Everything I like to drink has a mother. Not a mother with udders or teats, not a mother who alchemizes grass into cream. Everything I most like to drink these days has a sour mother, a slimy mother, a slick sediment at the bottom of the bottle that makes me flinch when it slips in my mouth.
***
Milk is the official beverage of twenty one American states. Twenty four American states have no official beverage, but we can guess what most would be.The white stars on the flag might as well be filled with milk.
***
I was a Midwestern milk-fed girl but can no longer abide milk from mammals. I drink milk from nuts and grains now, from seeds and legumes, nothing with a nipple (although perhaps a seed is all nipple. Perhaps a bean is all nipple. Perhaps each small food that is pressed into milk is nipple upon nipple upon nipple.)
***
My mother nursed me for a year. This was uncommon then—six months was suggested—but she just couldn’t stop. I nursed my three children a total of eight and a half years. I clearly couldn’t stop, either. I can still feel the sharp tug, the dreamy float, a small body warm against me like a tender loaf of bread.
***
When Sylvia Plath took her own life, she left bread and cups of milk by the beds of her sleeping children.
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The average American drinks 20.4 gallons of cow’s milk a year, a year in which the United States pulls 212 billion pounds of milk from udders. So many mothers drained into the bodies of America.
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When my mother took her own life one week after my youngest child was born, my milk had just started to come in. I worried grief would parch my milk to powder,but somehow it kept flowing. Somehow my baby kept it sweet.
***
The kombuchas and drinking vinegars I’ve come to love have bacterial mothers, mothers that won’t coddle you; mothers that won’t break your heart. These mothers are made of yeasty zoogleal mats; these mothers are made of fermented lichenous cultures; these mothers have Latin names that mean fungus and acid and skin. When I first tried these mothers, I puckered and shivered and found them too sour to bear, but I’ve come to crave their bite. I’m learning what toxins can sustain me now, learning to speak with bitter mother on my tongue.
Gayle Brandeis is the author, most recently, of the memoir The Art of Misdiagnosis: Surviving My Mother’s Suicide (Beacon Press), and the poetry collection The Selfless Bliss of the Body (Finishing Line Books). Her other books include Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperOne), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won the Bellwether Prize for Fiction of Social Engagement, Self Storage (Ballantine), Delta Girls (Ballantine), and My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt), which received a Silver Nautilus Book Award and was chosen as a state-wide read in Wisconsin. Her poetry, essays, and short fiction have been widely published and have received numerous honors, including a Barbara Mandigo Kelly Peace Poetry Award and a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2016. She teaches at Sierra Nevada College and in the low residency MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles.
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