No one warned me that we’d be hiking all day long, trekking under full blown summer sun on Lantau island, running low on water, dehydrated, sluggish, in need of shade and a toilet. Had I known all this beforehand, of course I would have carried several water bottles for myself and several clothes changes and diapers for my newborn boy, Parker, who snuggled like a dense but soft thermos up against my sweat-drenched sternum in the chest pack I’d bought a month earlier. I’d known I’d need it for Hong Kong. Parker would be only six weeks old when we would arrive there for my husband’s internship, and I’d wagered a stroller would be unwieldy in a crowded city. Hence, the chest pack. In spite of the way the closeness made us both hotter than we would be with a bit of breathing room, mother and son grew used to living heart to heart.
I wore the chest pack literally everywhere and nursed my boy on demand. Literally everywhere. A first-time mother, I was brusquely introduced to the practicalities (and impracticalities) of nursing in a big dirty city: I gave breast while squatting in the rat-infested alleyways of Wan Chai; I gripped for dear life to the hand-loops on double-decker buses swerving their way to Stanley Market while dangling baby lurched and groped for a swig of me; we were tossed about on boats and hovercrafts, my nausea mounting while baby nestled against the sticky sweatiness under my gluey T-shirt. As a result, I can now claim to have tried virtually every version of la Leche à la Hong Kong.
That day on Lantau Island took nursing—and me—to a whole new level. The excursion ended up being a few hours longer and several degrees hotter than I’d expected, and as we took the Star Ferry back to Hong Kong island, my fatigue and body temperature mounted, knowing, as I did, that in order to get to our home outside of center city, I would have to catch a ride with my husband who was working at the Jardine House situated in the center of Hong Kong’s banking district. He was not expecting me. Given that this was in pre-cell phone days, I had no way to forewarn him of my coming, to tell him just to wait. All I knew was that I needed to get there before he would pull out. That would be promptly at 6:00 p.m.
As the ferry approached harbor, it was 5:45. Surrounded by a crushing throng of local Chinese, my baby and I were drawing some attention. Not only did I stand blonde head and strong shoulders (and bundled baby and breasts) above the whole crowd, but said baby was launching a full blown protest. He was shrieking and writhing like a wounded Meer cat in a burlap sack. And of course, my dairy truck was dry as a Rye Krisp. I was parched. I was stressed. And the more he shrieked and writhed, the more stressed (and milkless) I grew. And the more I and my sweet baby grew parched. And the more he shrieked and writhed.
The heat and motion must have made him queasy, poor beloved, because, in the very moment I tried to soothe him by crooning softly into his ear and bobbing from side to side, he bore down for an impressive explosion that rumbled until it over-filled his diaper and, in turn, the seat of the chest pack. There he hung, swaddled in Dijon-and-algae mulch. Then the mulch began oozing from every crevice, drizzled down my grimy sear-sucker clam diggers, dripping (to my chagrin, listless as it was by then) down my calf and onto one of my Birkenstocks. With the back of my hand I wiped the sweat off my forehead and then tightened the elastic noose on the whale spout of my Malibu Barbie hair I’d knotted on the top of my head. Without as much as a napkin in sight—with neither wipie, tissue nor cotton swab—I patted his little back while wedging my smelly way through the crowds to position myself right next to the ferry exit as it thwonked in at port.
Slosh-flopping as fast as I could, various fluids dripping, babe wailing, stench trailing, I bee-lined it for my husband’s office. Galumphing like a yak in heat, I panted while clutching closer to me the small curve of the back of my precious but miserable boy, splitting (with breadth and stench and brute maternal force) the human sea of the powder-fresh, pencil-skirted, stiletto-heeled banking scene. At last, I pushed through the massive glass and metal doors of the Jardine House. Refuge. At last. An Arctic gust of air-conditioning sent steam rising from my shoulders. I dashed into the closest elevator. It was 5:55.
Silence enclosed me like a vault. For a second, it seemed Parker was soothed. I leaned my soggy shoulders against the mirrored walls, catching sight of my reflection. Okay. Nice beast. All you lack is a full grown beard. And a bear skin loin cloth. There were more wet and stained splotches than dry and clean ones, and the backside of Parker’s chest pack—where his small hind end bulged like a perfectly formed brioche—looked tie-dyed with freshly-spewed neon green and yellow. Ah, cool air. Heaven. Which is exactly what must have shocked my boy. No sooner were the elevator doors closed than he began wrenching and squalling till his face turned mauve and I could see all the way to his uvula which rattled and quaked, frenzied.
How I longed to join in.
By floor 12, I’d fashioned a genius solution: Your Complete City Map of Hong Kong (which I’d stuffed as an after-thought into my pocket early that morning), I unfolded and held by my teeth from its upper edge. It covered me and my bundle like a privacy shield, let’s say, in the off chance someone would be standing right at the elevator doors when they opened on my husband’s floor. Unfastening this and unzipping that, unrolling down there and unhooking up here, I soon had Parker in a lateral hammock hang. I was breast ready. He latched on—lips, fists, jowls and forearms—and for the first time in over an hour I breathed easy, the unfolded map quivering with each humid breath that shot out of my flared nostrils.
For a moment, I comprehended the magic of the machinery of mother and child. I softened, as I felt my body comfort and sustain my son. Eyes closed, I lost myself in contemplating the divine engineering that put the bend of a mother’s elbow right at breast height! Who, but gods, could construct such perfection? And for that instant, I was one of what felt like an endless chain of mothers who, with their own flesh and milk, were able to pacify their own flesh and blood. It was all working. Beautifully. It was a brief Zen moment. Very brief.
Because just then the elevator stopped. My eyes popped open. But this is not my floor. “Ping-ping!” and the doors slid wide open. In strode the crisply manicured Gucci-Prada-Chanel-Hèrmes contingent. All alligator bags, handmade Italian shoes, silk ties and status wristwatches, they smoothly turned their backs to me in one synchronized swivel. I studied their padded shoulders. The chest pack straps were digging a trench into mine as I heard the doors closing with that slick “whuiiit” of a hermetic seal. Locked in, vacuum-packed, we were suspended in one of those slow-mo moments of compressed, resounding silence. My throat was scratchy as I tried to swallow.
No one looked at me directly. But the four mirrored walls made disappearing from anyone’s range of vision impossible. Ho-hum-dee-dum, I pursed my lips on the map edge and fixed my eyes on the numbers heading up, up, up, the “ping” at each level chirping like a little, techno giggle at my expense. Or maybe the ping was a fairy wand sound and at any moment, this would all just glitter-dissolve away.
Map in teeth, and my odor suddenly more piquant than it had been two minutes earlier, I acted in-con-spic-u-ous. My breathing was shallow and steady as I gingerly readjusted my arm-cradle under the crinkled and creased map-curtain. Parker, sweetie, you gotta latch on just a wee bit better.
Then, at floor 20, I heard exactly two things. The first was the sound of rubber soles jittering on a waxed floor. Or a squeegee on a plate glass window. Or a diving flock of Hitchcock’s birds. But there were no rubber soles here, no, nor was there a plate glass anything. Nor birds. Coming at increasing speed and volume from beneath the unfolded map, was the fast, desperate small squeaking “pfffiisw-pffffiisw-pffiisw” of a suckling piglet. As the sound increased in intensity, everyone maintained absolute composure. No one as much as flinched. The sucking sound mingled with grunting and gurgling, and in an instant I felt a surge of maternal satisfaction crash head on with four mirrored elevator walls of social mortification. I closed my eyes, pretending to disappear, and then I proceeded to softly break little, perfectly even teeth marks through the map paper.
Then I heard the second thing. It was the voice of my husband’s favorite business school professor back in Utah. Congratulating us the week of Parker’s birth, he had leaned into us, new mother and father sharing the wonder of our first child. The older man’s eyes were steady and soft, his tone as rich and heavy as ermine; “You’ll learn more from this son’s life than you will from any other single thing you will ever experience on this earth.”
Professorial prophecy.
Today is exactly twenty-two years from the day of my elevator epiphany. Today is also Memorial Day. Two months ago I found myself in Hong Kong again, the first time since May of 1989 and the whole summer of my brisk maternal awakening. I was in Hong Kong this time around because I had been asked to speak at a regional women’s conference. My topic: “Some Truths I Have Learned From Death.” There was much about the serendipitous alignment of geography and dates that heated my very bones, and I was able to testify of this truth: I have indeed learned more from that baby boy’s life — a life which ended nobly yet too early at 18 ½ years — than from any other single thing that I have experienced on earth.
If you have children, can you remember — and, for this Memorial Day, memorialize— your own brisk maternal awakening?
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
—–e.e.cummings
Parker Fairbourne Bradford at 4 months
(His mother at 27yrs)
Photo taken in Wan Chai, Hong Kong
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