain but to its tip, sensitive, erectile tissue of the nipple,
dark red, the multiple streams of white milk flowing through my
breast.
Metamorphosis
from blood to milk... the woman-becoming food... starlight pouring
into the baby’s body...
What was
I learning? Endless hours sitting while my babies contentedly suckled.
Hours in which I could think, theorize experience, gather ideas
together. Pretty soon I tired of considering all the books I had
read, thought all the thoughts I had to think on everything in my
life experience up to then. Boredom sometimes set in. Endless hours,
rocking, holding my bundles of love, humming, singing lullabies,
switching breasts, maybe 40 or 45 minutes, or more, would pass before
my baby was finally sated. And then an hour or two later, we begin
again. Sitting, rocking, my thoughts emptying, rocking on that ocean,
itself a strength beyond endurance, something my baby and I could
each trust to offer comfort, nourishment, peace through the colicky
nights, the exhaustion of continually broken sleep, something which
carried us through, was always there, like an inherent divinity
in all the moments, a vital force of life.
When my
first child was about a year and a half, I put a one-day ad in the
paper for a nanny, and received about 200 phone calls, of whom I
interviewed about 60 women. My son, not yet weaned, during the interview
process, either clung to me, or ran, crying, into a corner of the
room each time a potential nanny attempted to connect to him. As
I listened to stories of dislocation, of leaving families in their
native countries, of their work as nannies, of the further 200 hours
of unpaid community work they were required to do in their application
for landed immigrant status, most of which was spent changing sheets,
cleaning bed pans, and scrubbing bathrooms in hospitals, of their
desperate search for work after the required two years with the
family that had sponsored them had lapsed, of their grieving for
the children whose care brought them here, I thought, angry at the
system for hired childcare help in our country, heartbroken for
these women, could I use such a woman, and further how would I justify
to myself that, somehow, I was better than she, and above the work
of child raising?
I need to
interject here and say that I am not against nannies. My life was
graced by the most beautiful, large and loving Black nanny in my
childhood in a jungle in Zambia, where I joined happily in with
her brood of children. As I struggled with the question of a nanny
for my son, though, having white South African parents, and hence
coming from a lineage of exploitation of people of colour, I also
suffered deep ethical anxieties as I struggled with the issues involved.
For many
complex and even contradictory reasons, after my savings had run
out, I decided to forgo returning to work and the privilege of being
able to hire another woman to look after my child, decided to make
the economic, social, and career sacrifices– and they were
considerable– and stay home. And why, I thought, shouldn’t
I approach this task as a feminist and try to remember the years
that are usually forgotten in the silence our culture applies to
them?
My husband
at the time did not support my decision, and my staying home was
often a point of contention. As a publisher he was able to give
me freelance editorial work, however, so I did contribute to the
family income, though I was immersed in the stay-at-home mother
culture. I consider myself a “neither/nor,” I was
not a ‘working mother,’ though I earned about the equivalent
of a receptionist salary, nor was I a true stay-at-home mother like
my friends at the time. For the most part, we were not a ‘privileged’
group in the sense that Chris Bobel talks about in The Paradox
of Natural Mothering (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
2002) but, rather, lived at subsistence level, everyone subsidizing
their housing in some fashion or other (rent-geared-to-income, boarders,
parents). Like my friends, I was barely able to stay home financially,
yet chose to anyhow.
A large
part of my rationale for remaining at home with my children was
the sense of being on an inner spiritual quest, of finding what
was of value not only in the joyful, which there was in bounty,
but in the weary, the menial, the culturally unconsidered yet enormous
work of raising children. I would never suggest that anyone else
follow this path, it was a waste of my potential in many ways, and
yet I feel I progressed spiritually during these years. My children
have not turned out any better than children who were in daycare
from four months on, or who had nannies, or babysitters. I didn’t
do it because I thought ‘the mother is best for her children,’
as is often cited in defence of mothers who stay home, but perhaps
because, coming from a difficult relationship with my own mother,
to take on the full time care of my children was a self-healing
act. Through the physically and emotionally demanding work that
young children are I learnt the song of the loving of children,
and their precious loving of me. Through the rhythm of this music,
jarring and difficult as its passages could sometimes be, mothering
my children I mothered the un-mothered in myself. I am trying now
to re-find my way back into the world, much older, perhaps no wiser,
but I want to bring the multi-faceted rhythm of what I learned of
the mother and child connection with me, to hear its strangely primal
and loving music in the background of my own consciousness at all
times. |
