Chapter 10: The Moment of Truth

I was thankful that we were on winter break. I could feasibly not go back to school for a term, but if I wasn’t enrolled in school, then I had no health insurance. And I got the good news that my tuition waiver had been renewed. Lily helped me set my class schedule, but I was going to need help with childcare. She worked full time and had already taken on most of the cleaning since Thanksgiving. I dusted, but it had been difficult to lug the vacuum cleaner up the stairs and outside in the snow between fourplexes. Thank God I didn’t have to shovel the sidewalks. Between Christmas and New Year’s, we got ten inches of snow. I did get up early each morning and make sure any ice patches were treated with deicer so no one would slip and fall on the apartment steps.

For two weeks—two wonderful weeks—Emily went wherever I went. My milk had come in and she was eating well. And often. I was taking a month off of selling real estate to get settled before I started tracking down more sellers for the spring. It’s hard to sell houses in January in Minne-snow-ta. For one thing, people track in snow and mud. If I held an open house, I needed to have brown craft paper laid down over all the traffic pathways, ask people to leave their snow boots at the door, and then spend an hour cleaning after an open house. I knew I could change that when we started selling condos, but, until then, I was at the mercy of the market. No one wanted to drive around in ten inches of snow with a wind chill of -20 to look at houses for sale. I almost made the mistake of trying to set up a web site for houses before I realized that we were still five years from when we could begin to get listings online. Ten years before it would be worthwhile.

I’d made arrangements for Emily to be at the University Childcare Center while I went to classes. But that didn’t mean I was ready to leave my two-week-old baby with someone else. I was a wreck. I stood outside the door of the childcare center for ten minutes crying. I wanted to rush back in and rescue my daughter.

Lily had gone to Babies-R-Us and got me some supplies. A breast pump and baggies for the milk that went into the bottles. When I delivered the breast milk to the girl at the daycare, she smiled and actually engaged me in a conversation about how it was working for me and how long I planned to keep expressing milk for my child. The girl wasn’t much older than me, but she was one of those hippie earth mother types who was all for doing everything naturally. She wanted to know if I’d managed a completely natural childbirth or if I’d had an epidural. I don’t remember anyone having offered me one. I probably would have said yes.

I had a hard time using the breast pump the first time. Lily to the rescue again. She sucked on my nipple until my milk started to flow and then attached the pump. She kissed and petted me while the milk flowed out of my tits into the container. When I got turned on, she fingered me to an orgasm. The doctor had warned me against sexual penetration for six weeks, but that was to let the insides heal. There was nothing wrong with the outside equipment and an orgasm or two was just what I needed.

That night, Lily and I lay in the big bed with Emily asleep in the bassinet and touched each other until we were both satisfied. I was working up to something more, but Lily still wasn’t pushing me. She said it would come when it came and not to rush it. I was beginning to feel, though, like I needed to reciprocate. Lily had given me no end of pleasure through the past two months of my pregnancy, sleeping with me and holding me, touching me and kissing me. And yes, I’d loved sucking on her cute little nipples. They were nothing at all like the suddenly huge milk bags that hung from my chest. But I loved suckling her and she seemed to enjoy it a lot. Touching her with my fingers was pretty much the same as touching myself. I had no problem with that, so I was sure I could handle going down on her. I knew the moment of truth was coming.

The rest of January progressed in pretty much the same fashion. I got used to dropping Emily at the daycare center and rushing back to get her as soon as my class was over. I learned how much milk to express and when so that there was still plenty for when she was hungry at night and in the morning. I shared the apartment cleaning equally with Lily for now. I wanted help with it, but I never planned to let her simply take it over. I wanted her to know that I was going to pull my weight even with the baby to care for.

Our neighbors across the landing were Darlene and Dick Rasmussen. Dar’s sister wrote a cookbook and she gave me a copy. I started at the front and tried pretty much every recipe. My cooking was improving steadily. I’d never been a very good cook in my first life. For most of the first two years, I ate with my parents while Jesse was off in the oil fields. My mother wasn’t a particularly good cook. She had a standard meal format. Some kind of meat cooked to leather, some kind of potato mashed, some kind of vegetable limp and tasteless. And ice cream. Breakfast was cold cereal and milk four days a week and bacon and eggs two days a week. And on the seventh day, God ate oatmeal. I’d steadily gained weight from the time Willa was born. After Mother and Dad died, I wasn’t much motivated to cook except to make sure Willa was fed. I tended to snack all the time and never lost the baby weight.

Not this time. By the end of January, I’d lost most of my baby weight. My tits were still bigger, but I was producing food for my daughter in them. In the kitchen, I was cooking for my companion and sweetheart. We were eating at least one healthy meal each day. I still hadn’t mastered anything better than Cream of Wheat for breakfast.

I finished nursing and burping Emily. She was a sleepy, milky little girl and I just adored her. Maybe more this time than the last. I knew what a remarkable young woman she would become. I put her to bed in the little bassinet and just marveled at the little miracle I was nurturing. Once she was settled and asleep, I left the bedroom.

Lily was sitting in the living room watching some program on television. I had no idea what. Mostly, my evenings were taken up with Emily and homework. I curled up next to her on the couch.

“Aren’t you cold running around in just your panties?” Lily said. “And the curtains are open.”

“I still have some milk left in this breast.”

“Do you want me to get the pump?”

“You have lips, don’t you?” I giggled.

“Oh! You want to play. I think I can handle that.” She clicked off the television remote. I stretched out in her lap and she bent to lick my milky nipples. “Which one?” she asked.