The Lactation Station

It’s been four days since my partner sped down I-15 in a snowstorm while I screamed and pushed a human the size of a watermelon out my vagina. Now, my baby has turned a concerning shade of yellow and she’s lost too much weight. The pediatrician puts her on blue lights and gives me a pink business card: The Lactation Station. I envision a white train with a regal conductor—magical like the Polar Express at a gold station where pulleys suck milk out of broken breasts.

I clutch the baby car seat and shuffle through an icy strip mall parking lot. The Lactation Station is decorated in an unintentional mid-century modern. It smells like cheese. Cheap travel pumps sit next to an overstuffed rack of pastel nursing tops and the brown carpet is littered with salt, as if hundreds have already trudged through searching for lactation support this morning. 

An older man in a doctor’s white coat and a faded baseball cap stands behind the counter, guarding the special hospital grade pumps. Stupid with exhaustion, I over-explain my situation to a grey haired woman, hoping she finds me likable. I’ve spent every waking hour trying to wake up this floppy doll to feed. She peers at my baby: She looks too small is all she says. It’s true. 

She leads me to a curtained stall and instructs me to take off my bra so she can measure my stingy breasts. Can the baseball hat man see through the curtain? I’ve been drinking fenugreek tea to support lactation which makes me smell like maple syrup. I mention this, embarrassed, but she only nods. Has she noticed I’m not wearing temple garments? She doesn’t like me.

I’m a motherless mother in a new city. A trip to IKEA to buy a cheap crib that might fall apart reveals an entire world I’ve never known, of blonde mothers a decade younger than me, their bodies unscathed in Lululemon, pushing shopping carts full of mini versions of themselves. Preggos I meet at the gym are already on their fourth baby. They smile at my bump, but they didn’t need new friends. They have their villages dialed. Some come right out and ask when they hear I’ve just moved here: Are you LDS? One colleague asks: So, what do you think of us Mormons? Motherhood, which I’ve been promised will bond women together, only makes me feel more alone.

During my grief and arrival in Salt Lake City, I’ve become obsessed with genealogy, looking for female ancestors whose lives weren’t cut short like my mom’s. In the 1840s, my fourth great-grandmother, Belinda, ditched her husband in Boston and joined the Mormons. She married Parley Parker Pratt, one of the OG apostles of the new religion, as his third plural wife. She endured a twin pregnancy as they crossed the Great Plains on foot and wagon to settle in Utah. While many died, Belinda gave birth. In her diary, she describes surviving on thistles that winter, but her milk still flowed for the babies. They survived.       

   At the Lactation Station counter, the baseball hat man throws down the extensive rental contract. He cradles the gold pump in his arms and it feels like a deal with the devil.    

The gold pump turns my body into a milk machine and while my baby thrives, I don’t, experiencing a little known crushing hormonal depression that no one spoke of in the birthing class: Dysphoric Milk Ejaculation Syndrome. Every time my milk lets down, it’s the opposite of an orgasm—a broken elevator ride plummeting to the ground floor of despair. Within minutes, I come back to myself, and it repeats each time. I barely eat more than a bagel a day, yet I’m gaining weight along with my colicky baby who is smiling when she’s not screaming, who seems to be intent on not sleeping for the rest of her life. Fourteen years later, this is still true. 

Perhaps my milk cow body is in starvation mode like Grandmother Belinda’s. Has her trauma gene trickled down a few hundred years, so I too will survive? I hate her diary. Her boasting about eating thistles is the same as the moms in the online forums who seem to have so much help and happiness and ability to do things like travel and how all their weight fell off in a week with breastfeeding. I am alone, except for the newest addition to my ancestral line who has just tried avocados and rice cereal and seems to enjoy pureed blueberries the most.

In the summer, I let my milk dry up. I’m manic with freedom in my body as it sheds layers. I take my baby on hikes across the buttes where Grandmother Belinda arrived and suffered. The baby enjoys communicating with me and I tell her about my mother, and her mother’s mother, and all the way back to the OG who trekked the plains to this spot. 

They are contacting me, and I’m late. Other women need the gold pump. I park on the hot asphalt, lift my pudgy baby from the car seat and walk inside The Lactation Station. The grey haired woman and baseball cap man rise from their seats and I slide the pump across the counter.