It started off as a way to earn a little extra money on the side to help support myself and my daughter. It turned into a real-life fantasy that I didn’t know I had.
It was hard being a single mom. Katie was only six months old, and I was struggling to make ends meet since her father wasn’t helping to support her at all. As soon as I told him I was pregnant, he freaked out. It didn’t matter that we had been together for almost three years at that point, or that we had often talked about getting married and starting a family soon. As soon as he was faced with the responsibility of being a father, he tried to convince me to have an abortion or give her up for adoption. But there was no way that I could do that. When I told him that, he broke up with me and moved to a different state. I think he was afraid that I was going to come after him for child support, but at that point I didn’t want him involved in my child’s life anyway. I knew it would be hard, but I resolved to raise Katie on my own.
I worked as a secretary for a law firm downtown. The pay was decent, and my boss was supportive of the frequent breaks that I would need to take so that I could pump milk for my daughter. It was frustrating at times to have to sneak off so frequently, but I was an overproducer and if I ignored that tell-tale tingle that my milk was about to let down, the front of my shirt would be drenched within minutes.
I couldn’t bear to put Katie in a regular daycare because I didn’t feel like she would get enough attention there. I wanted nothing but the best for her. So I hired a nanny who would go to our apartment during the day while I was at work. I loved her, and Katie loved her, but a nanny was a lot more expensive than daycare. Even with my nice salary, I was cutting it pretty close financially.
One day when I was pumping my breastmilk at work and leafing through a magazine, an article caught my eye. It was about several women who sold their excess breastmilk online. It seemed like a good way to make a little extra cash, and I already made more milk than Katie would ever drink. Every week I would throw out milk from the freezer, even though I hated to see all that milk go to waste. Selling it seemed like a good way to kill two birds with one stone.
As soon as Katie was asleep that night, I booted up my laptop and went to the website that had been mentioned in the magazine. I browsed a few of the ads to get a feel for them. Then I created an account and made my own ad. I wasn’t expecting much from it, but any extra bit of cash would be nice.
I woke up the next morning and sat down at the computer with my cup of herbal tea. I always checked my email first. Usually it was nothing more than a few messages from friends who wanted to check up on me or random ads. But this morning I had 57 unread emails in my inbox. Except for three of them, they all had the same subject line: Ad #47837. I clicked on the first one. It was an offer to buy 10 ounces of milk. The next email was the same thing, but from a different person. One by one, I opened them all. Apparently the market for breastmilk was more lucrative than I thought. My face lit up. If I could make enough milk, I could get a nice bit of money for it. As it was now, I couldn’t even fill half of those orders before my stash of pumped milk was gone. I made myself another cup of tea, but this time one that was supposed to help with milk production. I was going to pump as much milk as I possibly could.
I kept this up for six months – pumping as much milk as I could make and shipping it off to sellers as soon as possible. Most of my business came from repeat customers who had standing orders – all men. I didn’t ask what they did with the milk – that was their business. As long as they paid me for it, I didn’t care. I was making a pretty good supplemental income this way, and the money was easy.
That is, it was easy until my milk started