The Milk and the Madness

"My body went on making milk for a child I couldn't bear to feed. Even my own flesh wouldn't take my no for an answer."

My body betrayed me at dawn on the fourth day, or maybe the fifth—time had become elastic in this white room where day and night were marked only by medication schedules and shift changes. I woke to wet sheets and a pain different from the sutures, different from the trauma, different from anything except what it was: my milk coming in, fierce and undeniable, biology's cruel insistence that I was a mother whether I wanted to be or not.

The wetness spread across the hospital gown like accusations, two dark circles of evidence that my body had prepared for a baby it would never feed. The pain was specific, targeted, like someone had filled my breasts with broken glass—no, not glass, don't think about glass. Like someone had filled them with cement that was hardening, expanding, threatening to crack me open from the inside.

I rang for the nurse, not Margaret, not the hopeful young one, but someone new—the night shift bleeding into day, bringing Patricia, whose name-tag was worn and whose eyes suggested she'd seen everything and was surprised by nothing.

"My milk," I said, unnecessarily, the evidence already soaking through.

"Right then," Patricia said, business-like, already moving to gather supplies. "We'll get you sorted. Have you been binding?"

Binding. Like my breasts were wounds that needed dressing. Which maybe they were—wounds that leaked nourishment for a baby I couldn't nourish, wouldn't nourish, had tried to eliminate rather than feed.

She helped me sit up, and the movement made everything worse. The milk seemed to respond to gravity, to motion, to the mere acknowledgment of its existence. It flowed like tears I couldn't cry, like words I couldn't say, like all the things my body did without my permission.

"Cold cabbage leaves," Patricia said, producing them from somewhere like a magician with the world's most mundane trick. "Sounds mad, but they help. And we'll bind you tight, get you some medication to dry things up."

Cabbage leaves. I wanted to laugh at the absurdity—after everything, after the glass and the blood and the psychiatric evaluations, here I was being treated with vegetables. Patricia placed them against my skin, cold and foreign, and I thought about how many desperate women had done this before me, trying to stop their bodies from doing what bodies insisted on doing.

"Had a woman once," Patricia said as she worked, wrapping crepe bandages around me, "tried to nurse even though her baby had died. Kept pumping, kept producing, donated it all to the NICU for months. Couldn't stop. Said if she stopped, it would mean accepting he was gone."

"And me?" I asked. "What does it mean that I want to stop?"

Patricia paused in her wrapping, looked at me with eyes that held no judgment, only observation. "Means you're honest," she said finally. "Not every woman's meant to breastfeed. Not every woman's meant to mother the same way."

Not meant to mother. The words should have been condemnation, but from Patricia they sounded like absolution. Like permission to fail at this fundamental female function.

She finished binding me, and I felt like a mummy, wrapped and preserved, my body's rebellion contained but not conquered. The pressure helped with the pain but created its own discomfort—breathing became conscious work, existing in my body became even more unbearable than usual.

"The medication might make you a bit loopy," Patricia warned, handing me pills that looked innocuous enough. "Combined with everything else you're on. But it'll dry you up quick enough. Day or two."

Loopy. As if I wasn't already untethered, floating somewhere between sedation and agony, between motherhood and its rejection. I swallowed the pills dry, felt them stick in my throat like small stones—no, not stones, pills, just pills.

Patricia left, and I lay back against the pillows, feeling the cabbage leaves warm against my skin, already wilting from my body heat. The smell was subtle but unmistakable—cruciferous, vegetal, absurd. I was a garden of rejection, growing cabbage instead of nurturing babies.

The medication kicked in faster than expected, or maybe it was the combination with the Valium, the pain relievers, the antidepressants they'd started me on. The room began to shimmer slightly at the edges, like heat waves off hot pavement, like the world was melting just a little.

My mother appeared in the chair beside my bed, which was impossible, because I'd asked Noah not to tell her. No sense worrying her, I'd said, and he'd agreed, and that was the end of it—the way it was always the end of it, where my mother was concerned. She would understand. She always did. Understanding exactly as much as she wanted to was the one thing my mother had never failed at. But there she was, wearing the housedress she'd worn when I was young, the one with tiny flowers that looked like eyes if you stared at them too long.

"You're leaking," she said, not unkindly but with that particular maternal disappointment, like when I'd started my period and bled through my school uniform.

"I know," I told the hallucination, because what else do you say to your mother's ghost when she's commenting on your lactation?

"I leaked too," she continued, and I noticed she had wet circles on her housedress now, matching mine. "With you. For weeks. Ruined so many blouses. Your father complained about the expense."

My father. Who'd been absent even when present, who'd worked late to avoid the messiness of family life, who'd never noticed what happened in his house after dark because he was always conveniently unconscious, snoring through violations like a lullaby.

"Did you want to stop?" I asked my mother's apparition.

"Want?" She laughed, but it sounded like crying. "What did want have to do with anything? You were hungry. I fed you. That's what mothers do."

"But what if the mother is hungry too?" I asked. "What if she's been hungry since she was small? What if feeding others means starving herself?"

My mother flickered, became transparent, became the chair she wasn't really sitting in. "Then she learns to live on less," she said as she disappeared. "She learns to be empty."

The room was empty again, but not really. The ghosts were always there—not supernatural, just psychological, the residue of trauma that medication couldn't quite medicate away. The cabbage leaves were warming, wilting, becoming part of me or me becoming part of them. I couldn't tell anymore where my body ended and the intervention began.

A knock at the door, and Dr Campbell entered with his clipboard, his grey suit making him look like a storm cloud in human form. He didn't comment on the smell of cabbage or the obvious binding beneath my gown. Professional blindness to female physicality.

"How are we feeling today?" he asked, that medical "we" that suggested shared experience when really he had no idea what "we" were feeling.

"Bovine," I said, the word surprising me as it came out. "Like a cow whose calf has been taken away."

He made a note. Everything was always noted, documented, filed away for future reference. "That's quite dramatic imagery."

"Is it?" I gestured to my bound chest, the wet patches still visible. "My body is producing food for a baby it won't feed. If that's not dramatic, what is?"

"The medication will help," he said, retreating to the safety of pharmaceutical solutions. "Are you experiencing any unusual thoughts? Hallucinations?"

I thought of my mother in the chair, her matching wet circles, her advice about learning to be empty. "Nothing unusual," I said. "Just the normal madness of being female."

He frowned at that, made another note. "I think we should increase your antidepressant dose. The combination of hormonal changes and the... incident... means we need to be aggressive with treatment."

Aggressive treatment for aggressive action. Fight medication with medication. Drown the body's rebellion in chemistry until it forgot how to rebel.

"Whatever you think is best," I said, because resistance was pointless. They would medicate me whether I agreed or not. At least this way I could pretend it was my choice, could maintain the illusion of agency even as my milk leaked through the binding, evidence of my body's refusal to comply with my mind's decisions.

After he left, the day stretched into a haze of medication and discomfort. The cabbage leaves were changed—Patricia returning with fresh ones, cool and crisp, a salad bar of sadness against my skin. The binding was adjusted, tightened, like they were trying to compress not just my breasts but my entire self into something smaller, more manageable.

Noah came by in the afternoon, but I pretended to be asleep. I could feel him standing there, watching me, probably praying over me, asking his God to fix what his God had allowed to break. Through my closed eyelids, I could sense his shadow, the weight of his expectation that I would get better, would come home, would mother his children.

Our children. But they didn't feel like ours. Paul felt like someone I was babysitting indefinitely. Luke felt like a stranger who'd invaded my body and then been evicted. The milk my body produced for him felt like a betrayal, biology insisting on connection where none existed.

By evening, the medication had fully kicked in. The room swam in and out of focus. The cabbage leaves had been refreshed three times, and I'd begun to feel like I was becoming vegetable myself—rooted to the bed, photosynthesising under the fluorescent lights, producing nothing but oxygen and disappointment.

Patricia returned for the night shift, checking my binding, adjusting the leaves. "How's the pain?" she asked.

"Which pain?" I responded, and she actually smiled.

"Fair point. The breast pain specifically."

"Better," I admitted. "Duller. Like it's giving up."

"Your body will get the message eventually," she said. "No baby to feed, it'll stop producing. Nature's efficient that way."

Efficient. Unlike me, who'd taken the inefficient route—glass and blood and emergency surgery instead of just... what? What was the efficient way to handle pregnancy when pregnancy felt like occupation? What was the streamlined method for rejecting motherhood when it had already been forced upon you?

"Though sometimes," Patricia continued, adjusting my pillows, "the body keeps a memory. Phantom letdown, they call it. Years later, you'll hear a baby cry and feel that tingle, that rush, even though there's nothing there anymore."

Phantom letdown. Like phantom limbs. Like the body remembering what the mind tried to forget. I wondered if I'd carry this forever—not just the scar across my abdomen, but the sense memory of milk I never gave, love I never felt, motherhood I never wanted.

The night deepened, and with it came more hallucinations—or maybe they weren't hallucinations, maybe they were just thoughts made visible by too much medication and too little food. Luke appeared in the corner, not as he was—tiny and premature—but as he might be at five, at ten, at fifteen. All the ages I'd have to pretend to mother him through.

"Why?" the phantom Luke asked, and it was every child's eternal question to their damaged parents.

"Because," I answered, which was every damaged parent's non-answer.

The Luke-that-wasn't nodded like this made sense, then aged before my eyes—twenty, thirty, forty—each face heavier than the last, as if my fear were drawing the years onto him itself. I couldn't tell whether I was seeing something true about him or only the shape of my own dread. The medication never told me which.

"Will you ever love me?" he asked, now old, now dying, now back to being three pounds of premature baby.

"I'll pretend," I promised the ghost my fear had made of him. "I'll pretend so well you might not know the difference."

"But you'll know," he said, fading into the corner's shadows.

"I'll know," I agreed.

Morning came eventually, or what passed for morning in the hospital's eternal fluorescent day. Patricia returned to change my cabbage leaves one last time, the smell now so familiar it had become part of my identity—the woman who reeked of cruciferous vegetables and failure, whose body leaked nourishment for no one, whose milk would dry up unused like love unexpressed.

"Better today?" she asked, and I nodded because it was expected, because "better" was the trajectory I was supposed to follow, even if better just meant different, meant numbed, meant learning to live with the body's betrayal as just another betrayal in a long line of them.

The milk would dry up. The cabbage leaves would be thrown away. The binding would come off. The medication would do its work. And I would go home eventually, emptied of milk and madness, ready to perform motherhood without the messy biology of it, ready to pretend love without the physical evidence of nourishment.

This was recovery: not healing, but drying up. This was motherhood: not nurturing, but rejecting nurturing. This was my body: not mine, never mine, just a thing that did things without permission, that leaked and bled and produced and betrayed, over and over again.