The surgical withdrawal of the placenta from my body made my body edible in a way I could not have fathomed. As I stimulated my breasts with an artificial pump as part of my efforts to invest in a supply-demand loop, I felt all my bodily consciousness concentrated in my teats. Each time my milk ‘let down’, I felt reunited with primal mammalian sentience. In those ‘lost hours’ when, exhausted from maternal administrations yet committed to a schedule of pumping every three hours, I sat in the milky morass of my sleep-deprived thoughts. I recalled the title of Margaret Atwood’s 1969 debut novel, The Edible Woman, which has, at its core, a female protagonist Marian MacAlpin, whose subconscious struggle to wrestle with her hetero-normative conditioning manifests as a gradual inability to digest food—a metaphor for her experience of detaching herself from her subjectivity. I had forgotten all about the female character whose choices rest in opposition to Marian’s own, her roommate, Ainsley, who decides from the onset that she wants to be pregnant and have a child, but in a husband-less way, a totally unconventional decision. I also found myself trying to remember the gist of Philip Roth’s 1972 novella, The Breast, in which the lead protagonist, an English literature professor, David Kepesh, finds he has become a 6-feet long, 155-pound breast. I wondered if my current experience of feeling the world through my teat would have found expression in his book, or if it was primarily too female, too bound up in the maternal.

‘Boob Person’ is what I have been calling myself. Because the primary basis of my child’s relation and attachment to me is the breast. As I marvel at his daily improvements and ingenuities with latching and suckling, I think also about how the nipple has been sexualised and politicised, how it is the subject of taboo, especially on Instagram, and it befuddles me how a piece of flesh whose evolutionary purpose is to serve as a medium of nourishment can be a locus of censorship. How this site of vacuum, where my mammary intelligence is stimulated by the lingual papillae of my child’s tongue so as to ascertain his dietary needs so that the milk that my body produces from the food I feed can feed not only him but also the bacteria in his gut, can be a zone upon which misogyny plays itself out. Although it may sound like it, I don’t think of ‘Boob Person’ as a reduction of my role, I think it just more befittingly encapsulates the nature of my child’s current dependency on me.

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It isn’t that calling myself mother is a source of anxiety. I just wonder if embracing the term has something to do with language, when it is being enunciated upon his tongue. Would that make it more befitting? As I feed him, bathe him, try to decipher the vast vocabulary that is his crying language, I am also trying, simultaneously, to reconstitute my selfhood and reframe my subjectivity, especially in the midst of continuous interruptions. Can I be maternal and intellectual at the same time? Especially when the current focus of my imaginings is my ongoing treatise—In the Name of the Mother. 

On Saturday evening, at the Easter Vigil, he will be baptised. As I look at his candle and the symbolic water dripping over a head, signifying the beginning of life, I wonder if milk would have been a more befitting element. I think about the nature of the maternal miracle I am performing at every second of my current existence, the transformation of every ingredient that lands upon my tongue and enters my body into this life-nurturing substance that is mother’s milk. 

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D’Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx

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