Lucky Mother, I

I have been wanting to write some prose about breastfeeding for a while. My first few attempts were awkward and forced. As I honored and processed a few difficult events including the anniversary of a particular suffering for our family, the passing away of a 15 year old former student and son of friends of ours, the stage 4 cancer diagnoses of a young woman friend of ours about to get married and honoring the memory of 3 babies born to a friend 9 years ago that didn’t survive, a feeling of fierce protection welled up within me. Every time I sat down to breastfeed Smunchie my heart would pound with longing to protect my children and my thoughts for prose kept turning to this feeling. Though our own past as a family has shown me I can’t protect them completely from everything forever, I can do this. Offering the protection of my milk is something I can do right now and I feel so blessed as a mother to be able to guard my children this way. Down the road my milk won’t be the comfort and protection they need but right now, for my youngest, it is exactly what she needs. This poem came out of these thoughts.