My Bovine Adventures

Lactation Studies

The thing about children is they make you yearn for freedom. When my son was a tiny baby, all I wanted to do was detach him from my preemie-grade-high- calorie milk producing breasts and get back to work. I dreamt about day care and carefree lunches at the office cafeteria followed by long, relaxing walks.
I had read somewhere that when you have a preemie, the body automatically recognizes the need for calorie dense nutrients and coaxes your body to do the needful. I haven’t verified the authenticity of this information but it is a comforting thought. I couldn’t nurse my son when he was born, he was too tiny and his lungs were too weak to take the strain of sucking. I did not take to the breast pump and an elderly, highly qualified lactation consultant showed me how to express breast milk by hand. She also told my husband to take a video of the process.... he ran straight out of the door. So I hand expressed with a vengeance while my son lay in the NICU trying to get stronger with the white gold I provided. I threw myself into researching how to create the best quality milk. Methi seeds were soaked overnight and swallowed, garlic was thrown into hot milk and also swallowed (yuck, yuck, yuck). I bought measuring cylinders and checked how much milk I produced (it is true, you produce very little when you haven’t slept). It was a big family effort. My mother- in-law ensured we had freshly sterilized steel dabbas to act as suitable receptacles, the dabbas had time stamps and were placed reverentially in the refrigerator. The husband would rush to the NICU at 5 am, carefully holding my latest secretions thus earning the moniker “Milk Man” from the nurses in the NICU:-). I continued the process once my son came home weighing a whopping 1.2 kilos.

1.2 kilos!

And then I developed a nipple infection-all that hand expression had finally taken a toll. The lactation consultant was consulted again and she deemed him strong enough to suck. Naturally she asked my husband to take another video of “how to get the baby to latch on”.:-)
Now that I am confronted by a belligerent, hormonal, slightly pimply 14 year old who routinely yells “I hate you” and “I love you” in the same breath, I yearn for the time where the only thing I had to do was get my breasts to cooperate.

This was written when the brilliant

Natasha Badhwar

and

Raju Tai

gave us the prompt “The thing about children is” during one of the

Ochre Sky Stories

sessions.