6
IF I CLOSE MY EYES, I can picture the bathroom at work in great detail: a refill container of watermelon soap on the top of the vanity; white walls and doors smudged by touch in their high-traffic areas; a white-coated wire cart containing spare toilet paper rolls and a reusable bag full of clean hand towels. Inside the cabinet, relics of privacy: tampons, toothbrush, dental floss. The light switch is cockeyed, pointing northwest. The doorknob has a button lock, and I fear one day someone will walk in on me, sitting on the closed toilet seat, pumping. Sometimes voices bunch up outside the door, chatting in the public hallway, separated just barely from my private space. The bathroom light is connected to an overhead fan that rumbles as if it has croup; the bathroom fan obscures the noise of the pump’s motor.
My pumping routine proceeds by muscle memory—unplug the mouse deterrent in the hallway, plug in the extension cord, tamp it down with my foot to close the bathroom door. Connect the pump’s cord into the extension cord, connect the bottle heads to the bottles, connect the tubes to the bottles, turn on the power.
The first time I pump, I’ve just arrived at work. At the beginning of the week, I turn my phone face down and place it on the side of the sink. I focus on my breathing, to centre myself. I read somewhere that looking at a picture of one’s infant while pumping can help increase milk production, so I conjure a recent memory. But by the end of the week—my daily commute having wrung me of willpower—I sit hunched over to keep the bottles in place as I scroll through Twitter and answer emails.
When I switched back to full-time, in-office work from freelancing, Sinclair was five months old—still exclusively drinking breast milk. The act of feeding her became routinized, measured in ounces. Keeping up my supply meant never missing a pumping session; it meant drinking 100 ounces of water a day. It meant nursing Sinclair three times a day, and pumping five times a day: 9 a.m., 11 a.m., 2:30 p.m., 4:30 p.m., 9 p.m. Whatever else I did, my day was given its rhythm through the act of expressing milk. Milk, milk milk milk milk milk.
MIRJAM GUESGEN, A FREELANCE SCIENCE JOURNALIST, wrote a feature about dairy farming in Canada for Maisonneuve in 2018, while I was editing for the magazine. Guesgen visited farms where the dairy cows didn’t get to go outside very much at all—the most common situation in Canada—and others where the cows went out on a regular, if not daily, basis. My favourite moment in the piece comes when Guesgen is standing in a field with farmer Louis Fleurent, being investigated by “curious pink noses.” The cows (and Guesgen and Fleurent) are outside during a light rain shower. They like this, Fleurent says, and there will “be a little boost in how much milk the cows make today.”
When French settlers brought cows to Canada in the seventeenth century, Guesgen writes, their enclosures were often huddled in against the settlers’ homes. In the summertime, the cows grazed outside. In the winter, they remained mostly indoors, contributing their body heat as well as their milk to the family good.
Today, most humans live in urban centres, few of us own cows, and we’ve applied the laws of industry to milk production. As I learned—staying hydrated and paying careful attention to my diet—nutrition is a key determining factor in how many ounces (or litres) of milk you’ll get. Cows are generally fed a combination of plants, like grass or hay or barley, and “concentrate,” a mixture of carbohydrates, proteins, fats, minerals, and vitamins, generally by-products from other types of farming—canola meal, soy hulls, beet pulp, corn gluten. They drink between 80 and 180 litres of water per day.
Dairy cattle produced over 9.3 billion litres of milk in Canada in 2018–2019; each cow produced an overwhelming annual average of 10,519 litres over the course of their year-long lactation cycle. But averages mask the underlying truth that the milk production of cows varies just as much as the milk production of humans. In 2016, a cow from Wisconsin named Gigi made the news for producing about 34,000 litres of milk over the course of her lactation cycle—triple the production of an average cow. Although she’s in a category of her own, Gigi is also part of a trend: the average rate of milk production per US cow per year grew to 10,432 litres in 2017, up from 9,299 litres in 2008.
In the US, most cows go through three pregnancy and lactation cycles after first calving somewhere between two and three years of age, and then they are culled for food—the waning milk production of their fourth, fifth, or sixth lactation cycle means that it no longer makes economic sense to keep them around. (This wasn’t always the case. As we’ve bred cows to produce more and more milk, their lifespans have decreased.) Cows who are low producers—say, twelve or fifteen litres per day instead of the average of thirty—are often culled earlier. As for their calves, they’re usually separated a day or two after they enter the world; they’re then fed milk (less than they’d take directly from their parent), or a milk substitute, and housed with their peers.
Like humans, cows who listen to music while they pump produce more milk. Several studies—including one from 1990 called “Moosic Is for Cows, Too”—have shown that slower-tempo music, like Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony (a particularly boring piece of music that also happens to score the flying horses segment of Disney’s most soporific movie, Fantasia), decreases the cows’ stress levels and encourages them to head to the milking machine. Their milk production is better when they are healthy, when they get to go outside, when they get to socialize with other cows on their own terms (cows have cows they like more, and cows they like less).
Dairy cattle loom large in the human imaginary—black-and-white Holsteins are one of the first animals we learn about as kids after dog, cat, bunny. Cows are their curious pink noses, and they are a key source of sustenance, and they are one of several figures in a farmer’s economic ledger. They are a collective; they are also individuals with their own personalities, their own aches and pains and preferences. I thought about them a lot while I sat alone, drinking water and pumping.
IN MID-JUNE, just after we celebrate Sinclair’s half birthday, my iPhone is on its way out. It sheds at least sixty-three percent of its battery while I am waiting for the bus, which is late—the highway is backed up behind 174 Street in Surrey. Eventually, the bus comes and I take it the forty or forty-five minutes to Surrey Central station, where I catch the Expo Line into Vancouver. The train gets stuck at Nanaimo. Every few minutes, SkyTrain control broadcasts a message: Ladies and gentlemen. We have a problem train in the downtown area. We have staff on hand currently to remove the problem train, but there will be some short delays. My phone is long dead and I am people watching on the packed train. Man in baseball cap with eyes closed. Child who earlier refused seat tugging at father’s coat. Woman playing Candy Crush with the sound on.
When SkyTrain control says their staff is on hand to remove the problem train, I immediately picture a team of Thomas the Tank Engine figurines dismantling the train piece by piece, as if it is an overgrown snake in a sewer and there is no other way to solve the problem. Of course that can’t be right—they are probably pushing or hauling it to a spur track—but the image persists.
Eventually, the train moves and I get to work only to realize that the pump’s batteries are low. The pump wheezes along, more slowly than usual; I stare at the wall with my dead phone in my pocket, feeling as though the sapped batteries and the slow bus and the stuck train are all fine metaphors for how I feel commuting three hours a day while also pumping enough milk every day to ensure that our stockpile is growing instead of being depleted.
In late July, I get sick with a fever and go home early from work. I lie down to take a nap, and when I wake up, my face is swollen. The doctor at the walk-in clinic asks, “Your face doesn’t always look like that?” It must be simultaneously a virus and an allergic reaction, she says, shrugging. I regret getting out of bed. It is my body saying, “No!” and then “No!” again, several more times, just in case. Will brings Sinclair upstairs and I feed her lying down side by side in bed. I feed her, but being sick means I have less milk, and a slower letdown, and Sinclair gets frustrated. I have a fever, and my milk has slowed down, right in the middle of a heat wave, when Sinclair is extra thirsty. She bites me because the milk isn’t coming fast enough. She bites me and I cry, and the tears roll down my swollen face.
The fever passes, but the milk won’t come back. There’s enough for Sinclair when I’m with her but not when I pump. I read about how to increase my supply and the blogs are tailored to lactating parents who are at home with their babies. Take a breastfeeding honeymoon, they say. Stay in bed all day with your baby and focus on feeding her!
I learn that fenugreek and blessed thistle are galactagogues—they increase milk production. The blogs always mention that fenugreek should be a “last resort” when it comes to increasing milk—try a babymoon!—but they never spell out why. Increased risk of mastitis, I learn, eventually. On a weekend when I have several edits to complete and a lit mag to lay out, I also start taking fenugreek and blessed thistle. I am drinking almond milk, date, and oat smoothies with hemp seeds—all foods purported to help boost milk production. I am pumping for twenty minutes a session instead of my usual lazy five to seven. I am ordering Mother’s Milk tea and holding my selfhood back as I glean wisdom from the kinds of sources that claim your femininity will be strengthened if you spend time in a yurt. I am taking the bus and the train and pumping and taking the train and the bus, every day, every day, every day (people do this their whole lives!).
A body-seated memory crops up unbidden on the SkyTrain, between 22nd Street and Edmonds stations, where I pass, to the south, a cemetery and then a blue stucco house whose roof reads, ISLAM? READ QURAN. The memory is of a time when I was hauling a fifty-pound bag of potatoes from my best friend’s dad’s store to the Air Force Club, where my best friend’s dad was drinking with my mom, where a friend of theirs was running a catering company. Hauling the potatoes as if they were the torso of an incapacitated man. As soon as the memory comes, I realize I don’t want to remember it. It recurs at regular intervals. It’s a memory I’ve put in a poem, a memory that reminds me that my mother once asked me to apologize to a man who’d groped me because I must have misunderstood why his hand crept down my back, crept down to the small of my back; she asked me to apologize because I said no or stop or go away. A protective bad memory, one that reminds me to enforce my physical boundaries and to avoid my mother. But I haven’t spoken to my mother in years. The threat has passed; I left through an alternative exit to avoid saying sorry and I will keep leaving through alternative exits to avoid ever saying sorry.
In August I am trying as hard as I can. I have become a person with a 6:30 a.m. vitamin alarm. By the end of August my milk is running again, some days more plentifully than others. We are three-quarters of the way to one year. Sinclair has started to eat solid food: cereal, bananas, noodles with sauce, steamed yams. We are staying at a friend’s home in Vancouver and Sinclair is upstairs asleep in what we refer to as her nap tent, and I’ve asked half my brain to think about milk and the other half to think about the cover for a poetry book. I am relieved that my milk came back. I am thinking about how much everybody loves Sinclair. I am hoping that Sinclair always loves herself as much as everybody loves her right now.
WHILE “FED IS BEST” has somewhat supplanted “breast is best”—itself a response to the commodification of baby feeding, during a time when families were being encouraged to use formula and told that it was better than breast milk—the recommended best practice for feeding infants is still breast milk. Posters in the waiting rooms of the hospitals and the pediatrician’s offices and at the OB/GYN underscore this message; it feels, at times, like the public health message is designed to “educate” mothers who use formula, as if the most important thing standing between them and making the best choice is ignorance and not a complex mix of economic factors, time constraints, and other pressures.
When I worked at Adbusters, the publisher and editor-in-chief once remarked that women had ruined Western society by allowing television to raise their children. Though not all families with kids even include a mother, though a large percentage of American mothers don’t have access to any maternity leave, though white mothers get to breastfeed at higher rates than Black mothers for a million and seven different reasons, though Canadian mothers who are poor generally can’t afford to take maternity leave, though Canadian mothers who freelance don’t generally qualify to take maternity leave, the “natural work” of raising and feeding and nurturing young children is still seen as being the purview of the mother, and when that work doesn’t reach the superlative, it is considered the fault of the mother.
Though I am not a mother, I am the one who produces Sinclair’s milk. As I am burning out on the SkyTrain, and pumping and pumping and pumping, I come across an article that suggests that not only is breast milk best, but that this milk should ideally come directly from nursing. I watch the first episode of a TV show where a breast milk pump is a prop for a thin white executive who has begrudgingly gone back to work, who leaks through her shirt while helping land a dairy company account. I have yet to see, on TV, a twenty-two-year-old at her retail job pumping in an overstock closet while her manager knocks on the door to remind her that her break ends in two minutes. I’ve yet to see a trans dad cycling across the city with an insulated cooler to pick up supplemental breast milk from someone he met through Facebook.
I’ve read everything I could get my hands on about milk, milk expression, infant nutrition, and infant wellness. In the absence of being able to always feed Sinclair directly, I’ve tried harder at pumping than I have tried at anything in my entire life. Will stays at home with Sinclair and he thaws the milk and Sinclair lays her head in the crook of his arm and he tilts the bottle up and she drinks the milk as fast as is humanly possible—and it’s still not enough to be the best. She is fed. We are not the best because we are lower middle class and I am not a mother and the parent with the milk goes to work while the parent with the beard stays at home. I know it’s bullshit, and it’s only going to get worse—many North Americans are getting poorer and many of us are getting less like mothers and many of us have conditions, like polycystic ovarian syndrome, that make milk production more challenging. Many of us will never be the best. The best is in part an idea that shores up the gestation and birth and development of a child as a luxury experience, the child as a luxury good. “Failure”—not being the best—is not a function of the inadequacy or ignorance of mothers (or their afterthought analogues); “failure” is a function of the pressures of capitalism.
I LIKE TO STAND IN FRONT OF THE DAIRY CASE at the grocery store for an extra beat, before I buy my milk, to picture the cows who have produced it. I think about the milk production of cows as one line on the x-y axis and the breastfeeding rates of humans as another line on that same axis. We have been rendering one as efficient as possible, to the detriment of that animal, at the same time as we have been rendering one a luxury experience, to the detriment of that animal.
Breastfeeding parents have expressed milk since the 1500s. It got easier in the 1990s when a Swiss company called Medela developed electric pumps—manual pumps are laborious and not very effective, in my experience extracting about two ounces of milk whereas an electric pump extracts something more like three or four. One of the jokes about expressing milk is that—with one’s breasts vacuumed into the plastic bullhorns of the pump—it makes one feel like a cow. The pump’s suction is stronger and faster for the first two minutes of pumping, and then, once the letdown of milk has been triggered, it relaxes. Like a wind sprint easing into a jog. When a human milks a cow, they first clean and dry her teats. Then they pull gently but firmly until the milk comes. Or they clean and dry her teats and affix a milker—sometimes a vacuum milker, just like the electric pump I used. At farms with robot milkers, the robot cleans and dries the cow, and then the machine uses ultrasound sensors to seek and attach to the cow’s teats.
Pumping feels more like being a cow than breastfeeding does, and that says a lot about the relationship between cows and humans, and the way we intercede in the relationship between a cow and her calf—we no longer see the baseline relationship between calving and lactation in cows as one that would lead primarily to a cow feeding her calf directly. In addition, given that the average Canadian consumes about sixty-six litres of milk a year, it also betrays that we take for granted, and are dismissive of, one of our most significant food sources. (It is, of course, always more complicated than that. Wealthy white women used to offload the labour of breastfeeding to wet nurses, often Black women or poorer white women; the legacy of this practice understandably complicates the way a Black woman or a poor white woman with wet nurses in her family tree might think about breastfeeding and pumping—and is another contributing factor to the differing rates of breastfeeding by race.)
Nursing and pumping milk for Sinclair made me reconsider my relationship with dairy. It made me feel more grateful. We started to introduce cow’s milk into her diet by mixing it with my milk, topping up each thawed bag of my milk with full-fat cow’s milk, straight from the jug in the fridge. After I became a human with a vitamin alarm—salmon oil for mood and joints, B complex to aid with stress—my milk changed colour, shifting from a near-white to a white tinged with goldenrod yellow from the B vitamins. Cows’ diets, I learned, also—of course!—affect the colour and composition of their milk. Jersey cows’ milk has a higher fat and protein content than that of Holsteins’, but they are smaller cows and lower producers, in general, so many large herds of Holsteins will include a couple Jerseys to bump up their milk’s fat and protein content. I had accepted that milk came in neat and tidy conventional grocery store packages—skim, 1%, 2%, 3.25%—without ever stopping to question why or how an animal product that comes from hundreds, thousands, millions of animals could be so regularized.
When I pump, I don’t feel like a cow, but I do think about cows. Their furry bodies, spotted or warm brown or russet red. Their affability, the way they pick a leader, the way their panoramic eyes follow a field interloper as their heads dip and raise, their jaws working as they chew their cud. I think of the teaching cow at the University of Guelph that we used to pass as we walked from campus over to the mall to get groceries—the infamous cow with a hole in its stomach, the one the aggies plumb to learn about cow feed and cow digestion.
I want to feel a radical kinship with cows, but I haven’t earned it. I don’t want them to go from one type of Fisher-Price imaginary to another, where they carry narrative or symbolic weight for my feelings about working and pumping and nursing and growth. I have consumed conventional dairy for most of my life, a lifetime that is already a multitude of lifetimes for the cows whose milk has sustained me. Organic milk in a thick glass bottle feels like a bespoke artifact, like a gift of homemade jam versus the Smucker’s on sale for $2.99 as a loss leader, but the truth is that the milk we buy now in a four-litre jug for $5.49 is just as much of a gift.
IN OCTOBER, WHEN SINCLAIR IS TEN MONTHS OLD, my milk production dips again. I have a head cold. Ten months is the point at which dairy cows are allowed to go dry for a period, before they are inseminated and calve again. I got my cold from Sinclair—her first. My body, finally shedding the after-effects of gestation, is re-seeking its normal. At work, I bleed through my clothes and feel that my body has betrayed me. I bleed through my clothes at thirty-four years of age and feel irritated, until I realize that bodies change whether or not you gestate a child. And rather than being a cause for concern, my milk production is probably trending downwards because Sinclair is eating more solid food and needs less milk—maybe the anxiety I am feeling is less tied to Sinclair’s needs and more a reflection of the fact that I have been fixated on the math of ounces and hours and days and weeks and pounds and grams for so long that it will be hard to let it go, if it is time to let it go. It is October, she is ten months old, and I am so tired that I can’t tell if my body is failing me or I am failing my body.
Later, when Sinclair turns one and we celebrate with carrot cake, I should feel relief. My goal was to reach one year of breastfeeding, and I’ve met my goal. I am tired of pumping but keep developing excuses to push off reducing pumping and feeding sessions. The stash of milk in the freezer comforts me, the equivalent of living mostly paycheque to paycheque but putting aside ten percent of your meagre earnings for rainy-day savings. I am tired of pumping but scared of what it means to be done feeding Sinclair my milk—not because I am afraid of breaking a special bond, because for us nursing is not the best representation of our parent-child relationship—because it signals that she’s no longer an infant, that we have passed into a different stage of her life. Of course, she’s no longer an infant either way. I could feed her until pre-K and it wouldn’t keep her a baby. But imagined kinships and metaphors and magical thinking illuminate internal truths more than they illuminate objective ones.