milk
If the auditory world is measured not by what is said but how loud, and if time is measured in two-hour increments (give or take an hour or fifteen minutes or a minute depending on the baby’s needs), not by whether there is light in the sky, then the substance of these weeks is measured in milk and whether or not there’s enough of it. Milk.
Like kangaroo milk, mine is pink for a reason: the boy developed early on, we’ve just learned, a bad habit of pinching with his tongue instead of lapping, digging craters at the source. So if we keep going as we have, there will be no skin left. Instead, we use our bpa-free plastic bottles and I wear the sorry silicone nipple shield, the one that looks like a thimble with an orb around it. Out of it he gets such a little amount of milk that I have no idea if he’s crying because of hunger or some other need. We are so early in learning how to read one another. Crying is a language, I’m learning that. I’m sorry, boy, that milk comes out of a piece of plastic that won’t stay in place instead of skin. I cry, too.
Milk pooling, dripping, leaking, staining, spilling. Liquid gold, that’s what Steve calls it, and I measure time by how long it’s been since I’ve pumped and how long the milk has been sitting in a bottle. I measure temperature by the thermometer that tells me if it’s reached warm-enough: milk out of the body is, to me, surprisingly warm. But if the boy is crying, then, tapping my foot at the stove, room-temperature milk will do, but no colder, or okay not much colder, or okay right out of the fridge. In the cost-benefit analysis, I can’t bear his tears.
Milk coming out like a broken ATM machine. Like swiping the credit card at the grocery store and not seeing my favorite word in that moment: Approved. I am never more than an ounce ahead of his needs. I am teaching him already about not-enough.
Milk spilling. Last night, sitting in the living room with the boy, I hear the sound of something drop out of the fridge and Rosie is very sorry. I say a word like milk, in that it has four letters, then I say another. I am up every two hours in the night making up for the deficit, trying to wake before he does, to pump very quietly, to feed him — the most basic need.
If I’m not pumping I’m preparing to pump, I’m washing bottles I’m counting time, if I’m not counting time I’m feeding him quarter-teaspoonfuls out of a thimble that pinches open the wounds: fresh blood every time. If I’m not breathing yoga breaths over him as he eats through the silicone thimble and if I’m not pumping then I’m crying about milk. If I’m not crying about milk then I’m googling tongue-thrust and baby latch problems and occupational therapist and craniosacral therapy.
Last night, maybe it was the spicy seafood salad we had for lunch, the boy was inconsolable, except if he was drinking milk, from 6pm to 11pm. He pounded on my breasts which would not with the silicone thimble let him latch and if he couldn’t latch then he couldn’t get even a drop. The milk I had pumped before dinner I couldn’t use, I didn’t want to risk that he would feel sick any longer with whatever spiciness it might contain. I couldn’t dump it. Liquid gold. Dirty money. I gave it to the dogs.
