Boobs

We are mammals. And mammals are called mammals because we have mammary glands; so we are very literally defined as an animal by our titties. I’m on my second (and last) breastfed kid and he’s two and a half, which is quite old to be breastfed I suppose, and am trying hard to wean him at the moment. “About time!” those of you who don’t seem to understand that my body is mine to do with what I want and it’s none of your business, may say. And that’s the weird thing about breastfeeding, it is such a primal and important thing, but people don’t seem to know very much about it. So, I just want to tell you all some boob things you may not have known, in honour of the amazing time I’ve had boobing some guys to nourish them, boobing some guys into silence when I want to watch tv and boobing some guys because I don’t know how else to get babies to sleep, for the last five years.

Breast milk can be blue. When I was pumping milk at work, I used to store it in clear little baggies on the top shelf of the work fridge. I’d march through the depot with my pouch of boob juice, brandishing it in the face of any man I passed, exclaiming “Look! It’s blue!” I’ve seen my breastmilk be anything from creamy white to yellow to green to blue. It seems to be blue when it’s full of antibodies if either myself or my kiddo, are sick. Did you know that when a baby latches onto your boob, your nip analyses their spit and then makes the milk up with whatever they’re lacking? Dehydrated? It adds some water. A little coldy? Add antibodies. Not enough vitamin C? Throw that shit in there. Boobs are amazing and that’s why cow’s milk isn’t a substitute for what we’re packing in our titties.

People send their milk off to have jewelry made from it. This isn’t my bag, but I respect those who do it. Did you know that as a testament to this fucking awesome thing we manage to do with our bodies, you can send off a sachet of milk and have it turned into a calcified statue or pendant? That might seem weird, and it sort of is, but I’m here for it if you want to wear a pendant made of your own bodily excretions around your neck for the world to see (as long as it doesn’t smell).

You can leak milk if you see a hot dude. It’s all hormones, but mate, weird shit happens to you when you breastfeed. Firstly, when your baby latches on and your milk lets down (rushes into, and fills, your boob) you feel this amazing rush of love and warmth. That’s the oxytocin you get from breastfeeding, which literally bathes your brain in love. Oxytocin is the love and attraction hormone that acts as a neurotransmitter. It’s what sets off labour, is released when you have sexy time with someone, and causes you to bond with others, and sometimes if you see a hot dude you might start leaking milk. And look, I’ve tried to say this to other mums like, “Lol. How weird is it when you think someone’s hot and then you leak milk? Like, is your body trying to feed them?” and no one really responds that well to that, even other breastfeeding mothers, so sorry if I’ve made you feel uncomfortable at some point.

Breastmilk is worth $3.6 billion dollars a year. This is calculated by how many babies are born, how much they eat, and how regularly they eat it. If Australia were to produce the amount of breastmilk consumed in a year, that’s how much it would cost. Yeah, that’s what they mean when they say “shake your money makers*”. 

*I don’t know if this is actually said and who says it, and I think in reality shaking your moneymaker is referring to your butt, but let’s co-opt it and use it for boobs instead because it makes more sense. Unless you’re a butt model who is making all that sweet butt cash, then keep shaking your money-making asshole. 

Expressing milk requires a form of what I term “cute masturbation”. When you pump milk, at least when I do, it’s not just a matter of put the little sucking beastie on and letting it go, causing a bunch of milk to rapidly squirt out your tit. I need to get out photos of my kids where they look cute and think about how much I love them in order for the milk to flow, so I’m usually hunched over the machine as it buzzes away, rewatching the cutest bits of my kid videos somewhere in a warm, dark place when I express milk. Remind you of anything? 

Breastfeeding can make you break bones. Breastfeeding can literally suck the calcium from your bones if you aren’t consuming enough calcium to give to your little person. Breastfeeding is very underrated, hard work. It may look like we are just chilling or that we are lucky enough to have a way to quiet our kids, but it is to the detriment of our bodies when we do it. I was far too skinny seven months after I had George because he was consuming my stores of calories faster than I could replace them. Breastfeeding also comes with this weird, constant external pressure from people to wean your kid or give them another mammal’s milk that wasn’t even made specifically for them instead (yeah, makes sense), it makes you thirsty as hell, causes all your hair to fall out and you get hella hormonal and weepy. So if you see a breastfeeding mum, feel free to give her cash and a cuddle. 

You can look at women when they breastfeed. Shocking, I know. Before I was a boobing mum, I had no idea where to look when someone was breastfeeding, like do you look right at it? Do you leave? What do you do?! Well, guys, this is what boobs are literally for, so the best way to handle it is to keep talking and making eye contact, and being normal. Because I feel so little shame about anything in life, if you know me, you will have seen me breastfeeding during a workout in the middle of a gym class, as I’m buying cheese at the deli at coles, while I’m making dinner with my kid standing on a chair, while in the pool, leaning over a kid still strapped in a child seat breastfeeding them in a traffic jam etc etc into infinity.

Milk can get stuck in your boob. Your nipple isn’t just one little hole from which milk escapes. It’s like, hundreds of holes. And sometimes these little ducts get blocked and the milk builds up and builds up and builds up in there. Once I had a blocked duct and I could feel, in my boob, a kinder surprise egg-sized lump of milk. The suggestions to ease this are generally hot showers and then breastfeeding on all fours like a cow and letting gravity unblock the duct. This solution didn’t work and I waited for some life-threatening infection to set in when, at dusk, what looked like a pimple appeared on my nipple. I went to the mirror and squeezed it, and it was like the pimple was full of milk, and sure enough about 90mls of milk squirted forth onto the mirror and the blockage was released. I wish I had filmed it so badly because it was one of the best moments of my life, I still shudder when I think of that sweet relief.

You may end up with only one boob that does the milk. I have one boob that provides milk. Somewhere along the way my left boob slacked off and stopped making milk and just sits there all lazy and pointless while the milky right boob does all the work. Anyway, as a result, I have one B cup boob and one D cup boob which I like to show my girlfriends as a party trick when I’m in the bathroom at the pub.

For my final boob-knowledge point I just want to tell you this breastfeeding story, in which I breastfed a room full of adults I’d never met before. I have been to very few house parties in the last six or so years, mostly because my bedtime is 8 pm because I’m tired from spending my day shoe-horning tiny terrorists into and out of food and snot-covered clothes. But when one of your worst-influence friends turns thirty, sometimes you just have to break out of the rut you’re in and go and be the ratbag you’re occasionally called to be. As was the case when I abandoned my family to ferry two six-packs of passionfruit UDLs hours away from my mountain home, to the Hunter Valley. 

I arrived at a beautiful property, lush and green with a glass-tree-house-bungalow-only-rich-young-childless-professionals-could-afford-to-rent gracing its slopes. It looked like something out of a classy fucking horror film. As I trundled up the driveway in my gross mum car fresh from a morning of dealing with other peoples’ shit and screeching, the rest of the party stumbled up the path, returning from a winery suitably merry. Despite knowing all of two people, hugs and kisses were in abundance as I introduced myself. I clamoured to drink my teenage premixes to catch up with the rest of the group and was swept up in the joy of a cohort of people who haven’t already heard all your best stories and aren’t bored to death by you yet. At the perfect level of drunkenness, I was asked to give a speech, which is definitely one of the most horrific things you can ever be asked to do in front of a group of strangers, half-cut on passionfruit vodka, particularly when all the notes you’ve kept in your google docs diary weren’t available because there was no internet. But I forged ahead because I love you, Nicole. And you know I made that speech all about myself and the time I pooed my pants at a truck stop because at my core, I am a huge narcissist and gore is my go-to icebreaker. The night wore on and, as a breastfeeding mother, there came a point when my one really big, milky boob needed to be relieved. 

And so the rallying cry went up, “Maz has to pump milk! Come!” And that’s how I found myself in a dormitory, surrounded by no less than seven girls, enthralled by the process of where human milk comes from. I mean, they were intrigued. And as a total attention whore, I reveled in being the focus of a whole room. One girl was almost crying she was so into how cool the human body is and oh man, do I fucking love girls who are interested in this shit but have no clue about it all so I can impart on them my brand of wisdom and hope they carry it with them into motherhood (the wisdom nugget of that particular day being that it is fine to leave your nine-month-old baby at home in order to go get hammered with strangers). You know where this is going, right? Oh, you don’t? Because it’s going to that place where my milk is passed around enthusiastically in its little plastic sachet and tasted by all the girls in the same way they’d been tasting fine wines, mere hours earlier. The verdict was that my milk tastes sort of like coconut milk. I am, as suspected, delicious. Suffice to say, this event bonded me and my new milk sister gang firmly and I spent the rest of the night feeling like I was partying in the company of my closest friends. I never saw half of them again, but it’s nice to know that borderline cannibalism is one boundary that, when pushed, opens a doorway into the hearts, minds, and guts of girls you don’t know. 

So there you have it, all the boob info you never knew you needed. And if anyone who doesn’t lactate wants to buy some of my milk to make into their own jewelry, please let me know and I’ll cut you a sweet deal.

The first time I ever boobed  on Narrow Neck

Dips and tits

The beauty and grace of breast feeding a toddler 

I thought this was my last time breastfeeding. Two years later I am lolling at my naivety, this shit will never end. 

The breastfeeding hover

Places and Platitudes

The department in which I work calls themselves “placemakers”, which is an interesting turn of phrase. I liked it at first because I felt that yes, being a horticulturalist does mean you are very literally making places. You are making places by planting things in which ants will colonise. You are creating paths wending through rock-studded earth. You are nourishing the soil with compost and you are watering it all until you’ve transformed some trees into a woodland or a forgotten corner into a garden. But recently I’ve come to put a question mark after it in my mind. Placemaker? For the longest time, I thought this idea of placemaking was one of the reasons I was so connected to the land up here because I was a special breed of person, I was a creator as well as an inhabitor of this place. But the 2019/2020 bushfire season took a wrench to my perspective, adjusting it a little, and I now see the hubris of that idea. Because what I’ve come to realise of late is that no one makes places, it’s places that make us. 

Telling myself for so long that I was some sort of omnipotent being, that I was crafting landscapes, I was always Icarus headed for a fall. If you have grown up in the Australian expanse, be it the oceans that stretch out to the horizon, the red, sand dune mounded centre, or the ancient and echoey mountains, you are constantly reminded that you are just a tiny dot in a huge expanse. It’s this expansiveness that (should) develop in you an inherent humility because you are reminded everyday of how insignificant you truly are. When you’ve been tossed around by the ocean until salt water is coming out your nose or stuck in a snow flurry ten kilometres from your car with only one glove to shield your rapidly blue-ing hands, you are reminded that her beauty and her terror will always come for you. And yowzers was I reminded last fire season when she blazed and smouldered and zoomed me out until I was that little speck on the horizon again.

I have had fierce writers’ block for a year and unable to articulate anything in its entirety apart from fragments of things and short poems, so here I go, writing my halting love letter into the void of how these mountains have made me into the things I feel define me; a runner, a writer, a mother and a gardener. 

Place and being wild

I have dedicated a good chunk of my life to the notion of being wild. This sounds like absolute white girl tripe I know, and largely it is, but also I think being wild is an innately human and maybe very Australian thing. When I say “being wild”, I mean doing things that I feel driven by my instincts to do. Being wild is why I run so much. Like a shark that dies if it stops moving, I need to move to feel alive. I need to get dirty, I need to feel scared and alone. I need to pee on the ground and scream into the wind. I like to do base things. I am in every sense of the millennial phrase, a basic bitch. And I think the main driver of this desire is this big place I inhabit. 

Living in the mountains and existing in the places there; specifically, places like Narrow Neck and Mount Banks, the sense of depth and breadth is actually unfathomable. Have you ever noticed how echo-ey Men At Work’s I Come From A Land Down Under is? Like that flute is just tooting off into a fucking canyon and reverberating into eternity? That is no mistake, friends, that is straight up the best auditory allusion to our country’s literal greatness that I know. And that’s how it is where I live, expansive, nothing-y and alone-y (but never lonely). But it’s also ever-changing, like a magic eye keeping your eyes fighting to maintain focus. Some days, you can look out into the distance and think “oh yeah, that's a long way away. There are lots of trees there, and for sure at least seven yowies” but there are also days where I swear I feel like I’m going to swing my foot off the edge of Mount Banks and step straight onto the ledge of a cliff kilometres away because those distances feel so tiny. This is especially apparent in that Heidelberg light at the tipping point of winter where it starts thinking about being spring soon. The sandstone cliffs on the other side of the world look like you could touch them, like sedimentary rock sirens calling you to them. And it is in infinite places like this that I can really feel wild, free and like I am the actual, real Maz hidden beneath the everyday-use Maz veneer. 

I also have this very strong urge to run beneath full moons. I know this sounds like hippy-dippy mountain stuff (it is) and like I am a lunatic (I am). In actual fact, the word lunatic has the word “luna” (the moon) at its base, so that is very literally what I am, drawn to the moon like a moth. There is something so cleansing about running beneath a full moon. The first full moon under which I had a chance to run after the fires, set at 6 am followed by sunrise at 6.30 am. I hit the damp, dark and spooky trail at 4 am, cold, alone, and a little afraid. But beneath that full, luminescent sphere setting on one side and the burning sun rising dutifully on the other, I felt so safe and relieved, encircled by those same orbs which have touched every human in existence. And it was after that run all alone with my beloved Narrow Neck in the muted dawn light, seeing her healing from the fires, that I started to feel alright again. 

Place and my actual, physical body

And while the mountains regularly influence how I feel emotionally, they also affect how I physically look. The places which are dear to me have shaped my actual corporeality. Like a mother growing a child in her womb and birthing it into the world, the molecules of food she consumed and the air she breathed literally rearranged in her uterus to shape an actual human, so too does the earth on which we tread physically build our bodies. You know when you’re a kid and you learn about gravity and they tell you that gravity is pushing down on you from above, but also that the road beneath your feet is exerting that same force back upwards too? That’s what places do. While our footprints, dragged sticks and tire marks leave a trace on them, those tracks and trails physically influence us as well.

Recently I visited the little string of waterholes that runs along the Grose River at the bottom of Victoria Falls. I had the day to myself and it was warm. The last time I had run down into this salubrious refuge the canopy had been dense and the light mottled in that perfect way that neither makes you squint nor leaves you cold when you emerge sodden from a sand-bottomed pool. And I forgot that this canopy had been turned into so much ash. So of course, I got sunburnt. The shelter I took for granted was gone and this place had turned me a blush pink which has now faded to a light tan, meaning that the exact shade of my shoulders now, is attributed to a two and a half kilometre stretch of sandstone and gums.

Running on trails as opposed to a road or a treadmill informs my body’s shape in a specific way, too. Trails are uneven, they’re undulating, rock-ridden, you spend time leaping away from what you think is a snake but is, in actual fact ALWAYS JUST BARK. There are Hakeas which scratch you, Xanthoreas which tempt you off the path and into thickets of blackened wood which draw, like a child, on your shins. And it is because of the geography of those trails that my calf muscles have a particular shape, solid and sinewy,  that they would not have were I to run on a flat road, or never at all. My core muscles wouldn’t be near as firm if not for their need to constantly stabilise my little body hurtling along an uneven trajectory. My feet would not be so callused and thick bottomed if it weren’t for the teeny rocks that sting me through my shoes. My legs not constantly marked with new scratches and scarred with old ones and my rump not so big, if not for the hills that force my glutes to engage for hours on end. Sometimes, when I look at myself in the mirror, I feel that I look like the mountains.

Place, my mind, and my words

There is a legacy of way-too-long sentences and rambling poems and prose, that are due directly to the places I love. There is something about rhythmic footfalls, isolation, sandstone scents, and wet foliage that banish all writer’s block and have me writing like a fiend in my head. Pretty much everything I’ve written, from descriptions of vases or blogs about dividend yields, to my very best poems, has come from the trails around my home. 

If I died tomorrow, all that would be left of my personality would be a digital footprint and all the words that I’ve put down on paper. So largely, what would be left of my soul would be words about the best places I know. And I love that the trails are able to conjure up imagery in me, that flows out my fingers and onto the page, and someone on the other side of the world will know about these places. I am their conduit and they are singing to you from across roads, gorges, mountain ranges and oceans. It’s very pleasing that Nellie’s Glen’s cool, fairy-dell feel for example, can seep out of the pixels on the screen and into those who read this blog, until you can hear that water trickling beside the stairs in the stream after rain. Until you can smell that damp, rotten wood and mossy stench that is a little yuck and a little comforting. Until you can hear the call and response of whip birds, such a short delay between the two, you would think it’s one bird somehow calling from both sides of your head.

I haven’t written something for myself in a while, and I can hear the music playing trying to get me off the stage, but I don’t really remember how to wrap this stuff up. Except to just quickly expand on the writers’ block I mentioned at the start of this essay. As much as my writing, running, body and soul are linked to, and made by, the places I adore when those places are damaged, I physically and spiritually suffer. In the Blue Mountains, we are still reminded daily of the devastation 2019’s fires wrought. The drive to work is still a requiem to what was (though the epicormic growth on the Eucalypts is looking rather festive in its green and red glory). The trails and tracks that shaped my routine are either still closed or were only just reopening now, as the floods came through. One bed of the garden which I tended at work is completely gone, slated to be cut down and chipped. I saw no snakes on a run the other day, which up until now, has been the snakiest run I’ve known. And to compound this damage, the floods of two weeks ago have separated me from one of my core places, indefinitely. Due to a landslide on Bells Line Of Road, for the past two weeks I’ve been unable to reach the garden, and the plants and people therein, who I love more than I love myself. But it’s given me the time and reason to write all this. And I’m sorry it was long, but I needed to rationalise to myself who and what I am without these places currently in my life, and writing this has helped. 

TLDR shortcut to reading this entire thing; I made an artwork which is basically a four and a half minute visual and poetic embodiment of this blog’s vibe. Unfortunately, it is currently running silently on a loop where no one can see it at work, but you can watch it below. And may I run on these trails again soon, be back in the garden shortly and in the arms of that Mother Earth who makes me who I am; fierce, strong and oozing emotion all over the place.