do before I teach class and put everything else out of my mind—Aubrey, the preemie dad, Martin—and focus.
As usual, the basement annex is chilled to exactly the same temperature as the pathology lab next door. On summer days, I enjoy a break from the asphalt-melting heat. Today I can’t seem to warm up and wish I’d brought a sweater.
Five minutes before class is supposed to start nearly all of the folding chairs Dori and I set up have been taken. At the back of the room, Dori helps a few stragglers sign in. She checks that they’ve registered and paid, then loads them up with handouts.
Most of the twenty-nine parents-to-be are coupled up; a lot are well-off: husbands checking iPhones, wives sporting French-manicured toenails and linen blouses fresh from the cleaner’s. Some are less well-off. A couple in their late teens slump in the back row. Mom runs a tongue stud across her front teeth. Dad, in oversize jeans and a hoodie pulled up to hide most of his face, glances around, then retreats like a turtle back into the safety of his hood.
A teen mom comes in with her mother. The teen mom is slutty-beautiful with a sullen Elvis Presley sensuality. She turns away from her mother, curls herself around a phone, and starts texting. The mom glances at a young couple in the row ahead of her. They’re holding hands, heads tilting together, as they study the handouts. She-Elvis’s mom’s face tightens and she sits up ramrod straight, as if the couple’s settled, successful married state is a rebuke to her. I want to go to the mother, take her hand, and tell her that although she and her daughter believe that every bad choice the daughter has ever made in life is her fault, it’s not. It’s really, really not.
Everyone speaks in whispers. They all have the awkward air of people trying to avoid eye contact in a proctologist’s waiting room. From the back, Dori raises her arm and shoots a big thumbs-up, signaling that everyone who’s signed up is present and paid for.
“Hi, everyone. I am Cam Lightsey.” I launch into my spiel and, the way they always do when I step in front of a class, all my worries disappear. I am doing what I do best on earth, the one thing I have no regrets about. After a dozen years teaching this class, I have honed and fine-tuned it like a stand-up act.
“Welcome to Breast-feeding One-oh-one.” I hold my phone up. “Let’s all practice cutting the cord,” I say, turning my own off.
“Just by coming today, you all are giving your babies the best start in life they could possibly have.” As I say them, the words come alive and so do I. I become a funnier, bawdier, warmer, wiser, all-around better version of who I am.
“I’m here because I am exactly the person I needed after my daughter was born, and there was no one like me this far from the city. Eighteen years ago, the choices in Parkhaven were, you could either go the hard-core route that insists you have to breast-feed until the junior-senior prom. Or you go with formula and your kid ends up with a dozen bodies buried in the backyard.
“I assume that you’re here because, like me, neither of those paths works for you. Maybe you’re here because you’ve heard I’m not a lactation hard-liner, but that I’ll help you succeed at breast-feeding your baby. Maybe you’ve heard that I’m not gonna tell you you have to quit your job or divorce your husband if either one gets in the way of nursing. Or maybe you just heard that, at some time during the class—not saying when—I’ll probably touch my breastesses.”
The guy in the hoodie grins at his girlfriend: This is exactly what he’s heard. She swipes at him playfully. The whole class relaxes.
“I didn’t have the help I needed, so I flunked breast-feeding and I thought I’d failed at something as basic as peeing. I’d look at pictures of refugees living in boxes and they all had a kid plugged in. Women who’d never seen a book could breast-feed, and there I was. I could annotate a bibliography. I had gone to nursing school. But I couldn’t breast-feed.
“A lot was happening in my life around the time my daughter was born. She had colic, serious, serious colic. I had postpartum depression. My husband left me for a cult religion.”