The first time she leaves the house is a visit to the paediatrician who recommends a lactation consultant. We see her the same day and she manages, after using nipple shields on me and a wet face cloth on C, who is scarily sleepy, to find the latch again. I watch as C drinks and when she pops off, satisfied for the first time in a week. Her face runs with white. My milk has come in. It took five days. I had been feeling defective, my flat nipples roaring with pain and unable to meet my baby’s mouth, her gaping need. Now, oh, thank God, it’s possible.
But breastfeeding remains difficult. I have thrush, which leaves me red and raw and painful. C has a high palate and a tongue tie, so she constantly loses suction, making a sandpaper action on my nipple. Feeding is a snorting, sucking, quelching affair I fear to do in front of others. During my powerful let downs, in which a thin line of milk sprays out and beads on C’s cheek and upper lip and once went into her eye, C sometimes chokes and pops off, splattering. Or she takes short panicked breaths while frantically swallowing. It is a strange and visceral affair. There is also the matter of suddenly having a protuberance that penetrates, giving off a white substance when entering a receiver’s mouth.
Afterwards C often vomits up curdled milk in a great sprouting arch. I almost always scream when she does, then say, Sorry, sorry, and wipe the milk that’s shot out of her nose. Whenever she finishes feeding, I eye her, handling her gingerly, rubbing and patting carefully. Will she blow? She is a little bomb. Within all of this, relaxation is recommended. Breastfeeding needs surrender. For the milk to flow, you must flow. Luckily, despite the pain and problems, I seem to have a good supply, and on the way to the bathroom in the morning my breasts sometimes drip alarmingly. I smell strong and sour. I’m almost always either vaguely damp or coming across large wet spots on the bed, the couch, my clothes or on C. But I don’t mind. I just do a lot of laundry and try to shower each day to fight the fug of my armpits (I read that breastfeeding makes your body odour more potent so your baby can locate your nipples. My smell is such that all the babies in the neighbourhood, along with their parents and pets are aware of mine.) The milk in me rises like a tide each morning.
Then our time alone together is over, and my mom arrives. Ricky sets up in the flatlet attached to our house and recently vacated by our tenant. He will sleep and work there on his big project. We muddle through the first week. I want my mother to take care of me and the house, while I take care of C. It is difficult to hold everyone’s silence. No one will talk. We are so polite. But all of us drip with need and then crackle with resentment, try to feel out the stumbling blocks, try to read faces and intonations, skirt this and that hazard, make room or take up space, try to love as best we know how, try to ride smoothly in foreign terrain.
Ricky comes in the morning and my mother goes. Then he leaves and my mother comes. At night, I stare at C in the cool light of a lamp that’s always on. It is the only time I am “alone”. When I try to locate it, my mind is a haze, a smudge on the window. I think almost nothing, but feel a jumble. I fear falling asleep while I feed C, waking to find her suffocated. I imagine it, picture it, her chest no longer rising, then chastise myself for having horrible thoughts (and secretly feel by thinking it I’ll bring it on: bad thought! Bad thought! Go away!). I drift and then snap awake. I walk around the dead dark house, the deep, loadshedding dark – stage six again – and croon quietly or rock back and forth, the springs of the rocking chair keeping time, trying to help her back to sleep, trying not to sleep myself.
On the Friday night I am alone with Ricky for the first time in a week. A camping lamp in the kitchen casts an eerie light. C is with my mother among the candlelight in the lounge. Ricky has put The Antlers on our speaker and I hold him and sway and cry very softly so my mom won’t hear. I cry for our life, our crowded home, for the girl, small and alien and so lovely, for myself, for him. It is the first moment of reprieve since the birth. I hug Ricky without a big belly and try to feel what is new between us. But he is wooden, resistant, turns to the meal, checks the hardness of the rice. I want to find again the curves of my love after this new dive, but I fumble. The album ends and we eat in silence.
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