the columbia review
In the Land of Milk and Honey Angie Romines
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n the first photo we took as a family of four, we are gathered on the red, microfiber couch in our living room, having just hosted my family for a 4th of July cookout. My husband is holding our youngest son, just over two months old, socks on his hands because he can’t be trusted to not claw his own face off, (survival of the fittest, my ass). My older son, barely two-years-old, stands in front of me with a sweet grin on his face. I sit on the couch just behind my son, head thrown back, eyes squinted closed, mouth open in midhowl. My toddler had accidentally head-butted me in the chest, where the infection had been building all day. We retook the photo, and I look happy and healthy. But minutes later, my family said their goodbyes a little earlier than planned, as I lay on that same spot on the couch. The fancy thermometer we’d bought for the kids scanned my forehead. 103.9. Too late for anywhere but the ER, so I let the infection burn inside of me until tomorrow. And I kept pumping. I strapped myself into the machine, whimpering. I counted to three so many times, my thumb hovering above the “on” switch. “You have to do this,” I chanted to myself. “There is no other choice but this,” I whisper-lied through gritted teeth as I pushed down on the button.
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—— I never expected to have trouble breastfeeding, so of course, my first son wouldn’t latch. As we laid together in my hospital bed, I kept chucking my nipple in the general direction of my tiny son’s mouth, but nothing. “Try making a C-shape,” said one nurse, pinching my breast until it was practically inverted. My milk hadn’t come in yet, just colostrum, so I had no idea how much more painful her maneuvering would’ve been if my ducts had been heavy with milk. “Try a football hold,” said another nurse, rolling my nipple in between her fingers, as if that were a normal thing to do to a stranger. “Do the booby dance,” said my favorite nurse, the night nurse. “Shake those boobies up and down. There you go, you’ve got it. C’mon, Dad, you can do the booby dance, too. Shake that milk on down. All that good milk for baby.” “But he won’t latch,” I said, shaking my boobs in tandem with the nurse. “I’m into this dance, though.” “Yeah, you are,” said the nurse as she switched from the booby dance to raising the roof. “You can pump, sweetie. He’ll still get that good breastmilk. Let