Shit on my hands

BB

Once upon a time, I wore a bra, and in that bra I housed a couple of rather magnificent mammaries. Alas, those mammaries are now little more than memories. I was warned about sleepless nights. I was warned about relationship woes. I was warned about stretchmarks, colic, mastitis, and the perils of co-sleeping. (Tick! Tick! Tick!)No one, but NO ONE, warned me that after 17 months of breastfeeding, my rack would be not a rack, but a a couple of sad, stretched empty sacs swaying forlornly in the vast, virtually unoccupied cups of my bra. No one warned me that these once powerfully potent arousers of male lust would be rendered as sexy as two dirty dish rags. Come to think of it, no one warned me adequately about the overwhelming physicality of breastfeeding. I remember  waking up on the third night of Clementine’s life, my cans quite literally staring me in the face, waving their own flag and singing their own national anthem. Monstrous, heaving, veiny things that must have weighed five kilos a piece. I was drenched head to toe in sweat, and buzzed a nurse; ‘I’m perspiring like a virgin in a brothel. Do I have mastitis?’ ‘Oh no, dear, you’ve got the milk fever’. The milk fever, as it’s so quaintly termed, kept me drenched thrice nightly for three weeks. Adding to the pervading atmosphere of wetness was my bountiful milk supply. ‘Bountiful’ might be too delicate a word. Let’s say instead that my milk was flowing at rates approximating the beer taps when last drinks were called at the Tote. Nothing could contain the flow. Breast pads were soaked in a matter of minutes. My prodigiously hungry baby tried her best to take it all in, but it seemed my body, in a rare act of charity, was trying to establish the world’s first one-woman milk bank. Every day gargantuan efforts were made to keep myself from soiling every top I put on, and to keep the dreaded mastitis at bay. The hateful lumps that formed whenever I went more than two hours without feeding my daughter were subjected to assaults from cabbage leaves, ice-packs, hot water, fennel tea ( can you actually assault anything with fennel tea? Probably not) and awkward massages. Feeding my baby became less an exercise in nourishing her infant form, more a form of reliable pain relief from the dreadful pressure in my breasts. My profiency in the dairy department was a source of much familial pride (perhaps understandable given that up this point my greatest achievement in life had been evading a beating from the notorious Ringwood girls as a loud mouthed 16 year old) I can’t pretend I didn’t find it disconcerting to have my dad proudly boasting to virtual strangers that ‘she’s got shitloads of milk! Who woulda guessed it, she’s scrawny as a rat!’, and I also can’t pretend I had anything whatsoever to do with this god-given gift of milk. I just hope that down the track some day, when my  horrified teenage daughter catches a glimpse of these sorry old udders pinned to my chest cavity, she will have the good grace to acknowledge the part her sweet little rosebud mouth played in their demise. R.I.P, heaving bosom.

BB