My daughter walks around her apartment shirtless. Her breasts are impressive given the tradition of small-breasted women in our family. Her breasts also happen to be raw-nippled and heavy with milk, the whole package exposed to the air, to the uncurtained, second-floor windows daring anyone to gawk, and to me who would consider covered-up breasts in such circumstances silly.
Years before when I was a nursing mother, I would sometimes glimpse my small breasts, suddenly inflated to a pleasing size, in the bathroom mirror. Working breasts, streaked with blue veins, nipples as spigots. It was their utility that mattered.
In these weeks after giving birth, my daughter finds it useless to wear a shirt since her breasts are in constant use, manufacturing and dispensing milk either directly into her baby’s mouth or into bottles for later use. She is a milk maker, efficient and over-achieving, her nipples enthusiastically spilling drops even when there is no baby or bottle attached. She is a sentient, anticipatory machine that is at times connected to another machine—an electric double- breast pump that consists of funnels fitted over each nipple that in turn screw onto a collection bottle all joined by tubing that emanates from a small motor encased in a pretty, plastic oval. When switched on, the machine whispers a chugging sound as milk squirts into each bottle. It’s surprisingly soothing in its mini-industrial way.
Before the month is out, the electric pump breaks down as if exhausted from the demand, so my daughter brings out the back-up manual pump, which means milking one breast at a time. She squeezes and releases the lever, its click-click rhythm manually dependent. Meanwhile, the umpumped breast is fitted with a flanged silicone beaker for passive collection of the dripping that comes in Pavlovian response to the baby’s sucking at the opposite breast. More than once, after my daughter removes the beaker to rest it temporarily on the chairside table, her sleep-deprived body sends an errant elbow or hand to knock it over. There is every reason to cry over spilt milk. But we are too tired and only watch as the cat slinks over for a taste.
*
There is no male in this tableau. In this one-bedroom apartment above a nail and facial salon in a mixed-income Upper West Side neighborhood, I am a temporary resident, having flown from the opposite coast to witness the birth and participate in the care of my granddaughter. In this space, we are mother, daughter, daughter’s daughter, and female feline. We are the tiniest of villages.
*
When I arrived in New York at the end of June, my daughter and I had barely spoken since January. Silence is our non-aggression pact, a lull from the arguments that have no end, and begin in the misfire or misdirected fire or bonfire of words. Which of us had the last word? Who is the first to speak again? I’m too old to keep score, weary of the seesaw. One day we start talking again. Because we have to. And we act as if nothing has happened. As if our tongues had just taken a vacation from speech—but only with each other. We both knew I would come. Who else could it have been in the labor room, during the delivery, and for weeks after? Only me. Her mother.
*
In M’s first days, when we are all still in the hospital, despite her instinctual homing in on the nipple, her latch is not deep. The lactation consultant points out the tissue connecting the underside of M’s tongue to the floor of her mouth—a tongue-tie. She shows also how compressing the breast tissue at an angle helps direct the whole nipple into the baby’s mouth and facilitates the milk flow. Yes, my daughter and I nod, hoping the other is alert enough to pay attention.
The first night home from the hospital, my daughter settles in her chair by the window that overlooks Broadway, where the blue neon of the dive bar across the street winks, the traffic signal blinks down the seconds for pedestrians, absent at this hour, and the occasional delivery bicycle shoots down the nearly carless street—soundless backdrop to our quiet proceedings. M bobs at my daughter’s breast, trying to aim her mouth at the nipple and landing imperfectly at the tip, missing the aureole. Without asking permission, I squeeze my daughter’s breast, remembering the sure fingers of the lactation consultant, who herself had asked permission. My daughter doesn’t flinch.
When my daughter was in labor, I asked, “Would you like me to massage your scalp? Would it help if I massaged your feet?”
But in this circumstance, it seems a natural thing for me, without shyness or embarrassment or sense of intrusion, to put my hand on her breast, not in the clinical way of a doctor or lactation consultant, but in the way of a mother, which we both are now—extensions of one another.
*
It seems the tongue-tie is hindering M’s ability to suck with utmost pull at both bottle and breast. It could also affect her speech acquisition later we are told, so we take her to a pediatric ENT. He is a kind, grandfatherly man with a young assistant lacking in grace. “I can take care of that now,” the doctor says, holding up a tiny pair of very sharp scissors. My daughter cradles M, and the graceless assistant places his hands on either side of her delicate head. The snip is quick and so is M’s full-throated protest at this trespass. The grandfatherly doctor and his assistant leave the room so my daughter can soothe M with her breast and allow her to try out her newly untied tongue. For unfettered sucking and, later, agility in talking. And maybe much later, in talking back.
*
In the first two weeks, I am up when my daughter is for M’s night feedings. Sometimes when M doesn’t fall back asleep right away, I take her in my arms and urge my daughter to bed. I sit in the yellow chair that is not a rocker, so I rock my body to lull M’s eyes closed as I look out the window and wonder who else in those other windows in the buildings all around us is awake at this dark hour with a tiny new human in their midst. Who else knows this cocoon of loneliness and love?
*
It’s been well over thirty years since I tended to a newborn of my own, so my daughter and I learn things together. How to avoid and relieve gas in babies. How to suction the milk snot from a baby’s nose when her breathing is hindered. Crises that always seem to happen in the middle of the night when the darkness makes them more alarming. It’s a relief to resolve them together. In the presence of the other, we both remain calm.
*
In the third week, my daughter and M arrive at some semblance of a pattern and I no longer get up with them for night feedings. I am the mother’s mother, a stratum removed from the baby. I take my cues from my daughter who is learning her daughter’s cues. We’re part of the line of mothers and daughters and mothers, in which invariably a cue or two or more will be missed along the way.
*
In the fourth week, my daughter is shirtless less often. But her tops are constructed for easy access to the breast for M. “How are your nipples?” I ask. It’s a question as breezy and matter of fact as the weather.
The days can still be exhausting and sometimes all four of us—mother, daughter, daughter’s daughter, and cat—find ourselves in various slumped positions on the couch in a communal nap, M draped over my daughter’s milk- plumped breasts or my unendowed chest.
*
In the five weeks that I have been with my daughter in her one-bedroom apartment with the New York summer’s breath hot and humid at the windows, the prickliness we have provoked in one another over the years, the perceived slights, the catalog of mother-daughter misapprehensions—all of it has been absent. Sublimated to the daily focus on a newborn? Yes, of course. Discarded permanently? Unlikely.
They will surface again, all the old hurts and blurts.
Each day, the intimacy of those weeks—when two women fretted and marveled together over a new baby who is a bit of each of them—is more deeply cocooned in some dreamy past.
Donna Miscolta’s third book of fiction Living Color: Angie Rubio Stories was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. It was named to the 2020 Latino Books of the Year list by the Las Comadres and Friends National Latino Book Club. It won the Next Generation Indie Book Award for Multicultural Fiction and an International Latino Book Award Gold Medal for Best Collection of Short Stories. It was also a finalist for the American Fiction Award and the Nancy Pearl Award. Her previous book Hola and Goodbye: Una Familia in Stories won the Doris Bakwin Award for Writing by a Woman, an Independent Publishers award for Best Regional Fiction, and an International Latino Book Award for Best Latino Focused Fiction. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including the recent What’s Next: Short Fiction in Times of Change. A recording of her work is now part of the Library of Congress Palabra Archive. She blogs monthly at donnamiscolta.com.
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