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
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