I went to a baby shower for a friend who had told me, shortly after she’d become pregnant, that I had inspired her to become a mother. Looking back, I’ll guess that that inspiration occurred on the day my friend and I sat with my five-month-old infant on a high floor of the Washington National Cathedral, in a café in a turret. It was a sunny day. Songs sung by choirs of little angel-children echoed around the old stone walls. Candles burned. My friend, who was several years older than me, stared and smiled at my baby, and occasionally stroked her rosy cheeks, which made her coo and grin. What was it like to be an older mother, my friend asked me, since I was thirty-nine by then. I didn’t know how to answer that question exactly, given that the baby she was adoring was my second child. My first, also a girl, had been born six years prior. For all the obvious reasons, I was nothing like what I’d been before motherhood. No mother is—which is what I think I said for an answer. And, certainly, the mother of two is a different animal from a late-starter mother of one.
I do remember, though, that I had morphed into a calmer creature since the birth of this second baby and was quite conscious that, on that day at least, I was making one of the hardest jobs in the world look fairly easy. This second baby was an expert nurser who latched on like a calf guzzling its milk. She’d fill her tank and fall asleep, which meant I slept, which meant I wasn’t the sleep-deprived sloth I’d been with my first baby, whose tiny rosebud of a mouth had made nursing immensely difficult; and I couldn’t seem to help her. When nursing doesn’t go well, your breasts harden like bowling balls that have to be soaked and covered in cabbage leaves while you hang them (your breasts!) toward the ground in a downward dog yoga position. At least that’s what my midwives had told me to do, promising this would decrease pain and swelling. Intent on not giving up, I eventually turned to pumping milk to keep it flowing. This was easier than the cabbage patch routine. The little milk bottles filled up as though with liquid gold.
Now, eight months since our afternoon at the cathedral, my friend was hugely pregnant. It was time for her baby shower, that hot summer, at the house of another of her friends: the Hostess, a childless woman who lived in a cozy brick colonial. Hostess wore an expensive fitted skirt of some small plaid or herringbone variation and a button-down silk blouse. In fact, most of the women at the party appeared outfitted in slick designer ensembles and high heels that tapped the wood floors like tiny hooves. I have to admit I envied Hostess’s décor: her plush furniture, gold-framed paintings and antique Persian rugs. Fine China and crystal were impeccably arranged on the Rococo dining table. Hostess’s hair was coiffed into a meant-to-look-effortless-but-took-effort-to-achieve bun at just the right spot on the back of her head, something I’d tried many times unsuccessfully to accomplish, just as I’d tried to wear fancy, fitted skirts that, over the years, I never could endure. I’d worn my most expensive pants to this party, which were some version of baggy. My turquoise necklace peeked out from under my hair that looked windswept in a long, layered shag along my neck and shoulders. I guess now I shouldn’t have worn my black, chunky-soled, motorcycle-boots that caused Hostess, while shaking hands with me when we met, to raise her eyebrows and widen her eyes.
I filled my China plate with upscale finger foods and poured frothy, pink punch into my crystal glass, hoping that, soon, a speech I’d have to pay attention to would begin and save me from having to make conversation with absolutely no one I knew. Finally, a baby-shower-game started. We were to tell a story about the soon-to-be mother: betray her secrets; divulge her late nights out; something snarky about her husband. Playing this game reminded me of being in high school, which now that I think of it might be an appropriate analogy regarding the culture of mothers of young children. A good many of us give birth and, before long, find ourselves trapped in a certain state of wildness—or wilderness—we haven’t felt since we were teenagers reeling in fluctuating hormones, isolation, identity issues, and the demanding needs of bodies.
At some point, thankfully, it was time to open gifts. Aha, a breast pump! exclaimed my friend, slowly ripping the shiny wrapping paper. A pump, of course, had saved me until, finally, the third lactation consultant I’d found actually knew what she was doing and taught my first daughter (and me) how to correctly position for a strong “latch on.” Having become an expert in her own time, my first baby nursed until she was a toddler. And I still was nursing my thirteen-month-old—the baby who was the reason I got invited to this party of elegant gazelles to begin with, this party where I was starting to feel like some black bear sow whose cubs climb all over her and nurse for two years, or an orangutan who goes even longer, swinging through the forest of motherhood as best she can. A few women spoke up before me: I just hate pumping at the office . . . I know, the bathroom is so smelly.
In what would later prove to have been a bad idea, I blurted out, with perhaps a little too much enthusiasm, that I loved the milk in the bottles when they were full, when the milk . . . separates into the thinner, watery milk for hydration, and the fattier, thicker milk that’s a nutrient-rich chaser with ingredients that boost immunity and brain development. It looks like an ice-cream float, or that British cream we slather on scones!
Ten seconds of silence followed. A few gazelles scrunched their faces and groaned, TMI, TMI. Whether they may have felt the same as me but couldn’t agree out loud that making milk was a woman’s superpower, I’ll never know. What I knew was that despite my moto-boots, shag haircut and baggy pants, whipping up milk was one thing I did right.