How not making enough milk for my child dissolved my myth of individualism.

(This writing includes intense and sad things like death, so if you’re not up for that, skip it.)

I have written about this before, a few years back probably, but it’s worth sharing again, remembering for myself. Because it’s just one of the things that transformed my world view the most. The list of pains and struggles I experienced in my pregnancy, birth and postpartum was long. I’m not going to go into it all because that’s not the point of this, but it was fucking hard. I’m saying that so that you have some context when I tell you what the hardest thing of all was. The hardest thing of all was not making enough milk for my bb. Stressing about his weight gain was so physical, so literal, so so intense. So obsessive. It was the darkest room in the long tour of the underworld that was my pregnancy and birth. (There were many of the most sparkling beautiful magnificent moments in all of it too. But underworld is an important word for me in summarizing that time.)

So finally, after a lot of confusion and stressing and doubt and trying to see the picture clearly, we got milk from other people. Many many generous breast-feeding people who gave us milk. Which my love drove around to get. And then, this one incredible person, we found each other. She had so. much. milk. to share with us. She had been pumping for months. She birthed twins at twenty-something weeks, and one of them died. And from that time on she pumped. For her own child, and for someone else. Who she didn’t know yet, which would be me. She labeled and dated each packet of milk she pumped. (While she had a newborn in the nicu, and an older child at home. If you’ve ever pumped milk, that memory might add to the sense of the generosity here.) She gave us all of it. For months and months she gave us milk. My love would go pick it up where she lived, an hour away from San Francisco. Bb’s life was nourished for most of his first year from my milk and this woman’s milk. She was committed to giving this milk to someone who she didn’t even know, right after one of her babies had died. In a way it made sense, the generosity, it is really something humans are made of. And yet, it still astounds me. It still moves me. Tears still come, as I write this, two years after we received our last milk from her.

I want to share this with you because this experience of not making enough milk is described as hard, and often felt as a deficiency (it felt that way to me even though I “knew better”), along with anything else we don’t “do ourselves” in this individualistic culture. It was hard! And what I got instead is the cloak of delusion that I do anything myself came down for a moment. I got to see behind it. And behind it is a more beautiful, magical, full-hearted world than most of us usually get to see or remember or encounter. The truth is this person making milk and pumping it and bagging it and labeling the amount, and the date, and the time of day it was pumped, and keeping it in her freezer and saving it for us (we tried to give her bags or money for the hundreds of bags she used, and she wouldn’t take it!) - THIS IS ALWAYS HAPPENING, to all of us, all of the time. The forces of life, human and more-than-human, that are conspiring to keep us alive right now are beyond comprehension. And the gift I got instead of the ease of making enough milk myself, was the most inspiring energizing truth of support, of how much life is supporting life at all times. And how easy it is to forget that. And how life-giving it is to remember. That’s why I’m sharing this again. Because perhaps you can catch a tiny bit of that feeling. That this is happening for you too. Right now. Probably in many ways you can see and name, and many more you can’t. I’m not saying that it’s equal for all of us, I’m not diminishing the horror show of what is happening here on planet earth. But additionally, crucially, countless beings are supporting your life right now. When we remember this truth, it becomes so much easier to feel generous ourselves. Generosity feels like the obvious response to the truth of the way things are.

Every single time I remember this woman who gave us milk, I remember this truth. In this way her gift is so much vaster and more comprehensive than the milk itself.

From this memory that endless forces are conspiring for your life right now,

Sarah