On Being a Mammal
Deborah Williams
In the final days of the 2000 Presidential election, I was sent to bed. I was six months pregnant with my first child and had been told by my midwife that the baby wasn’t growing as it should, an observation borne out by the ultrasound doctor who squirted blue goo over my demurely pregnant belly, peered at the blurred images on the screen and said, “basically, you have a crappy placenta.”
Crappy placentas meant bed rest and an astonishingly low-tech piece of advice: stay on my left side as much as possible, to make it easier for my heart to pump blood around my body.
No one could explain why my placenta was suddenly crappy. I’d been the very model of a modern-day pregnant lady and I felt like I’d been tricked: I’d followed all the rules, the baby should have been thriving.
The only things that were working as designed were my boobs. I finally understood why you might call boobs “jugs.” Mine were swollen, ponderous; they slopped against each other when I gingerly heaved myself from the left side to the right, moving in slow motion so as not to dislodge the miniscule being inside me. I felt like a semi-inflated life raft: my boobs were full, ready to take on passengers, as it were, while my belly stayed soft and small.
We waited, me and the country, resting in mysterious suspension to see what the outcome would be.
The country’s crappy Supreme Court gave us Dubya. My crappy placenta gave me a baby boy, seven weeks earlier than planned and weighing less than two pounds. “Crappy placenta” became the more official sounding IUGR: intra-uterine growth restriction, which isn’t a diagnosis but a description. A description of a body that failed its basic biology.
I wept as I sat in the “pumping room” of the NICU, my tears dribbling onto my blue-veined breasts. My boobs were prodigious but—another failure—not making much milk. I started taking fenugreek tablets, which promote lactation and have a bizarre side effect: they make the body smell like maple syrup. So there I sat, wrapped in a cloud of eau de maple, my C-section scar throbbing with my tears, while my giant, ineffective boobs were milked by a wheezing breast pump. If I didn’t pump, my milk wouldn’t come in, and if my milk didn’t come in, that would mean I wouldn’t be able to nurse the tiny baby when he could be taken off his tubes and wires. It seemed like another cruel trick: big boobs, no milk.
I was hell-bent on breast-feeding that child. I wanted at least one thing to go right, wanted at least some shred of “normal.” If that meant breast pumps and smelling like Mrs. Butterworth for the rest of my life, so be it. When I was finally allowed to nurse, my husband worried—quasi-jokingly—that I might suffocate the baby, whose head was about the size of a small clementine. My boobs were cantaloupian.
Somehow, though, the clementine and I figured it out. The life raft of my body buoyed him up and my heavy soft breasts kept him alive: leaky, mammalian miracles.
Deborah Williams
Deborah is a writer and literature professor based in Abu Dhabi. Her work has appeared in various publications, including The Common, The Paris Review Daily, The New York Times, and The Rumpus.
