Friday, November 19, 2004
something I wrote in a writing class seven or eight years ago...
By “nurse”, I mean not only women hired to suckle other people’s infants but also those who suckle their own. The following are the ailments with which nurses are most afflicted: gradual wasting, hysterics, pustules and scabies, headache, vertigo, respiratory troubles, and weak eyesight, and they are liable to many other disorders, especially in the breast when milk is so abundant, when it curdles in the breasts, when these become inflamed or suffer from an abscess or cracks in the nipples. I tis easy to understand how atrophy and wasting may result from long-continued suckling ( Facile esta autem cincipere, quomodoex diurturna lactatione sequator atrophia and contabescentia) … (From Diseases of Workers)
As an adolescent, the first sign I had that I was really a woman was when my nipples began to swell and ache, like miniature breasts in themselves and I realised that the real thing would fill out behind them I didn’t like the idea; it was summer and the imposition of a new, restrictive piece of clothing for the rest of my life seemed most unfair, even faintly sexist when I observed the cool, bare torsos of the boys.
While my breasts grew, I felt as self-conscious as if I was naked; for a while my recurring dreams were of walking down the street in my hometown and suddenly discovering I was in fact naked.
With the breasts came all the other manifestations of femaleness, like a sign around my neck - “Open for Business” - and men responded with wolf-whistles and cat calls and gropes, a wave of lust and desire continually washing over me. Sometimes it knocked me over.
He wrote to me: “For the six months we fucked, not a day went past that I was not grateful to have access to your breast, your warm, resiliently fleshy, bury-your face-in breasts. And I never once felt unwelcome there.”
I remembered aching breasts and a rash across my chest caused by his unshaven chin.
I could not feed my children. Before the births, my breasts rounded and leaked in anticipation, but almost immediately afterwards they dried up and refused to function. Instead of curling up in bed in the cold winter with my baby on my breast, I would have to leap out of bed and boil bottles, heat formula, while my sons fretted and howled alone in a cot.
Useless as nipples on a man: an insult, one that encapsulated for me the real advantage of the female form - in a non-combative, white-collar world, brawn and bulk was useless and even a little old-fashioned, while a woman might still be connected to her animal being by the mere fact of having nipples.
But I found that my femaleness was as flawed and wished instead for brawn and bulk. Feeding or not, I lost weight at the rate of about a kilogram a week, for three months each time, forgetting to eat as I lost track of sunrise and sunset, surrounded by nappies and bottles and creams and the constant sound of a hungry baby.
When John was six and having trouble reading, my doctor - my female doctor - asked me why I hadn’t breast fed him. “You must know that there’s a measurable correlation between breastfeeding and IQ,” she said. I stepped up my after-school tutoring to an hour and a half. I was working 60 hours a week, two jobs, to feed them, and I was still a bad mother.
In court, the defence barrister inquired as to my bra size, and the size of my uniform, and the colour of my bra under that white uniform, for all the world like a heavy breather on the telephone. I stood in the witness box with my breasts demurely covered under my black jacket, as they’d been the night the line supervisor raped me.
That night, for the first and only time, I struck my child. Rohan cried for a week, late at night when he thought I couldn’t hear him.
It’s not that I didn’t want another man. There just never seemed to be time, and as tired morning followed exhausted night, it took me a while to realise that the face in the mirror wasn’t just suffering from lack of sleep, or a bad cold, or not enough sunlight. I was just getting old.
Mr Andrews pulled the cap off a black texta marker and leaned over me. “I can move these” - he circled my nipples - “to here. And this” - a line below my 41-year-old breast - “up to here.” In my handbag beside the consulting room table, a nude photograph of Charlotte Rampling was folded inside an envelope with the referring letter from my GP. I must have been mad. And now that this has happened, I can’t stop thinking “I could have taken the kids to Disneyland, or Europe with that money, or bought them new bikes.” Or something to remember me by.
The weirdest thing is that it’s so small, not at all dramatic. Wouldn’t you expect a hooded bloke with a scythe, or at least a thunderclap? My end began with a small, hard lump like a piece of gravel in your shoe, something you shake out and keep walking. So small that if I hadn’t been such a goody-two-shoes with my regular breast checks, I sometimes wonder if it mightn’t have gone away by itself.
Denial. Anger. Acceptance. I’m still looking for acceptance, and will be until the day I die. It won’t be long now.
By “nurse”, I mean not only women hired to suckle other people’s infants but also those who suckle their own. The following are the ailments with which nurses are most afflicted: gradual wasting, hysterics, pustules and scabies, headache, vertigo, respiratory troubles, and weak eyesight, and they are liable to many other disorders, especially in the breast when milk is so abundant, when it curdles in the breasts, when these become inflamed or suffer from an abscess or cracks in the nipples. I tis easy to understand how atrophy and wasting may result from long-continued suckling ( Facile esta autem cincipere, quomodoex diurturna lactatione sequator atrophia and contabescentia) … (From Diseases of Workers)
As an adolescent, the first sign I had that I was really a woman was when my nipples began to swell and ache, like miniature breasts in themselves and I realised that the real thing would fill out behind them I didn’t like the idea; it was summer and the imposition of a new, restrictive piece of clothing for the rest of my life seemed most unfair, even faintly sexist when I observed the cool, bare torsos of the boys.
While my breasts grew, I felt as self-conscious as if I was naked; for a while my recurring dreams were of walking down the street in my hometown and suddenly discovering I was in fact naked.
With the breasts came all the other manifestations of femaleness, like a sign around my neck - “Open for Business” - and men responded with wolf-whistles and cat calls and gropes, a wave of lust and desire continually washing over me. Sometimes it knocked me over.
He wrote to me: “For the six months we fucked, not a day went past that I was not grateful to have access to your breast, your warm, resiliently fleshy, bury-your face-in breasts. And I never once felt unwelcome there.”
I remembered aching breasts and a rash across my chest caused by his unshaven chin.
I could not feed my children. Before the births, my breasts rounded and leaked in anticipation, but almost immediately afterwards they dried up and refused to function. Instead of curling up in bed in the cold winter with my baby on my breast, I would have to leap out of bed and boil bottles, heat formula, while my sons fretted and howled alone in a cot.
Useless as nipples on a man: an insult, one that encapsulated for me the real advantage of the female form - in a non-combative, white-collar world, brawn and bulk was useless and even a little old-fashioned, while a woman might still be connected to her animal being by the mere fact of having nipples.
But I found that my femaleness was as flawed and wished instead for brawn and bulk. Feeding or not, I lost weight at the rate of about a kilogram a week, for three months each time, forgetting to eat as I lost track of sunrise and sunset, surrounded by nappies and bottles and creams and the constant sound of a hungry baby.
When John was six and having trouble reading, my doctor - my female doctor - asked me why I hadn’t breast fed him. “You must know that there’s a measurable correlation between breastfeeding and IQ,” she said. I stepped up my after-school tutoring to an hour and a half. I was working 60 hours a week, two jobs, to feed them, and I was still a bad mother.
In court, the defence barrister inquired as to my bra size, and the size of my uniform, and the colour of my bra under that white uniform, for all the world like a heavy breather on the telephone. I stood in the witness box with my breasts demurely covered under my black jacket, as they’d been the night the line supervisor raped me.
That night, for the first and only time, I struck my child. Rohan cried for a week, late at night when he thought I couldn’t hear him.
It’s not that I didn’t want another man. There just never seemed to be time, and as tired morning followed exhausted night, it took me a while to realise that the face in the mirror wasn’t just suffering from lack of sleep, or a bad cold, or not enough sunlight. I was just getting old.
Mr Andrews pulled the cap off a black texta marker and leaned over me. “I can move these” - he circled my nipples - “to here. And this” - a line below my 41-year-old breast - “up to here.” In my handbag beside the consulting room table, a nude photograph of Charlotte Rampling was folded inside an envelope with the referring letter from my GP. I must have been mad. And now that this has happened, I can’t stop thinking “I could have taken the kids to Disneyland, or Europe with that money, or bought them new bikes.” Or something to remember me by.
The weirdest thing is that it’s so small, not at all dramatic. Wouldn’t you expect a hooded bloke with a scythe, or at least a thunderclap? My end began with a small, hard lump like a piece of gravel in your shoe, something you shake out and keep walking. So small that if I hadn’t been such a goody-two-shoes with my regular breast checks, I sometimes wonder if it mightn’t have gone away by itself.
Denial. Anger. Acceptance. I’m still looking for acceptance, and will be until the day I die. It won’t be long now.
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