pumping

I just spent 10 minutes with a machine sucking my nipple. I know, it sounds pornographic but really it’s for the well being of my child. It’s also for my own future independence. We have to make sure that he will take a bottle so we start pumping and feeding now. I warmed the bottle for Joerg and passed over my hard earned milk. He sat on the couch and gave it to little Lukas who greedily gobbled it up without any awareness that the food source was a plastic container and not the flesh of his loving mother. I wasn’t supposed to watch. I wasn’t supposed to even be in the room for fear that my smell, the smell of the real thing would cause him to wail for me. He would cry out “imposter” “phony” “fake” as he fought the forced bottle. But I couldn’t stay out of the room. I couldn’t allow a feeding to happen without me. How could it? I peeked around the corner and Lukas didn’t seem to mind at all. So I crept into the room and sat on the chair across from them. He ate without any notice of me. He simply drank and looked up at his father…his stray hand tapping the sides of the bottle. I wanted to take it back….put the milk back in…it’s my milk. I’m the food source. I am your link to life. Love me most. Need me most. I complained all along that I feel like I am nothing but a boob to him, that I want my body back. Well, here it is, ten minutes strapped up like a cow and I can have it back. But something doesn’t seem natural about all this. My son sits across from me drinking my milk from two days ago while I pump out more milk for him to have two days from now. He looks over at me. He is trying to understand the world, to make sense of things. I am supposed to help him understand this world. How can I when there is so much that leaves me baffled? What a strange place we live in. What strange things we do.