Unlatched by Jennifer Grayson

Author:Jennifer Grayson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

eight

Breasts Are for Men

So what is it about this small gland of postnatal nourishment that puts a great nation in a dither? . . . Perhaps the problem has to do with generations of men who didn’t get enough nipple when it really counted.

—GLENN O’BRIEN

“I don’t know if you want me to go into the personal details,” my mom hedged. Truth be told, I really, really didn’t. But I was now thirty-five years old, with two children of my own, and still, I had never heard the full story about why I hadn’t been breastfed as a baby. Of course, I knew it had something to do with the fact that I was born at a time when the overwhelming majority of mothers formula-fed. In 1979, the year I was born in New York City, only 29 percent of new moms breastfed their babies after birth in the hospital (versus 89 percent today), even though some public attention had shifted to the issue that same year and, in an across-the-board effort to increase rates, the New York City Department of Health had begun to gather hospital data on breastfeeding. But I had long suspected that there was another reason for my milk-deprived childhood, one having to do with a subject that few daughters of any age want to talk about with their mothers: sex.

During the years since I had started breastfeeding my own children, my mother had tossed off remarks here and there about why she hadn’t used her own breasts to feed me, as well as my younger brother. She had mumbled something about how my father (her long-estranged ex-husband) had been the real baby in the family. “He was rather, um, possessive about my breasts,” I think she had said, but I wasn’t sure.

Now here I was on the phone, ready to officially interview her and already starting to cringe. I felt just as I had as a preteen, packing my bag for sleep-away camp, when my mother pounced on me with a pile of sanitary napkins “just in case” and then promptly launched into “the talk.”

I decided to put on my serious journalist persona and thus block whatever awkwardness the conversation might evoke. And I would use the same tactic, I decided, when I contacted my father—whom I hadn’t spoken with in years—for the necessary follow-up for my “unbiased” story. Ugh, I thought, is eleven a.m. on a Wednesday too early to start drinking?

“Are you still there, sweetheart?” my mom asked, on the other end of the line.

“Uh, yeah. Sorry. I really don’t want the personal details, but I kind of need them,” I said. “Can you give them to me as gently as possible?”

Before she could speak, I heard my stepfather’s voice near her as he evidently passed through the room. We both burst into giggles at the comic relief.

“I’m doing my breastfeeding interview now, sweetheart,” she told him. I could hear her trying to shoo him away.

“Anything I should be worried about, Jen?” he called to me and laughed.

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