Frank is concerned that the drugs I have to take to induce lactation will make me want to kill myself again, but on the warm June afternoon when I fill the domperidone prescription at Pharmasave, I find it hard to imagine. I keep telling people I don’t eat at McDonald’s anymore but we thought this was a special occasion, worthy of celebration, so I have a $1 Diet Coke slicking my left hand with its condensation, and I fumble one-handed with my wallet when the pharmacist asks how I would like to pay.
For weeks I tell everyone who will listen that these drugs are illegal in the United States of America, because I find it amusing when their jaws drop as though I’m committing some kind of elaborate healthcare fraud. Frank rolls her eyes. She reminds everyone that lots of useful, good things are illegal in the United States of America, like cannabis, and that domperidone is perfectly safe for those with low risk of cardiovascular disease. I stick my tongue out at her for ruining the fun. I like to feel illicit and brave, probably because I am really risk-averse and compliant.
After we pick up my medication, she takes me to the beach.
Your tits are gonna be so great, she says, picking her way over the polished ovoid stones. She never trips. I always do, and I almost drop my phone and shatter it as I follow her to the lapping water’s edge. The tide is low and the ocean stinks of kelp, brine, dead fish in the heat. It would be sunny, but the haze of wildfire smoke billowing west shrouds the sun gauzily like a demure bride, so it’s hot but not bright out, and Frank isn’t wearing her sunglasses, which she almost always wears. I squint at the water, greyish and calm.
My tits are already perfect.
Yes, obviously, but like, I’m not sure you understand how big they’re gonna get when you’re breastfeeding. It’s gonna be so great for me.
I look down at my tits. Do you think they’ll even out? Like will they grow equally and the left one will still be bigger or do you think the right one will grow more and they’ll be the same size?
She doesn’t answer because an eagle darts out of the trees that shield the cemetery behind us from the ocean wind, which can become violent and destructive at short notice, and dives to snatch a tiny silvery glistening fish from the waves.
Holy shit, says Frank.
Woah, I say at the same time.
For a while we stand there and look at the place where the eagle caught the fish, watching the ripples of where its claws punctured the ocean’s surface expand out in concentric circles and finally disappear.
I have to take a 20mg tablet three times a day and I am hungry all the time.
For breakfast I scramble four eggs and scarf them down with three slices of buttered toast, and usually then I start to feel like I should have eaten a vegetable, so I clumsily slice an avocado and douse it in hot sauce. Sometimes the hot sauce gives me acid reflux. I eat the avocados whether or not they are ripe, I buy seven every week, they cost an absurd amount of money. I tell Frank that they should have an independent budget line item. Frank says we are saving money on formula, even though we both know that we will have to supplement with formula whether the milk comes or not.
I have always struggled to eat at lunch, a side effect of different, unrelated blue capsules I take every morning so that I don’t sit slack-jawed at my desk for eight hours and get fired, but I have been told to stop taking these and see if I can “manage,” and so I roam around over the course of my entire lunch hour, looking for food: overpriced made-to-order deli sandwiches, snack-sized bags of Doritos, granola bars, apples and grapes and baby carrots and strawberries, space-age protein drinks with flavours like fruity cereal and salted caramel. I am fat to begin with, and I gain weight. My pants tighten. Thinned, glossy pink skin appears on my inner thighs, my belly, my breasts, which are growing, and which do look fantastic. After I shower, I stand naked and wet in the bathroom staring at myself in the mirror. Later, I’ll do this again, without quite so much joy and wonderment.
I run my thumb along the lines of my stretch marks. Some, on the underside of my soft belly, are wide enough to fit the outlines of my fingers: the damaged skin is impossibly soft. Frank contradicts me. It’s not damaged. Just changed. Her belly is stretching too, more dramatically, swelling as she builds neural pathways, tiny toy-sized organs, impossibly small and sharp fingernails and toenails.
If our baby has a uterus, I tell Frank, then you’re creating every single egg that they’ll ever have.
It’s something Frank told me, actually, once when we were first dating. Guacamole from my crispy chicken burrito smeared across my chin as she discussed intergenerational trauma in her family’s matriarchy. When my grandma was pregnant with my mom and all that shit happened, the egg that was gonna be me already existed.
I could eat three or four of those ginormous Tex-Mex monstrosities for supper these days. More often than not, we’re both too tired to cook. I think it’s foolish to spend money on takeout when there is a baby coming. Frank reminds me winkingly that fed is best.
There is domperidone, but there is also a hormone regimen: I am back on a birth control pill for the first time since I was twenty years old. Progesterone and estrogen made me crazy back then. My pediatrician put me on them for acne when I was eighteen, and I kept taking them all through college, a handful of ill-advised situationships with men. Then I ceased to need them, and ceased to take them. The blister packs remind me of an anxiety I haven’t felt in ten years.
I don’t like to take the birth control pills. They’re tiny and pink, gendered candies, except the white placebo pills, which I must skip. I push the tablets out of the blister pack like popping pimples. Six weeks before the baby is born, I will quit cold turkey. I will bleed. I will carry on with domperidone, until, my doctor says, I achieve a substantial milk supply or I am ready to wean the baby.
Achieve, Frank says in air quotes, eyebrows raised.
Any amount of milk production is an achievement, our doctor corrects herself. About stopping domperidone, she says, you’ll know.
I must begin pumping before the baby is born. Every three hours for seven minutes, so I will already be sleep-deprived when they arrive. I must pump, I must massage, I must pump again. Frank likes to watch, then step in, her soft, nurse-competent hands on my chest, shaking the milk free. In the night, I roll out of bed and stumble into the next room so the hum of the pump won’t wake her, but my moving always does. She opens one eye at me and I grin and lift my shirt.
I’m practicing, I say, so I won’t complain about never sleeping.
Frank sleeps all the time. Pregnancy has exhausted her. I’m preparing, she counters. She’s polite, and pretends not to care that I wake her up.
All summer, the fires keep burning. At work, I comment that we are having another drought, and a scientist informs me that we have in fact been in drought conditions this whole time, regardless of the wet winter. That’s behind us now, and the sky’s shroud darkens from hazy grey to an ominous reddish-orange. All the grass is yellow and dry. When I wait for the bus to work, I try to breathe as little as possible under my KN95. We don’t open any of our windows, and so we must also keep the curtains drawn, blocking out the sun, refusing to let the apartment heat up. Once it’s hot it’s impossible to get cool again.
While pumping, I google do wildfires affect breast milk.
The AI summary tells me that the stress of evacuation can decrease my milk production.
do wildfires affect breast milk – AI
pollutants breast milk – AI
wildfire smoke lactation – AI
Every pill is a prayer, and with each one, I believe a little less that the milk will really come. I tell Frank my childhood biblical stories, fleeing slavery in Egypt for the Promised Land flowing with milk and honey.
She says, how come no one talks about how anti-slavery the Bible is?
Well, they ended up wandering lost in the desert for forty years.
She squeezes my tits. That won’t happen to you.
I do want to kill myself on the hormones, a little. I sit naked on the toilet and cry for an hour, imagining the baby in therapy in thirty years talking about how I ruined her life. In this compulsive daydream, the baby looks exactly like me complaining about my own mother in therapy. I imagine wildfires that inch closer and closer to our temperate rainforest island every summer and no way to evacuate. It’s selfish to have a baby in a burning world, and here we are doing it. Our baby will never breathe clean air at the lake, I tell Frank frantically. Our baby will never get to sing around a campfire.
I love the baby so much that I tell Frank I want to crawl up inside her and live in her uterus with the baby.
I think it’ll be crowded in there. But I’d be happy to have you.
We settle for sex, my fist inside Frank to the wrist. She comes in a flood all over my arm and I lap it up and feel better. We use baby wipes to clean ourselves up, too hot and tired to shower.
I pump for two weeks and nothing comes. My breasts are swollen, heavy, and still uneven, the t-shirts that are all I ever wear now stretched tightly over them. I have to start wearing bras again, to stop my nipples from rubbing against my clothing and aching. Almost every day, I call the doctor and ask if this is normal.
Everyone is different, says our doctor. There’s still a lot of time. I’m not concerned at all.
She suggests fenugreek. I brew it into tea and stop drinking coffee. Without caffeine, the world fogs up. Everything seems to take longer, like I’m moving through deep water. When I shower, ash rinses out of my hair and I watch it stream over my unfamiliar body, pool on the fiberglass. I sit on the floor of the tub and let cold water run over me wondering whose home is sliding down the drain.
Milk comes two weeks before the baby. Four hundred wildfires are burning across the country, but in the dark, it’s harder to tell: you can’t see the lifeless staring eye of the sun, just a benign, starless night. I am looking out the window, double pumping, watching a video of someone cooking fiddlehead ferns on my phone. I’m not excited when the clear drops ooze out, I’ve seen them before and they’ve always disappointed me. The influencer, a forager and a chef, advises me on the importance of blanching the fiddleheads after boiling, to avoid mushiness. They coil inwards, perfect green scrolls.
When I look down again, the drops are opaque, white-ish. For a ridiculous moment they remind me of semen, and then I can’t help myself, I shriek. It is three in the morning, stifling, humid, twenty degrees. Tears mingle with my sweat and I stop pumping, I massage, I watch food come from me.
Katherine DeCoste is a queer, neurodivergent writer who lives on unceded Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm) territory with their fiancé and cat. Their work has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2, The New Quarterly, Grain Magazine and elsewhere. You can find them online at katherinedecoste.com.
