Free Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace by Ayelet Waldman Page B

minutes, astonishing for a baby his age. I sat there feeding him and weeping, horrified that I had allowed my baby to starve, sick at the thought that he’d been in pain. He had cried a lot during his first few days of life, doing what he could to let us know that he was hungry. After a while, however, he had stopped. He was a good baby, we told people. We hadn’t realized until that moment that he had simply grown too weak to utter more than the smallest whimper.
    The pediatrician told us that she would allow us to take him home for one night, but if we couldn’t put half a pound on him by the next morning, she would have to admit him to the hospital. Twenty-four hours later, when she put him on the scale, he had gained almost a full pound. I had not slept for even a moment thenight before. Instead, I’d held him in my hands all night long, watching his emaciated chest rise and fall. During those long hours the membrane between life and death seemed so very thin. He was tiny, a weightless bundle of sticks wrapped in translucent skin. I felt his heart beating and the blood flowing through his thread-thin veins. Every breath seemed like it could have been his last. As soon as he opened his mouth, I or Michael popped in the bottle. We kept feeding him long past when he was full, long after he wanted to go back to sleep. We unwrapped him from his blankets, tickled the soles of his feet, anything to keep him awake and drinking. I began pumping that night, for forty-five minutes out of every two hours, giving myself no more than an hour and a quarter rest between sessions.
    All this I told the woman standing in line behind me at the café. I told her how I had weathered plugged ducts and breast infections; I showed her that the milk in that very bottle was colored a faint shade of purple, from the gentian violet I’d been applying to treat a brutal case of thrush. To establish my breast-feeding bona fides, I even told her how especially traumatizing my failure to feed this baby was, given that I’d successfully nursed three children, one for nearly three years.
    She gave me absolution. I was doing great, she said. Keep it up. Because, you know, breast really is best.
    Over the course of the next six months I continued my punishing pumping schedule. I gave over the actual feeding of the baby to Michael, who, with the help of a bottle designed for babies with cleft palates, managed to keep Abe steadily gaining weight. I enlisted the assistance of a team of lactation consultants, one of whom visited nearly every day to help me try to teach Abraham to nurse. Every few hours I settled into the glider rocker in the darkened room, a nursing pillow circling my waist,and tried to cajole Abraham into doing something more with my nipple than halfheartedly moving it around his mouth with his tongue.
    In a final, doomed effort, I took him to Los Angeles to consult with the Lactation Institute, a place that promised me it could solve the problems of any “nursing pair” (that is, mother and baby). I had imagined a medical clinic with dozens of labs and consulting rooms, staffed by white-coated experts spouting the latest in breast-feeding medical research. What I got looked less like a doctor’s office than like the headquarters of a Marxist student newspaper circa 1971. There were the usual frayed posters on the wall—War Is Not Healthy” et cetera, the usual pile of magazines with names like the
Vegan Quarterly
, the
Lesbian’s Guide to Yoga
, the
Spelt-Lovers Review
, and the usual assortment of herbal teas and mismatched crockery mugs. The lactation consultants were just like the others I’d been working with. Warm and supportive, they mothered me in a pepper-and-salt-crew-cut, Teva-sandals kind of way.
    Best of all, they were confident they could help. Showing me an oversized syringe attached to a long, thin silicone needle, they said, “You fill the syringe with breast milk. Then you put your finger in his mouth and slide the