Listen now (2 mins) | The Birth of Insufficiency My milk came in hard and fast, my breasts ballooning into solid porn-star frankensteins, blue veins sticking out all over. I had to pump before I could nurse, because a newborn can’t latch on to a cantaloupe, however warm and milk-scented it may be. I slept on towels and woke up soaked in sour. My ducts clotted up with infection, my mind with fever. The midwives sent antibiotics and a doula, who gave me a bath and put cabbage leaves inside my bra. I listened to the bris over the baby monitor, too sick to eat the pickled fish and watch my son be cut, too sick to say a prayer for him. Years ago, now. But I am here still: monstrous and ineffectual and ill, listening to my children crying from the other room. -- Amy Isikoff Newell, July 2014
The Birth of Insufficiency
The Birth of Insufficiency
The Birth of Insufficiency
Listen now (2 mins) | The Birth of Insufficiency My milk came in hard and fast, my breasts ballooning into solid porn-star frankensteins, blue veins sticking out all over. I had to pump before I could nurse, because a newborn can’t latch on to a cantaloupe, however warm and milk-scented it may be. I slept on towels and woke up soaked in sour. My ducts clotted up with infection, my mind with fever. The midwives sent antibiotics and a doula, who gave me a bath and put cabbage leaves inside my bra. I listened to the bris over the baby monitor, too sick to eat the pickled fish and watch my son be cut, too sick to say a prayer for him. Years ago, now. But I am here still: monstrous and ineffectual and ill, listening to my children crying from the other room. -- Amy Isikoff Newell, July 2014