When I was a little girl, I felt light, I felt free. I ran through the woods with my wild curly hair swinging around me and my conch shell tied to a leather strap from my neck. I blew it ceremoniously when I came across a sight that delighted me or when I encountered a dead animal that needed a witness to its passing. I choreographed dances and slid across the wood floors in my house. I scrunched my nose and smiled. I twinkled. [Read more…]
Before anyone, there was Mom. She breastfed me for three years. She didn’t have a book or someone guiding her. She felt motivated to breastfeed despite not having any outside information or mentors. She just felt it was right. I used to be embarrassed when she told anyone how long I asked for “night night”, but now I think, “Wow, what a gift.”
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See me at fourteen years old. I monitored every single bite of food that passed into my mouth. I ran my hands along my stomach to see how it felt to be one bite bigger. Each bite of food felt like a threat. At the end of the meal, I would turn sideways in the mirror to assess the damages. How much my hip bones protruded from my body and how much my belly caved in determined how I felt about myself. It made me feel sick to see what food did to me. Sometimes I panicked seeing my belly with a meal of food in it. Eating felt like a big mistake. [Read more…]
I couldn’t wait for milk to arrive.
The final weeks of pregnancy, I would stand in the shower or sit back in the bath squeezing around my areolas to extract a little drop of hazy white-tainted fluid. The colostrum collected like the tiniest bit of morning dew on the central disc of a daisy. It was exhilarating to see, the most exciting thing to happen to my body since puberty…without all the fear and self-consciousness and wondering, “Is this right? Is this how it’s supposed to look?” This time around it was more like, “Whoa!!! It’s working!!!” [Read more…]
“I want to take a family beach trip,” I kept telling my husband. It stood for so much more than putting my feet in a large body of water and getting a good tan. Traditions. I was desperate to start traditions. I wanted the different seasons to come with rhythms of anticipation for my son. I wanted part of our summer tradition to be piling into cars and driving to the beach with grandparents, aunts, and (someday) cousins. For my 29th birthday, my in-laws granted my wish. They were taking us to the beach. It would be our 3-month-old son’s first trip.
