My earliest memory involves breastfeeding. I stand in the half-light next to the rocking chair, cradling a dolly to my chest as I watch my mother nurse my baby brother. Even at three years old I understand that this is something special. I cuddle up next to her and ask her about the words in the glossy magazine she is reading. Maybe I don’t say ‘words’. Maybe I ask how to draw letters or what the black patterns mean. This is a story my mother likes to tell often and it is impossible to disentangle my own memories from her retelling. What I do know for certain is that my mum passes me a biro and I write my first letters - j-o-a-n-n-a - in the margins of that magazine as my brother softly feeds.
The twin nourishment of milk and language. Mine was a household abundant in language nutrition too. Rich in words, books and conversation a valued currency.
A few years later, my mother bought me a diary for Christmas. It was the greatest gift she could give me; a space of my own which could contain all the angst and joy I was unable to share with the world. A refuge and an archive. A space of my very own in which to think.
Perhaps it was inevitable that I turned to writing when I had my first child and experienced no end of problems with breastfeeding, jabbing words into my phone above my son’s head, trying to make sense of it all: this new identity, new bodily function, the mis-match between the reality and my expectations, formed from all the cultural markers I’d carried with me. Making sense of how milk was, for me, integral to motherhood.
I wanted my body to create the nourishment to grow and sustain new life. I wanted to sit cross-legged on the grass in the summer, nursing my chubby baby, sipping a glass of wine, a carefree earth mother. I wanted to hold my squishy, dumpling baby to my nipple, to begin my mothering.
I wanted abundance but instead found scarcity, bodily pain, heartbreak and grief. I didn’t then know that almost half of women in the UK who start breastfeeding have stopped by six weeks and 90% of them state that they weren’t ready to do so. I didn’t know quite how navigating breastfeeding problems was going to challenge my view of who I was as a person and a mum.
Feeding babies milk is a universal experience; we were all babies once and, even if we do not have our own, most of us will witness partners, friends, or siblings feed their children at some time in our lives. After all, we are mammals, a term derived from the Latin from breasts, and we require milk. To mother means to nurture, to nourish. And milk - in whatever formulation and by whatever means of delivery - is central to the enterprise of nourishing and nurturing a baby. Infant-feeding raises some complicated paradoxes: milk is a precious, life-sustaining gift, but to be milked means to be exploited; mothers are everything and nothing; motherhood exists across cultures, but the lived realities of the individual experience are ultimately private and the ubiquity of milk contrasts sharply with the intimacy and specificity of each mother and baby relationship. These contradictions shaped my reckoning with my own motherhood, and the role that milk played in my becoming a mother.
I write to make sense of the world. To lay it out on page in an attempt to translate it from a tangle to something sequential. I wrote MILK to find ways to inhabit the contradictions of motherhood, recognising the unique journeys we each make, guided by the time and places of our own births. Because however personal our journey felt, I knew that how I fed my baby was also a deeply social phenomenon, informed by the cultural landscape we inhabit.
"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means."
Joan Didion
I knew motherhood was often characterised by a forgetting, the passage of time smoothing the sharp, painful edges of life in the newborn trenches. I write because I didn’t want to forget the tug at my nipple, the crashing realisation that breastfeeding is a skill that must be acquired, or the unparalleled sense of connection with my baby. I write to wrestle with this tumult of emotions and instincts and external noise.
I needed to connect with the women throughout time who’d been here before me, who had felt the loneliness of a long, painful night feed, who had fashioned sculptures to celebrate their magical milk. How did our ancestors feed their babies? Did they find it easy? What were their alternatives? What does art tell us about attitudes to breastfeeding?
When I found that book didn’t exist, I knew I had to write (it) myself.