A Bottle Filled With Love
POV: You're a breast cancer survivor and it's World Breastfeeding Awareness Week
I remember, only once, losing my cool with a medical worker. It was just before my double mastectomy, when I was sent to nuclear medicine for an injection of radioactive dye in each nipple. The injection was painful, but I do not remember the sting of the dye quite as vividly as the searing rage I felt when asked a routine question by the nurse, “Are you breastfeeding?” I had no children and had been told that my chances of conceiving would be low after chemotherapy. Of course I was not breastfeeding… nor would I ever be able to. The nurse was just doing her job, but I was swallowed up in the loss and angry at the world and my situation.
Seven years later, carrying a cabbage-sized, somersaulting baby in a body I once thought had closed its doors to this—now entering my third trimester—I’ve allowed the joy of this season to wash over any lingering ill feelings. I am so incredibly beyond happy to be pregnant with our little buddy. Little else matters. Yet, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that there is still a quiet holdout in me buried somewhere where a hope used to exist.
An aroma of memory takes me back to the in-home infant daycare my mother used to run all throughout my childhood, adolescence and young adult life, takes me back to my seasons of nannying in my early twenties. I sat beside countless mothers as they nursed before and after work, at drop off and pick up, learning how it’s done and always thinking someday it would be me. I helped friends get their babies to latch. I mixed what was probably thousands of bottles, thawing frozen pouches, gently heating mother’s milk in water till it was body temperature warm. The smell of a nursed baby is scorched into my memory.
Maybe it is just part of the process, but I struggled to put together my registry, caught up in a sort of decision fatigue. What bottle is best? What nipples should we use? What formula should we feed our baby? I’ve never given any of those questions much thought until now. I am so excited to get to make these choices, excited to resist the tides of avoidance that might somehow still arise.
The confrontations of breastfeeding have been pressed against my calluses: when my doctor accidentally mentions lactation classes and I have to remind him that I simply cannot breastfeed; when I come across the best bottle choices for breastfed babies; when I am served ads for nursing bras and breast pumps and silver nipple shields; when I see that it is World Breastfeeding Awareness Week; when I am reminded again and again by a society that doesn’t often see women like me, that— “breast is best!” No, not for me, not for my baby. For him, a bottle filled with love is more than perfect.
I have been excited to discover options to access and integrate breast milk that I never thought would be available or possible. I was delighted to learn that there are emerging options to access freeze-dried human milk—a dream of a discovery that went straight onto my registry. I burst into tears when a person dear to me sent me a message offering to continue pumping so she could share her own milk with us. What an unimaginably generous gift. My heart, engorged.
Nerves severed years ago seem to awaken just enough to reach for a baby they know is coming. The ghosts of my breasts ache with phantom pain as whatever residual cells live there grow, activated by pregnancy and reality. It is an astonishing, tender sensation… my hormones firing signals to tissue that is no longer there, a physical body trying desperately to carry out a promise it cannot keep. But my heart is strong. I am a cook. I am a nurturer. I provide nourishment. It’s what I do. This is the prep work, the mise en place. This kid will eat exceptionally well, of that I have no doubt. And maybe my hope was never lost at all, and he’ll even get himself some magical amount of breast milk… His first tastes of life, learning to share our love of gathering around the community table.