Penalty: Illegal Substitution

Being a working mother is an exercise in finding a suitable replacement for each other, my son and me, in our lives. 

I leave for work when he and Mr. Pi are still sleeping. Between the time Mr. Pi leaves for work and the time I come home, we pay a woman to come stay with the baby. 

We pay her. For the privilege of feeding him, rocking him, playing with him, singing to him, reading to him, and comforting him. Being a part of the (undeniably) most formative moments of his life. The time in his life when, day to day, hour to hour, he is rapidly changing. Every single moment that passes he has learned something about life, and it has irreversibly shaped the person that he is becoming.

When I get home, he is happy and I know that he is loved every second of the day. But he smells like her and it reminds me that for 10 hours of his life, I wasn't there.

During those hours at work, three times a day, I leave my desk, ride the elevator down to the lactation room, and use a machine to extract my son's food from my body. Food that is perfectly designed to provide everything he needs: calories, immune defense, even down to the right balance of pH and bacteria in his gut.

This machine doesn't provide the cues my body needs to start producing this food. I use props to trick my body into thinking that my son is there with me. I have a set of clothes that smells like him. I look at photos and videos of him on my phone.

Even still, because this machine is an imperfect substitute for my son, my milk supply has diminished so that I must replace the milk missing from his diet with formula. The container of formula reads, "Breastmilk is best."

I freeze my milk so that it can be heated and put into an artificial substitute for the part of me that was perfectly designed to provide him this nutrition. So perfect, in fact, that after nursing, he doesn't need to be burped. If he isn't burped after a bottle-feeding, a few hours later he suffers the pain and discomfort of trapped air in his belly.

I carried my son for 36 weeks and 6 days. He was with me every moment of every day. I determined what went into his body, the sounds he heard, the motion he felt. When he was born, I got 16 weeks to continue that constant care and provide for his every need, every hour of every day. In this day and age, I am lucky to have gotten over a year of continuous time with my son.

Now, three weeks in to my return to work, I realize that as much as he has needed me, I needed him. Most days it takes all the willpower I have to kiss him goodbye and pull myself away from his crib. Leaving him feels like the most unnatural thing in the world. Like each morning I sever a limb from my body.

The near-cliched words of Elizabeth Stone lose none of their potency: "Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body."

Mrs. Pi