What Was I Made For?

A song for my tits.

(Please note, I'll be waxing rhapsodic about nursing in this letter - not in a "breast is best" way, just in a "I loved doing this thing and now it is over" way. If that's not for you, I understand!)

A fun fact about me: for a good two-ish years of high school, I answered primarily to the name "Jugs."

This nickname was "gifted" to me by a "friend." Like most high school nicknames, it was alternately thrilling and humiliating. It meant I was known, even if only for one part of me, less a whole human than a smutty Picasso. It turned my body from a punchline into...well, another punchline, albeit a sexier one. It meant I was desirable (in theory, less in practice), which, as a high school girl in the late 90s/early 00s, was really the only currency we believed we had.

Either way, it was accurate. I was skinny with big tits (in a freakish way, a "that shouldn't be possible re: physics" way). Boys used to pretend to want to talk to me just so they could stare down my shirt. I didn't know what to do about it. I was 15. My body was a mystery. My body is still a mystery! Maybe if I had been an athlete I would have understood my body as something strong and capable, but again—I was a high school girl in the late 90s, so my understanding of my physical abilities was defined by the misogynistic thick-necked P.E. teachers who told me I was inept because I couldn't run a sub-7 mile and then encouraged other kids to throw balls at my head.

(Guys, the late 90s were a horrible time to be a teenager!!!!)

I came into my body in college, in large part because of theatre. When acting, your body does not belong to you. It belongs to the role, to the emotion, to the scene (the drama!). It belongs to the audience. This was almost unbearably freeing. Acting is the best I've ever felt about myself, because I was not myself. It's an excuse to be looked at without truly being looked at, if that makes sense. I became a shiny, golden creature on that stage. I loved every minute of it.

(To be clear, I wasn't a great physical actor. After a particularly dispiriting audition, one of my professors threw up his hands and said, "I can do nothing with you. You are dead below the waist.")

Everyone goes through some iteration of this process of becoming physically aware. Something I have found fascinating about having kids is discovering how little physical autonomy they have. There is a movement that argues babies should have ownership over their bodies (the same movement that says cribs are essentially little prisons and by making kids sleep in them we are teaching them to submit to incarceration) and—how do I put this? I think this is garbage. I own every sweaty, smelly, secret inch of my babies. I will nuzzle their armpits and pick their noses and eat their little toes and I will have to be forcibly made to stop. And I will, of course. There was a day that I too, ungrateful wretch that I am, told my own mother to stop touching me. There was a day I said my body is mine, now, to do whatever damage I wish to and with it.

So having a body at all is an act of reclamation, is what I'm saying. Our bodies are never completely our own, but the process of growing up is one of figuring out how to inhabit them with the least amount of despair and wreckage. In my 20s, living in Brooklyn, I spent a lot of time figuring out which parts were mine, which parts I wanted to share, and how to use my body to get what I wanted, which at that time was to contort myself into whatever shape necessary to make the death-defying leap from male attention to sex to love.

As it turned out, the only thing that delivered me from my obsession with my body was nursing.

Nursing a baby made my breasts make sense. Here was why they were so comical, so obvious, so reckless! Outta my way, Jugs has a baby to feed!

some snapshots of nursing, including my first round of mastitis (genuinely thought i was dying) and a wee leak

Both of my girls latched eagerly and easily, although I had a fierce oversupply, a propensity for clogged ducts, and 7 rounds of mastitis. Neither liked bottles—Mira refused them entirely—and with Lily, I experienced pumping-specific D-MER, caught in the grip of existential despair. The pump only served to highlight the distance between me and the baby. When Lily was hospitalized for RSV at two months, she wasn't allowed to eat until she could breathe again, so I sat in a hospital closet and pumped milk into bags and listened to machines beeping in complex patterns that told me how close my kid was to death. The pump was my enemy, so I tethered myself to those babies and only let myself off the leash to pee every now and then.

Yes, modern breastfeeding is a minefield and a scam and criminally unfair on working and under-resourced women, but quieting my screaming baby by shoving my tit in her mouth is the closest I have ever come to understanding my purpose on earth. Watching their tiny guppy lips search and latch and their dumb chubby hands knead and pat and the sweet, simple contentment of it all—yes, this, this my body could do. This I could do forever.

I nursed Mira for 15 months until she self-weaned (the nerve!), and I nursed Lily until just a few days ago. I did not intend to nurse this long; I would have kept doing it as long as they allowed. But Lily is two-and-a-half and for the last few months has nursed only at bedtime and lately she pulls off and says petulantly, "Your milks is dry." (She refers to my boobs as "milks," as in, "You have two milks! One, two!" Or, when she recently saw me in a pink bra, "Your milks is pink!") She has stopped asking and even when I sort of sidle up to her topless, hopeful, she gives me this look like, Don't you have something better to do?

Do I?

Pregnancy and childbirth and early motherhood and nursing are acts of self-annihilation. The self becomes animal, the body primitive and intentional. I experienced this transition with dizzying relief. Finally, finally, my body cohered into something of which I could be proud.

And now it is over.

“Here’s how to get your body back!” all the magazines crow.

But what if I don’t want it?

A few weeks ago I went to mid-coast Maine with my girlfriends. We spent one afternoon in a cedar sauna next to a pond that had been cleared of ice for cold plunging. 90 minutes transitioning from a cocoon of heat into the thick, inky cold and back again. I sat among them, six naked, spectacular women in our early 40s, and there was a kind of relief in realizing my body was no more special or un-special than theirs. My tits are soft and saggy and the rest of my body made wide by age and children. There is no longer anything to distinguish me. I am free.

There are women who take up power lifting, women who take up young lovers. Women who take up cold-water swimming or nude modeling. There’s life in me yet, I’m sure, though I’m not sure what to do with it. My milk is dry. My body is mine again.

What am I going to do with it now?