Topoi
of the breast: soft, round, like landscape, like hills
and valleys, not hard, stony, but tender, warm, place of giving,
of comfort, of fullness, of milk. Mother-of-milk. Large and wet,
delicious. Baby loves Mama’s warm and sweet milk, rich droplets
on tiny tongue, this first golden food, gurgling down into the warm
area somewhere near the heart where it hurts when empty and where
the rich milk flows, filling until sleepy, satiated. The smell of
milk everywhere, on my clothes, on my baby’s clothes. Like
an untamed perfume that follows me through the years, that buttermilk
smell still blossoms in the air sometimes. I’m not sure what
causes the sudden connection— an old loose t-shirt, my still
comfortable black nursing bra amongst my lingerie— but then
my body recalls ‘let down,’ the milk filling the buds
in the breasts, waiting for the tiny mouth to latch on, the bright
eyes, little hands curling on the breast, or holding onto Mommy’s
finger, her welcoming hand. At such moments I almost expect to find
my top soaking with breast milk in the remembering: the body has
a way of never forgetting its experiences.
Breastfeeding
was not easy at first, which, with both my babies, was painful,
with cracked nipples when the colostrum receded for the milk to
come in, and each time engorged, which only hot bathtubs soothed
when I put my swollen breasts in, swaying them in the steamy water,
but easy after. The crying, and the offer of the nipple, and the
sucking, then the flow of milk, warmth, nourishment flowing from
my body without my willing it, struggling to achieve it, simple
comfort from my body, from the maternal body. Me but not-me. Something
I did, breastfeed on demand, but beyond me, not of my ego. Something
I gave, but didn’t consciously create, that flowed through
me, the one to the other, my body feeding my baby’s body,
without effort, simple act of latching on, the comfort of milk,
these waves flowing in my body, soothing my heart too.
I learnt
to live this simplicity. Women all over the world breastfeed for
up to four years. I would breastfeed on demand, whenever the baby
needed. I didn’t know the dissension this decision would create
with my mother, my mother-in-law, and my husband, who actually brought
home a box of formula once. They all thought me indulgent and excessive
(even though I was breastfed for 8 months, it was via a strict schedule).
Yet here
was another way of knowing, the cradle of another rhythm. I was
35 when my first child was born. I had spent the previous ten to
fifteen years reading three to seven books a week. Naive mother
that I was, I thought I could continue my voracious habit while
the little nipper sucked happily away. At first, after the engorgement
passed, and the nipples healed, he would lose his grip often enough
for me to give up my book and help him through. Then the love dance
took over. The touching of hands, fingers, singing to him, caressing
his tiny curve of body, his letting go of the milky nipple to gaze
into my eyes and croon a baby song, just being in that flow, often
silent in the richness of it, became the norm as the books were
abandoned, and increasingly suffering from sleep deprivation as
he woke up regularly all night, every night, I was too tired to
follow even the pattern of a paragraph.
Sometimes
I did mind this abrupt change in my habits. Often I felt intellectually
starved. I missed university life, was distraught about not finishing
a thesis. When he began crawling he explored everything, including
my books and their rip-able pages. We could not go into my book-lined
study, which sat as an unused room in the house. He was in his second
year before I could consider reading, which was now on the subject
of babies and toddlers. And then, at 38, my daughter was born, and
so the process began all over again. There is enough of a belief
in Zen Buddhism in me for me to embrace the idea that every experience,
no matter how humble, contains a way to learn spiritually, has its
own message of enlightenment.
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.
I
won’t say that I am not embarrassed talking about being a
stay-at-home mother,
or that I didn’t suffer the effacement, the feminine mystique,
of those who— defined by the work they do, its lack of income
and status— fall outside of the dominant mode of subjectivity
in our culture. I feel especially awkward when I hear of the deep
pain of women who struggled with the separation issues of combining
mothering and work outside the home. One ponders, though, if one
could take one’s babies and toddlers to work or to a daycare
at work, if this was the norm, how different it could be for women
who have children. Be that as it may, there are many sides to the
mother story that each of us weaves out of our own experiences and
which we have just begun in our many voices to tell. There should
be room also for mine.
As I tell
my story, I wonder what this intensive, embodied learning meant?
The route, its rhythms, the way it’s continued its strange
melodies, the places it took me, were unexpected. In the years since
I have many times said that breastfeeding taught me how to meditate.
If the male creator god arrogated the life-giving, reproductive
powers of the female, and of the goddess behind her, then I would
also posit a connection between breastfeeding and the art of meditation.
Having since become a yoga teacher, and having spent many hours
chanting mantras and meditating mainly with other women, I would
say not only that I learnt to find the stillness within, but that
the predominant metaphor for my particular form of spiritual expression,
to turn to another side of this, is that of maternal love, of the
milk of mother love. Mothering took me to the Adi Shakti of the
yoga tradition I studied. She is an incarnation of the Divine Mother,
who has become my particular tutelary spirit, who I turn to for
unconditional acceptance, nourishment, comfort, who I ask to fill
me with trust and strong love in the middle of the night when I
cannot sleep, who I turn to for help when my children are throwing
tantrums, or I am upset. Divine Mother has become my main goddess
energy. While many goddesses come to mind, such as the Babylonian
Ishtar, Greek Gaia and Hera, Christian Mary, Japanese Amaterasu,
Chinese Kwan Yin, Nordic Freya, Indian Kali Ma, as well as present
day Divine Mother incarnations in India, like the Gurus Karunamayi
and Mother Meera, it is Isis, great goddess of ancient Egypt and
of magic, of women in childbirth, of women suckling their young,
of many groups of pagan, Wiccan women throughout the millennia,
who I feel closest to. In my practice as a witch, a priestess, when
I set up a sacred circle and light the votive candles and offer
incantations and prayers to the forces that be, it is always Divine
Mother whom I ultimately call upon, whose unconditional love and
wisdom I ask to channel. What I am exploring through my life experience,
the route I have chosen in a female incarnated form, in this inscribed
and gendered body, is, then, inclusive of earth-based religions,
which are important in their own right, but also moves towards an
embodied spirituality.
It is in
my mothering experiences that I have found unexpected gifts. These
gifts were contained in what flowed through me, somehow the strength
and forbearance gained from offering comfort. Perhaps it was the
self-sacrifice of my dominant self for an underlying maternal consciousness
that indicated an unconditional love and infinite compassion for
the other are possible modes not only of consciousness, but of being—
on good days at least. I know that there are many ways of coming
to this knowledge, that this is only the particular path I took
to interweave body, mind, and soul, to integrally combine multiple
aspects of my/self in a multiple unity that, even in its discontinuous
segments, has a wholeness that is satisfying, is inwardly nourishing.
I think it’s about having the courage to be, in all your moments,
in all the places and people you find yourself in and with, in all
your activities, in all your giving to the world through whatever
you do, and anyway you get to that is fine, is good. Let me close
with an image of the ancient Egyptian goddess, Hathor, the ‘mother
of light,’ whose milk, flowing from her abundant breasts,
creates the stars of the Milky Way, among whom we are nestled on
our creative, living planet of diversity... let the bright blue-green
pearl of our home in the universe rest gently in your consciousness...
in you, gently with sweet warmth and nourishment...
mmo : april 2004
This essay was
originally presented at Mothering, Religion and Spirituality, the 7th Annual Conference of the Association
for Research on Mothering, Oct. 25, 2003, at York University,
Toronto, Canada. |