Way back, when baby-child was just an extraneous blob newly slipped from my body (so new, in fact, she was just named baby-child) I had cracked nipples that I thought would murder me with spikes of just-over-the-top pain every evening. Thanks to an infamous man named Bob Rae (or maybe no thanks to him, I just like to mention him to see if any of my readership remembers their Ontario politics) we have publicly funded midwives here, and that seems to translate into publicly funded breast pumps of great, quiet, streamlined, efficient, almost-painfree milk extraction. So, my ever-patient midwife visited twice that day, the second time to bring me the black mantra-hushing tube-rich contraption. And out came some lovely colostrum that made it seem as if I had spent the previous weeks nourishing myself on fresh spring grass (you know, the proper colour like proper cow’s milk should be).

Then things got better and it sat very deep and very far in the vast tundra of my mother’s deep freezer. Which is even on another floor of the house, so definitely out if sight and mind.

And then since we are, swooping off, trudging South, bungling our way into the pitch-blackness of here, just start this family stuff all over again somewhere new, it won’t be so complicated, really - since all of this - I removed it, broke it into precious pale watery-sun chunks and offered it up to my newly crab-crawling breast-milk savvy baby-thing.

And breathed a sigh of. . . relief? contentment? remembrance? sheer emotional exhaustion?

as she loved on it with all the fervour of her little clutched hands and cold lips

mmmmm mamasicle . . . . 

This entry was posted on Monday, July 7th, 2008 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.