Where does milk come from?

A meditation on cows and breastfeeding

Most days, I think about milk. I think of the farmer whose tiny herd made the gallons of raw milk his wife ladled into quart jars marked in Sharpie with my mother’s name. The milk I drank from cups and poured over cereal, whose pure unhomogenized essence fed my brain with its fat. 

Camino Cows

I think of the cow whose teet I was once fortunate enough to squeeze, of the stream of milk that shot out and hissed against the side of the pail as I pulled downward with one hand, then the other, left-right, left-right. The rhythm drew forth her life force, spurt by creamy spurt.

I didn’t fully understand the feelings of the cow until I became one. I had always imagined wanting to breastfeed my child. My mother breastfed me a long time, far past the point where I had gained the words to ask for it. So long, in fact, that when my mother took me to her gym’s daycare, I asked if the attendant had milk in her “babas” – my baby word for breast. No, my mother explained, Dorothy (likely at least 65 years old), didn’t have young children so her breasts no longer made milk.

“Couldn’t we put new batteries in them?” I asked, helpfully. 

I think of that hiss – the milk whizzing out as it hits against the pail – when my infant son wakes in the night demanding to be fed. A low, repeating, mournful wail announces his hunger and pulls me from my bed to sate him. Somewhere between sleeping and waking, his mouth gapes open and he searches for the source, latches, and draws forth the liquid on which his life depends. He nurses with firm yet steady pressure, drawing heavily to slake his thirst, and I hear an echo of the same repeating hiss of the milk moving at velocity through the nipple, my lifeforce leaving my body to sate his hunger.

The pregnant mother’s body overflows with blood, pressing outward on the veins, arteries, and skin. It expands by at least half its previous volume to carry the nutrients the unborn child needs through the placenta and umbilical cord, and give the baby its own lifeblood. And then the baby comes and where does it go? Of course some of it follows the infant and placenta out of the womb. But much stays behind to feed the child.

I trace the dark blue veins across the pale white skin of my breast and imagine the machinery my body has fashioned behind those paper-thin walls to turn blood into milk for the benefit of my baby. During pregnancy, I felt my breasts swell with the infrastructure of lactation, but it wasn’t until my milk “came in” that the power really came on. Like a water purification plant, a few days after birth, the pumps hummed to life, alchemizing my blood into a form my son can easily take from me, which I give to him willingly, day or night. 

The bond that emerges between mother and child is anchored by the breast. In the first three months of his life, my child fed anywhere from 10 to 15 times a day for up to an hour at a stretch. By eight months, he is showing steady interest in solid foods and sipping from a straw and I consider supplementing with formula. But I reach for the ingredient list and read first, corn syrup solids and second, palm oil and I have read enough to know this is no substitute for the essential nourishment my body makes just for him. 

But breastfeeding is so much more than just nutrition. It is comfort after his first vaccination and reassurance after a bad dream or a long journey. It is the one thing that can always induce calm when he is beside himself, upset, a familiar place of comfort he can retreat to whenever he needs. It is also the emotional foundation of intimacy. Five times a day for a dozen or so minutes, I lie belly to belly with my child. His lower hand pillows the underside of my breast while his upper hand searches for a finger to hold, his tiny hand pulsing against mine. I resist the urge to use this time “productively” by losing myself in my phone. His eyes gaze up at my face and I look down at him and marvel at the being my body has created. 

Still, the world demands work and soon I hope he will wean himself of one of these feeds. So I lash a phalange to my breast to draw the milk out so he can sip it from a cup instead of sucking it from the breast. And yet again, I am the cow. But this time not one of the farmer’s small herd being milked by loving hands but one cow among hundreds – thousands? – standing hip to hip, stanchion to stanchion, with her fellow bovine, stripped of her young that has been taken elsewhere to be fed his own infant formula while a vacuum sucks her dry – two, three, four times a day? – for the benefit of our young. They are livestock after all, bred to feed the human hand that tends them, but I cannot help but empathize with the cow and the agony of her prolonged extraction. 

Sometimes, at night, after my son has sated his hunger, I shuffle into the kitchen, hungry too, searching for sustenance. I reach for the box of Corn Chex I have craved since pregnancy, the same cereal I ate with the raw cow’s milk decades ago, and pour myself a bowl. Long ago, I converted to plant milk (first soy, then almond, now oat), but in these early mornings, I reach past the oat milk for the jug of 2% our older children drink and pour it over the light mound of squares. Somehow, its taste is shockingly different, its own alchemy of somatic memory and nourishment – protein? vitamin D? iron? – my body craves. 

I eat the last square from the spoon and lift the bowl to my lips to slurp down the remaining liquid, faintly sweetened by corn flour, and I give thanks for the cow, who gave up her calf, so that my son and I can be whole.