The Day I Walked Into the Wrong Room
Chapter 9: Always Afraid, Always Brave
The instructor, with heavy breasts, talked about how to hold the breast, where to position the nipple, and something about something else, that I didn’t understand because her breast, her nipple, with a milk drop, small, whitish, translucent, hung almost at my mouth. I could smell the freshness of her milk and the pungent aroma of my fear.
Sally, I learned with the first drop, latched me, and her personality flooded over me as her milk warmed me. Sweet, apple-flavored, she latched onto my memory of Mother leaving me, screaming in the crib, as her own memory, of her first, decades ago, when she held her husband in the front room, tears, snot, anger, and fear covered them, as their baby screamed in the room down the hallway.
“I can’t, I just can’t,” she said into his shoulder.
“The book said to let them cry it out. It said,” the tall, breaded man, her first husband, whispered, soft, with his coarse beard against her smooth skin. It tickled and reminded her of her father. She trusted that scratch.
That night, she didn’t cave. But the next night, neither could stay strong, and they brought their baby to their bed, to co-sleep. They didn’t tell anyone, because while all the research said that parents could co-sleep, just not drugged, other mothers wouldn’t understand. Sally and her husband feared they would lose their child to a faceless, by-the-book system. They raised all five children the same way. They didn’t turn out better than other children, but they did have a close relationship and a less troubled childhood. Sally still had a deep connection with her children.
All five, with their spouses, came to their father’s funeral. At that thought, my anger swelled, my hate and fear of all mothers consumed me. My mother loved me, smothered me, home schooled me with her friends, until too late, they had retared my social skills, so that by high school, when I escaped her school, I had only one friend, and too many mothers.
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