Motherkind

Book by Phillips Jayne Anne

From Chapter 2

After the birth and the overnight in the hospital, she didn't go downstairs for a week. She'd lost some blood and she felt flattened, nearly dizzy, from the labor and then the general anesthetic. Alexander had been born at dawn on Christmas Day; since then she'd wept frequently, with incredible ease, and entertained the illusion that she now knew more than she'd ever questioned or known before. The illusion pursued her into sleep itself, into jagged pieces of sleep. New Year's came and went; Kate heard bells ring at midnight and revelers' horns blaring plaintively in the cold streets. She slept and woke, naked except for underpants, sanitary napkins, chemical ice packs. The ice packs, shaped to her crotch, were meant to reduce swelling and numb the stitches; the instructions directed her to bend the cotton to activate the solution; inside, the thick pads cracked like sticks. This bathroom looks like a MASH unit, Matt would say. But it's not your unit that's mashed, Kate would think. In fact, her vagina was an open wound. Her vagina was out of the picture. She couldn't believe she'd ever done anything with it, or felt anything through it.

She couldn't use tampons; there were boxes of big napkins, like bandages, piles of blue underliners -- plastic on one side, gauze on the other -- to protect the sheets, hemorrhoid suppositories, antibiotic salve, mentholated anesthetic gel, tubes of lanolin, plastic cups and plastic pitchers. She drank and drank, water, cider, juices. The baby slept in a bassinette right beside her bed, but her arms ached from picking him up, holding him, putting him down. On the third day her milk came in, and by then her nipples were already cracked and bleeding. The baby was nursing colostrum every hour but he was sucking for comfort, losing a few more ounces every day. His mouth was puckered and a large clear blister had formed on his upper lip; he was thirsty, so thirsty; finally, Kate gave him water, though the nurses had said not to. He needs to nurse, to pull the milk in. That night she woke in the dark, on her back, her engorged breasts sitting on her chest, warm to the touch, gravid, hard and swollen. She woke the baby to feed him. He began to cry but she held him away until she could sit and prop her arms with pillows, pour a glass of water for the thirst that would assail her. In the beginning, she'd moaned as he sucked, then, to move through the initial latching on, she did the same breathing she'd used throughout labor. She breathed evenly, silenced vocalizations cutting in like whispers at the end of each exhalation. The pain cracked through her like a thread of lightning and gradually eased, rippling like something that might wake up and get her.

She called LaLeche League every couple of days for new suggestions. Kate's favorite counselor was in Medford, a working-class part of Boston Kate didn't remember ever having seen. But the woman had no accent; she was someone else far from home. You'll battle through this, she would say, be stubborn and hang on. Women are made to nurse, she'd declare in each conversation, any woman can nurse; and then she'd say, in a softer tone, that people forgot how hard it was to get established the first time. "Don't let the pain defeat you," were her exact words. "The uterine pain actually helps you heal, and your nipples will toughen."

"What about stress?" Kate asked once. "Will I have enough milk -- "

"Stress?" was the response. "Are you kidding? Any woman with a new baby is stressed to the max. She doesn't sleep, she's bleeding, she's sore, she might have other kids or a job she'll go back to. The baby is sucking for life. As long as you eat well and drink, drink constantly, your body responds. You don't need unbroken sleep. You don't need a perfect situation. Refugees nurse their babies, and war victims; theirs are the children more likely to survive, even in the worst of times."

I understand, Kate wanted to say. I understand all about you, and I understand everything.

"Have your husband buy you a Knorr manual breast pump at the hospital infirmary," the counselor had said, "and a roll of disposable plastic bottles. The pump is a clear plastic tube, marked in ounces. Use it each time your breasts aren't completely emptied by the baby. Increase production; you can't have too much milk. Freeze all you express. That's how some women work full-time and still nurse their babies. I'll send you some information in the mail. And if you feel discouraged, call back."

I just want to hear your voice, Kate wanted to say. We're in a tunnel flooded with light.

But she spoke an accepted language, words like "air-dry," "lanolin," "breast rotation," "demand schedule." And there was light all around her, great patches angling through the naked windows, glancing off snow piled and fallen and drifted, hard snow, frozen, crusted with ice, each radiant crystal reflecting light. Kate had brought her son home in the last week of December, and the temperature was sixty degrees, sun like spring. Her neighbor Camille had festooned the fence with blue balloons. Kate and Alexander posed for photographs, then she took him in the house, shutting the front door behind them. Immediately, the cold came back and the snows began. At night Kate was awake, nursing, burping the baby, changing odorless cloth diapers, changing his gown, nursing, nursing him to sleep; all the while, snow fell in swaths past the windows, certain and constant, drifting windblown through the streetlamp's bell of light. Each day Kate stayed upstairs and her mother padded back and forth along the hallway connecting their rooms. Just before Christmas she'd finished a full round of chemo, and the tumors in her lungs had shrunk. She had a few weeks of respite now before the next group of treatments, and she came to Kate's room to keep her company, to hold the baby while Kate slept, to pour the glasses of juice.
"Are you awake, Katie?" She sat in an upholstered chair that had once graced her own living room; Kate had moved that couch and chair to Boston and slipcovered them in a vibrant 1920s print, navy blue with blowzy, oversized ivory flowers.

"I'm always awake, more or less," Kate said. "How was your night?"

"No complaints," her mother said. "No nausea."

"Good." Kate smiled. "It's nice to see you sitting in that chair. I always see it in photographs, in one of its guises. In the old house."

"Yes," Kate's mother said. "By the time we moved into town, this chair was in the basement."

"Now you might admit I was right to drag it here. The cushions may be shot, but at least you have a comfortable place to sit." Watching her mother, Kate realized the print she'd chosen for the chair, dark blue with white, was nearly the reverse of her mother's choice. "Remember the fabric of your slipcovers, what you used on that chair? What did you always call that print?"

"It was a blue onion print, white with blue vines -- "

"Thistlelike flowers," Kate interrupted, "like fans, with viny runners -- "

"Yes," her mother continued patiently, "wild onions, hence the name."

"And you had those glass pots with lids, in the same print, on the coffee table. I remember. There they sit, in all the Easter pictures. When we're wearing our good clothes. You always matched things. But before, there was that dark living room."

"Dark?"

"The walls were dark green, and the drapes on the picture windows were dark green, with gold, and the furniture in its original upholstery, dark beige, with a raised texture -- "

"Well, when kids are young you want things that are dark and tough. When you were older, we had the white fiberglass drapes and the lighter slipcovers. That first upholstery was chosen to last through climbing and sliding and whatever. Your brothers gave it a workout."

"It did last," Kate said. "It was what I covered up. It seems ageless."

"Yes," her mother agreed, "but it darkened. This was your father's chair, and the fabric darkened just in the shape of him."

"Really?" Kate asked. "You mean, as though his shadow sank into it?"

Her mother frowned, exasperated. "No, I mean it was worn. Worn from use. Am I speaking English?"

Kate laughed. "Your energy level is better, isn't it? You're your old feisty self, and I'm just lying here."

Her mother peered over at the bassinette. "I thought I might hold Alexander for you, but he's sleeping so beautifully. I've been downstairs already, to let that little girl in, the MotherKind worker. It's been wonderful to have her for a week. She came this morning with her arms full of groceries. She's just putting things away, and then she'll be up to see what you want her to do."

"It was so nice of you to buy help for me, Mom, such a great present."

"Well, I'd be doing all the cooking myself if I were able. But I must say, your requirements are pretty daunting."

Kate smiled. She'd asked for someone versed in preparing natural foods. No additives, no preservatives. No meat with hormones. "Your color is good today, Mom," she said. "You're sitting right there in the sun, and you look all lit up."

"I'm sure I do. It's so bright in this room. Why do you paint everything white? And not a thing on the windows, not even shades to pull down."

"The walls are linen white," Kate said, "and the trim is sail white. And I don't need shades; I'm not worried about snipers."

"Snipers?"

"My LaLeche League lady," Kate said. "She was telling me how war victims can go right on nursing their b...