Boob Chart

            We reached a standstill. My daughter Mavis slumped into her chair at the dining room table in a pout. I took a deep, theoretically calming breath and adjusted the crumb-strewn placemat in front of me. A moment of domestic refuge from the swell of emotions in my chest.

            “Honey, we’ve been over this. It needs to stop now.”

            “I know.” Mavis hung her head.

            I felt relief that she hadn’t turned combative as she had in the past. Or lash out, double down on the righteousness of her position.

            I readjusted my black tank top over the hole-pocked waistband of my leisure pants. I leaned forward in Real Talk Mom posture.

            “I don’t know what else to do, sweetie. You know that it’s not okay. It’s disrespectful of my body and me.”

            She shrugged. Her usual boisterousness reduced to a limp resignation. “I know, but I just love it.” She said.

            “I know you do, but it’s my body.”

            Past attempts to address the issue at hand included loss of her daily treat, which in my middle-class faux-post-boho Portland milieu translates to a graham cracker with a squirt of honey on weekdays. On weekends, we up the treat ante with a bona fide sweet from the bakery or an ice cream. Or, more frequently, something from her candy basket, which harbors remnants from the big three candy-gathering holidays: Halloween, Christmas, and Easter. By late summer, the basket harbors a few mystery flavor Dum-Dums, a Ziploc bag of Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans (who wants to risk popping a “barf” bean?) and half-eaten Peeps. The promise of the words “candy basket” belie its humble contents.

            Mavis looked up at me. “Did I lose my treat?”

            “No, sweetie. Do you want to lose your treat?”

            She shook her head.

            “But we need to figure this out,” I said.

            Now that she is knocking on the doorway to eight years old, we try to engage her in problem-solving whenever possible, per all the Real Simple articles and the bits of parenting blogs I allow myself to peruse when I reach an impasse on a particular issue. Sleep interruptions, potty-training strategies, fear of a fictional character that steals children from their homes: Mommy blogs have you covered. But I’ve yet to Google the strategies in dealing with a kid who won’t stop grabbing at her mother’s boobs years after the time for boob-grabbing has ended. Like five years after weaning.

            “I have an idea!” Mavis said, the sparkle back in her hazel eyes. “A boob chart! Like when I was potty-training.”

            There haven’t been many habits we’ve tried to break or encourage without passing through the Chart Phase. Chores, potty-training, and sleep training were all met with a graphed piece of cardboard, the squeak of the red magic marker, and a bevy of glittery dog and unicorn stickers. Parenting advice held that giving too much of a reward for using the bathroom would instill a bad lesson—that everything deserves a piece of candy or a new toy. But stickers occupy a sweet spot. They are a physical reward of a job well-done, but aren’t too valuable for kids to get the wrong idea and metamorphose into entitled monsters.

            Mavis expounded on her plan. “We could make a chart and then every day that I don’t touch your boob, I get a sticker. And if I get to a week straight with stickers then I get something special like an ice cream cone or doing a special activity with you,” she said.

            I am a sucker for the “special activity with you” reward. It means that my presence is a reward. I know this classification is fleeting. The days when my presence transforms into a dark cloud of uncoolness loom on the horizon. I am on borrowed time. If my adolescence is any indication, I’ve got four years at best.

            “Okay, that sounds good,” I said.

            “And we could put charts in every room so that I remember not to grab your boobs,” she said, proud.

            “But shouldn’t you remember that you shouldn’t grab my private parts without putting a chart in every room? You’re a big kid now,” I said.

            “I know, but I love it.”

            Mavis loves what she loves. She loves soccer, Chopped Junior, random, spastic dancing, and dogs. Most of all, she loves my boobs. Not just any boobs as I have clarified with her time and again, but mine in particular. She presses her face into my chest and steals a kiss through the thick weave of my sweater. Or she runs a hand up my t-shirt to caress a swell of side-boob, defending the swipe with a faux-innocent claim. “What? I didn’t touch your nipple!”

            Before we reached this impasse, I joked that she was worse than a creepy teenage boy. That when she reached into my shirt, she was acting like Donald Trump—the first true villain aside from the child-stealing book character to haunt her life—and, as a firm member of the I’m With Her camp, she flew into a rage at this comparison.

            “I am not Donald Trump!”

            “You can’t walk around grabbing people’s boobs,” I said.

            “But I don’t grab anyone else’s. Just yours,” she said.

            That is some relief. When she was three, I fielded the call from her preschool teachers that she and her BFF were caught checking out each other’s private parts behind a bush on the playground, and handled it with aplomb. But I’m not sure how I would react to charges of groping by my almost-eight-year-old.

            Mavis’ appreciation of my breasts started early. Minutes after she was born she was ready to nurse, her powerful suck so strong—yet misguided—that she left my right tit strewn with hickies. And later, after a couple of days of tears and failed nursing attempts, she left me bleeding from my nipples. I was not one of the Earth Mothers to whom nursing comes naturally. I had a willing baby with a strong sucking reflex, but something was off. The positioning of her mouth, the angle, my overly sensitive boobs. In the early days of Mavis, I had to nurse her every two to three hours to quell her cries of hunger. After two days and several incidences of bleeding nipples later, a dread took hold in my guts every time I heard her hungry whimper. I can deal with discomfort. I had just endured a nine-month marathon of discomfort punctuated with a head tearing out of my vagina. But something about trying to feed your child through screaming pain and sleep deprivation felt like a devastating wave crashing over me. I needed a life preserver—and fast, before I was swept under by the miserable rotation of feeding, pain, dread, then more feeding.

            I spent the moments when I wasn’t holding Mavis or trying to feed her without dissolving into a puddle of blood, sweat, and tears, Googling breastfeeding techniques, common problems and their solutions. I thought I was doing it right. A week after Mavis was born, we met with a lactation consultant who told me, in her charming Irish brogue, that Mavis was getting the food she needed and she gained the necessary ounces after a feeding, but that my discomfort was indeed a problem. She showed me ways to help Mavis’ latch be less painful. New holds and positions that promised an end to my agony. But still, the pain persisted. When she nursed, droplets of blood bubbled on the tip of my nipple. I bit my lip. Tears slid down my cheeks and onto Mavis’. I took comfort in the Mommy blogs that assured me formula was an option if breastfeeding didn’t work. I’m not sure where my determination to keep nursing was rooted. Maybe in fear. Fear of disapproving looks from the Earth Mothers of southeast Portland, from the articles I would read my whole life about how my petty need for comfort had cost my daughter IQ points. Mostly I feared my own mind, which had become alien terrain fuzzed by sleep deprivation and punctuated by electric zaps of panic at every mundane thing that conspired to hurt my baby. I was so riddled with fear, you could probably see sunlight through the wounds in my body during those first days of motherhood.

            But I persisted.

            Through the blood and pain and terrifying Google sessions, I whipped out my raw breast and fed my daughter. I found comfort in bingeing episodes of True Blood while I nursed Mavis. I identified with the vampires’ victims. I was one of them on a three-hour rotation.  

            Then one day, as if by magic, it stopped hurting. My tits toughened up.  When the friends I had regaled with my tales of nursing misery asked what had changed, I truly had no idea. My technique hadn’t significantly altered and Mavis was sucking as deeply as ever. Like when I started playing bass and my fingers erupted in bleeding blisters before turning to callouses, my breasts had grown seasoned.

            Nursing then took on the magical qualities espoused in the mothering books and blogs I’d read. I felt strong being able to feed my daughter and relished the moments of reprieve from the world when we could focus on each other, our eyes locked while I cradled her tiny body in my elbow or on the best baby shower gift ever, the Boppy. Sometimes her lips formed a smile around my nipple as she laughed at some private baby joke. Others she pounded her fist against my chest in an exuberant joy. I felt grateful for my persistence, rewarded for all the bloody nipples.

            And when I returned to work and had to program my day around my pumping schedule—including lugging two saddlebags to carry all my pumping gear on my bike—I didn’t flinch. Feeding Mavis was important. And she was the most important thing in the world to me.

            Of course, I sometimes felt like a cow needing to be milked when the familiar tingle called me to the pump. And I plowed through boxes and boxes of disposable nursing pads when the reusable ones did not prove up to the task of stemming the tide of my leaking breasts. But it was worth it to see that face, to feel that connection.

            During those first two years when I arrived home from work, Mavis gave chase as soon as I walked in the door, plaintively crying, “Boob! Boob! I want boob!”

            Many mothering books advised coming up with a sly name for nursing to lessen embarrassment, as if a child crying “I want num-nums” is somehow less egregious than the simplicity of “boob.” We are an anti-euphemistic family. We call a fart a fart, a vagina a vagina, and a boob a boob. Tit, boob, breast. Boob is the middle ground between the crude “tit” and the high-falutin’ “breast.” “I want boob,” she cried. A lot of people do.

            The next hiccup in our idyllic nursing world came when, at Mavis’ three-month checkup, her doctor determined she was too small. Holding steady in the three-percent weight range for her age, she was labeled “failure to thrive” even though she hit all of the benchmarks and showed no other problematic signs. Pictures from those times are shocking. She looks skinny, her arms little sticks, her eyes lively but her cheeks hollow. Even more shocking since she now is off-the-charts in terms of height for her age—literally, she is listed as 99+ percentile—and in the ninety-seventh percentile for weight. But even though she was eating enough and I was pumping within the normal range, she wasn’t gaining weight like she should.

            I felt like a failure. When I pumped, I kept going even when my tits were bone dry. The wheeze and click of the pump a soundtrack to my anxious hopes. Maybe if I kept pumping, I could increase my production and Mavis’ numbers would climb out of the “failure to thrive” range. I admonished myself to relax. Stress can impact milk production, but I couldn’t outrun my own mind as I pumped and stared despondently at the plastic bottle only a quarter full of milk. I fixated on the hash marks printed on the bottle, praying that I could fill past the two-ounce line. My jealousy of the mothers whose milk production was so bountiful they could donate to breast milk banks was palpable. I flashed back to the months after my pre-Mavis miscarriages, when I saw people walking hand-in-hand with toddlers. How their parenthood felt so effortless, how I was failing at something that came easy to the rest of the world. Intellectually, I knew that was not true. Most struggles with infertility are invisible. The same held true for nursing challenges. But what I knew in my mind was no match for the feelings rushing through my new mother body.  

            After a visit to a feeding clinic, it was determined that Mavis would need to supplement with formula. All the doctors involved were extremely respectful and careful with me.

            “You are doing everything right. Your milk production is fine. She just needs a little extra. Just until she catches up.” They said.

            I didn’t believe them. I still loved nursing Mavis, but the moments were more fraught. I wasn’t enough for her. Despite my efforts, I had failed.

            “If we were living in the wilderness she would die,” I told Josh during one of my self-flagellation ceremonies.

            “But we aren’t living in the wilderness. And she’s going to be fine. She is fine.”

            After four months of feeding her extra formula, which she happily gulped, her weight caught up. She was officially thriving. She started eating solid food a few months after we added formula to her diet. But even with the addition of all the new tastes, she showed no signs of slowing on her love of nursing. I read tearful accounts of kids turning up their noses at their mother’s naked breast, “No more num-nums.” Or, more commonly, of mothers returning to work and being forced to wean before they were ready.  I was lucky on both counts. I was burning through more bike tires than usual thanks to lugging a heavier load, but I kept pumping even as I envisioned the freedom of ferrying only one saddlebag between home and office. Such bliss!

            Three months after her third birthday, I decided I was ready. I was tired of being chased around, of being fondled as Mavis smiled mischievously and said, “No fondling” in a cute mimic of my admonitions. I broached the topic with her the gentlest way I knew how.

            “Time to say bye-bye to boob,” I said.

            She smiled. “I say bye-bye to boob the day after tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow.”

            “Oh, I think we should pick a day sooner than that.”

            We marked it on the calendar with a sticker. In the run-up to the big day we joked about the end of nursing. Mavis cooed a rhyming babble, “I want moob. I want schmoob. I want goob!”

            We made it through the first afternoon relatively easily. Jokes and rhyming eased the transition. She even pretended to chase me around the house when I arrived home from work. Bedtime was the test. She has nursed before bedtime every night since she was born. Aside from bodily functions, nursing is the one thread that ties her to her days as a drooling baby. I cradled her in my arms and rocked her in the chair.

            “I want boob,” she whimpered.

            “I know sweetie. It’s bye-bye boob day so we aren’t having boob anymore. You are doing a great job. You’re such a big girl.”

            “Talk about when you were sad when you were a kid,” she said. One of her favorite genres of my childhood stories were tales of loneliness and disappointment.

            “When I was sad, I would think of fun things or things that I wanted to happen. Like building snow forts or the time I dreamed Wonder Woman was my cool teacher.”

            After each story ended, she insisted, “More.”

            Until, finally her eyelids were getting heavy. She pulled open my v-neck shirt and called to my chest, “Bye-bye, Snoop. Bye-bye, Loop.” Then she looked up at me. “Your boob names are Snoop and Loop.” I set her into her crib and felt the warmth of tears rush to my eyes.

            For a few months after, she crawled into my lap and pretended to nurse, smacking her lips while nestled into my chest. “I’m just pretending.”

            I experienced a few moments of hormone-induced craziness and regret, but mostly I was happy to have moved on from this stage of our relationship. We still snuggled. We still laughed. We still had private jokes.

            And Mavis still had a feeling of singular possessiveness over my breasts made evident by her continued grabs, caresses, and kisses.

            “Sweetie, no touching. No fondling. That is not okay!” I admonished to little effect.

            And almost five years later, here we are in our own Geneva Convention, negotiating our terms.

            Boobs are fun. They are wobbly and bouncy and weird and soft. Mavis makes all of these points. They are also a connection to me, to the former incarnation of us. My boobs make her feel safe and soothed.

            And for all the sweet arguments she makes for her continued boob adoration, I believe she also gropes me for more Trump-ian reasons. For power and control when she feels like she isn’t getting what she wants. The correlation isn’t direct. She doesn’t come at me, hands raised to tit level in the middle of a fight, but she has been known to do a walk-by grab after I have taken away a privilege for unrelated misbehavior.

            I wonder if I am sending her mixed messages. If my ambivalence about her growing up and eventually growing tired of me keeps me from being consistent in sanctioning her boob grabs. She no longer craps in a diaper, so I was clear about that behavior. She doesn’t bite us. She doesn’t burst onto a playground and declare that every piece of equipment is hers while shoving aside all children who get in her way. Curbing these behaviors was part discipline, part development. Am I alone in swatting my child’s hand away from my swinging breasts the moment I remove my bra?

            In this woman-objectifying world, a woman’s body can never truly feel like her own, especially in the wake of motherhood. Unless shrouded in a flowing caftan, breasts are looked at, examined, judged. My breasts still feel like they exist in a liminal state, of me but not totally mine. Public domain breasts.

            Shortly after my boobs entered public life when I was thirteen, I developed an armor, a defense against the groping and unwanted touching, out of necessity thanks to my first high school crush. Andy, the boy who proudly proclaimed he hugged girls to feel their tits press against his chest, was the first boy to feel me up during a basement party slow-dance while “Hotel California” crackled through the speakers, his beer-thick breath raising goose-pimples on my neck. I had never been kissed but yet here I stood with a boy I like-liked moving his hands over my chest for all to see—and whisper about. I froze. Did I like it? I felt electric, glittery, but also afraid. Dirty. What did this mean about me, about us? Was this my John Hughes moment when his hidden love for me was revealed? Did this mean he was my boyfriend? As was later hashed out in miserable teenage style, it meant nothing to Andy. He didn’t like me like that.

            “I was drunk. I’m sorry,” he said, pulling me in for a supposedly conciliatory hug. Dancing with me was too tempting. His hands couldn’t resist their hormonal walkabout.

            “I’m fine.” I mumbled. “I get it.”

            I decided I was fine. I had to be fine. They were just a body part. My lackadaisical attitude towards my boobs, which I cloaked alternately in sexual liberation or toughness, bloomed from this moment. A pernicious ivy that twined through my consciousness, making me question the authenticity of both my every response and the motivation of future boyfriends. Did I want a boy to touch my breasts or was it simply easier to let it happen? They were just a body part. In one respect, the transformation of my breasts to a non-sexual function in motherhood was a relief. Finally granted leave from their tour of sex-object duty.       

            After Mavis and I concluded our negotiations and decided to give plain old self-control another try before resorting to charts, I tucked her into bed. I remember the many phases of her bedtimes—the nursing making way for the time of the overly long tuck-in ritual, and now our bedtime stories. All things that I knew I would miss one day, and now I do.

            I wonder if I will wake up one day and think back wistfully to the days of her casual gropes, if I will have nostalgia for her single-minded adoration of this part of my body. If I will wish that we had created a Boob Chart for me to uncover from the overflowing bins of Mavis effluvia, and feel a bittersweet longing for the parenting problems of days gone by. Or maybe I will see the confident woman I hope Mavis will become, a woman who inhabits every part of her body with assurance that she controls her own destiny, tits and all, and will remember our struggles, our negotiations of where my body ended and her rights began. Her embodiment of her proud self its own reward.

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