The first thing you need to understand before I dive into the post-birth quagmire with Girda, is that the Lord saw fit to bless my baby sister with MY breasts. It’s that whole sibling rivalry thing revisited, “Mom, she took my belt!” “Mom, she’s making faces at me!” Mom, she has boobies and won’t give me any!” Yes, my sister is a 36 EE, and I… I am a 32 A minus. In fact, to add insult to injury, my nipples don’t even stick out! What sort of sick sense of humor does it take to give a flat-chested woman “innies?”
Prior to knowing that I was doomed with a life-sentence of flat-chestedness, I was just as thrilled as any other 11-year-old to go out with my mother and purchase my first “Training Bra.” This contraption of straps and two tiny triangles of lacy fabric would become cell keeper to my rib cage for the next 5 years. In those 5 years I learned how to french-kiss, how to dance, and how to wiggle my training bra back in to place without being noticed. Finally at age 16, I came to the realization that my breasts had been in training for quite some time, and apparently they hadn’t learned a damned thing! The “Training Bra” was discarded along with other items of childhood fantasy like my tiara and the fake ruby slippers I had kept hidden in my closet for years. I was never to be a princess, and I was never to model for
I find it funny that though flat as a board, I must still suffer through the embarrassment of the yearly breast exam performed by my gynecologist. Like I wouldn’t notice some lump that had attached itself to my ribs? On one occasion the doctor was inspecting me with a look of concentration on his face and stated, “I seem to have found a small lump on your left side.”
My simple reply was “Thank-goodness! Can you find my right one too?”
I was ecstatic when I finally became pregnant! First, I was going to have a baby! Second, I was suddenly an “A” cup! A real “A” cup! Like, I could actually wear a grown-up bra without the worry of finding it nestled up under my arm pits at the end of the day! I’d been waiting 25 years for this.
Of course there was also the down-side. Suddenly as I trotted down the stairs, there were these two lumps on my chest that seemed to have developed a life of their own. They were bouncing! And they were SORE! When I lay on my side at night, they were there… pinching themselves between my arm and body. It took some getting used to (though my husband adjusted pretty quickly). Unfortunately my poor little nipples seemed to be confused and upset by the changes. They hid deeper inside, only coming out in the extreme cold, but rushing back to their hiding places as soon as the goose-pimples had subsided. It got so bad that around the 7th month of pregnancy, they even started to cry at night!
About this time, I started to read up on breast-feeding. It was made clear through the television and the pamphlets at the doctor’s office that only mothers possessed by Satan himself did not breast-feed their babies! From the looks of it, some states might even have pressed charges in if a mother was found purchasing formula for a minor! But what I read concerning breast-feeding started to frighten me…
“Hold the baby in the crook of your arm. Gently touch his lower lip with your finger until he starts to ‘root’ or look for your nipple. Bring your breast to your baby’s face and place your nipple in his mouth.”
Are we talking about a breast or a garden hose? “Bring your breast to your baby’s face…?” The only thing I was going to be bringing anywhere was my baby to the thing that looked like a halved orange stuck to my chest because I was pretty sure it wasn’t going anywhere! Hmmmm… was this going to be a problem?
So finally my baby was lying in my arms.
“The lactation coach will be here in about 5 minutes.” The day-nurse warned me. Well, looking back I say “warned.” I suppose at the time she “told” me that the nurse would be in.
And in came Girda!
The best way to visualize Girda is that large, Viking woman in the opera, but without the horns (or, at least, you couldn’t actually see them). Vit a very tick German accent she sait, “Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
“Hi, my name is Leigh and this is my son Jacob.”
“Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
“What’s your name?”
“Girrrrdahhh. Tak ovv your tup, pleez.”
As I began to wonder if the next sentence would be ‘Vee haff vays ov makink you tak ovv your tup!’ I quickly began opening my gown. Before I was even fully exposed, a large mutton-like hand had shot out and adhered itself to my tiny, sore, orange-half boobie.
“Hmmmm… dis iz nut verrrry goot. Do you haff nipplez?”
“Uh, yeah… they’re just innnn-aaaaaahhhhhh! Um, I guess you found them, huh?”
“Uummmm-hmmmm.”
“Am I going to have trouble because I’m small?”
She stood back with her arms crossed over her ample chest while she scrutinized the situation. “In uull my twenty-fife yerrs ov teaching dis, noboooty walk out ov hospital not
(Did the rest of them get rolled out in body-casts? This was not a good start!)
Girda broke my panic-stricken silence with “Let me haff your niplez again.”
Like I had a choice.
“Deez are not too goot for feedink baby.”
She held Jacob against me and appeared to be attempting to stuff my entire breast into his mouth. After torturing us both to her satisfaction for the next 30 minutes, she announced, “Teachink baby to nurzz frum you like teachink him to nurse frum wall. He can nut latch on to sometink he can nut finte. Zo now I tell ladees, in uull my twenty-fife yerrs ov teaching dis, der voss only one who did nut.”
And with that, she left.
While I was sitting there in shock, my husband came in with a bottle of formula.
“What, things didn’t go so well? I was just in the sitting room with Sgt. Neilson’s wife and she said she never even needed the coach.” he said innocently.
As soon as I found my voice, I replied “If you think it’s so damn easy, why don’t you give it a try?”
In the years since that time, I have discovered that babies do fine on formula, you won’t be arrested for not breast-feeding, and a little thing called the Miracle Bra. I have a wonderful, healthy son, a nice figure in clothes, and plenty of extra room in my bra to carry my wallet, keys and makeup. I can proudly state to anyone who asks,
“Yes! These are 100% natural… cotton.”
No comments:
Post a Comment