[“As Hannah grew, breastfeeding became less idyllic. She took me in, guzzled and cooed one moment, hated me the next. When my breast slipped from her mouth, or the milk didn’t pour down her throat fast enough, she beat my chest, mauled me. I thought of the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theory, which I had first read while pregnant, in which she argues that the mother-child relationship forms every person’s early sense of self. Klein in some sense blames the mother for all the troubled contours of the human psyche—an American tradition, especially in the field of psychology—but she also introduces a sense of power into the psychoanalytic saga of the mother’s purportedly passive body. For Klein, the mother’s breasts are the first objects the infant encounters with passion. They are also the first tools of power, and they begin, in the child’s mind, as two confusing, fragmented objects: a “good” breast that gratifies and a “bad” breast that deprives and tortures.
I had found this all confusingly abstract before I breastfed. Was one breast fuller? The other with a low milk supply? I had interpreted the theory literally, finding it hard to understand an infant’s perspective, which is that the good and bad breast are, bewilderingly, one and the same. Watching Hannah nurse, I could see now how the mother’s body teaches the infant about nourishment and the threat of its denial, about giving and taking, and soon, I would learn to identify the potential there—the possibility of teaching my child about consent. Klein called the early phase of infant development the “paranoid-schizoid” phase—a time when the child understands the mother as two beings, a giver and a withholder of pleasure. As the child grows, however, it learns that the mother’s breasts are two aspects of the same presence, and that the mother is a being unto herself.
When I was still reeling from childbirth, I didn’t yet see this period as an opportunity to provide my child with her first lessons on autonomy. Instead, our breastfeeding relationship became increasingly one-sided. I lost any strength to resist her demands, to say no, to refuse her, not only because she was needy and helpless and it was my job to care for her, but because the advice I consumed in the early years of motherhood—in books, online—told me our relationship should be this way. Learning to see the mother as a whole person, one with the power to teach the child a range of human emotions, I found, takes a very long time—but even longer in a culture that tells women that they no longer belong to themselves after they have children and that their time for freedom is over, if it ever had a chance to begin.
Even so, years later, when I think back on that time of giving myself over to my baby completely, I do not feel remorseful. I yearn for the short-lived decadence of the first months, for the license I gave myself to fade from public life, to devote myself to my baby, to the creative work of caring for her, and for myself. I sometimes long for those days—before I began to see how my love and my labor as a mother were deeply entwined with my own disempowerment, and with a world built on one-sided wants. Before I began to fight, but also before my baby began to move away, as all babies do. I don’t wish that I had never woken up to the culture of motherhood that was thrust on me, but I do sometimes long for that brief time when everything felt like a choice, even if, perhaps, it wasn’t.]
amanda montei, from touched out: motherhood, misogyny, consent, and control, 2023