Francesca Leader
Milk and Blood
My first child was six months old when I started working.
I bought ten kinds of bottles, and she hated every one; she starved herself all day until I got home, then latched on and wouldn’t let go except to sleep. Even through the night she sought me, lips plump and red as cactus fruit, sucking the air until, at two- or three-hour intervals, she woke, whimpering beside me in bed, and I nursed her so we both could rest again. Derin, the Turkish name my mother-in-law chose for her, meant “deep,” and my baby’s hunger was aptly bottomless. My nipples stung like scraped knees. I intermittently dabbed ointment on the cracked, scabbed skin that threatened to bleed, and sometimes did.
My mother-in-law, who watched her, gave daily reports of baths, diaper changings, funny things that Derin had done. She justly took pride in her persistence with bottle-feeding—it was a good day if she got Derin to take three ounces of pumped breast milk.
When Derin was eleven months old, my mother-in-law said she had to go back to Turkey to attend to some things. It would be best, she persuaded, if Derin went with her, because our child was used to a level of attention she’d never get in a daycare center, where one harried, underpaid woman was supposed to attend to ten babies at once. She assured me it would take just a few weeks—a month at most—to handle her affairs. She felt it was high time we weaned Derin anyway, and that this was the perfect way to do it: birden – suddenly. In English, we would’ve said “cold turkey,” but there was, unsurprisingly, no Turkish translation for that idiom. My mother-in-law said this was how she’d gotten my husband off his binky—birden. They were at sea with my father-in-law at the time, back when less strict security guidelines allowed high-ranking crew to bring their families along. My husband was three years old, still crying whenever he dropped his binky or lost it somewhere. One day my mother-in-law had had it with his fussing, pitched the binky off the side of the ship, and that was that. He screamed for days. But by the time they saw land again, he had no interest in putting anything in his mouth that wasn’t food.
My husband drove Derin and his mother to the airport, and me to work, early one morning. I sat in the backseat, buckled with Derin in my arms, nursing her until the last possible second. She fell asleep at my breast; she was still asleep when we reached my office; still asleep when I passed her to my mother-in-law, got out of the car, and stood on the sidewalk looking through the rolled-down window at my baby’s face. My mother-in-law told me not to worry, that “Our Derin” would be very well looked after. Merak etme, Derinimiz çok iyi bakılacak.
My engorged breasts ached. I imagined them exploding, like rotting gourds. This went on for a few days, until my milk dried and hardened, and my body began, slowly, to reabsorb the unclaimed sustenance, to accept my baby’s absence.
A month came and went.
By around the end of the fifth week, I wouldn’t leave my husband alone. Why hadn’t they come back yet? What was taking so long? He seemed unable to grasp the urgency. Derin was well-cared-for and happy, from all the pictures. He said I needed to be patient—a lot could pile up in six months. With his father away working, and his mother living over here with us, there had been no one attending to the bills, the taxes, the maintenance of properties they owned in Turkey.
I asked how much longer I’d have to be patient. My husband couldn’t say.
Derin turned one year old. She took her first steps.
I saw none of it. I heard about it over the phone.
And with these losses came another, unthinkably-timed loss, on Derin’s first birthday.
Your dad’s dead.
When my husband, who took the call, relayed this news, my first impulse was that of a little girl—to run to Daddy. I knew the only way of doing that now was suicide. I also knew, for the first time in my life, that I was capable of killing myself. The impulse throbbed again and again, like a Morse code signal that wouldn’t be ignored. I considered, and accepted, the price of following my father.
Then I remembered: I wasn’t a little girl anymore. I was a mother. I had no right to wish for death. And I needed—with a deep, grief-sharpened need—to bring my baby home.
When my husband and I returned from my father’s funeral, around seven weeks after my mother-in-law took Derin away, I demanded a plane ticket to Istanbul. If she was too busy to bring Derin back, I’d go and get her, I said. This time, given what I’d just lost, my husband couldn’t refuse me.
The day I reunited with Derin, I approached her from the back, recognizing her changed but distinctive features as she stood—still chubby but leaner, still dark-haired but sun-bleached—holding onto a chair in the front yard of a family I’d never met. My mother-in-law had left Derin with some neighbors in order to come and meet me at the airport. They kept chickens and grew their own vegetables. On the bus ride, my mother-in-law told me how much Derin loved toddling into the henhouse to pluck the new-laid eggs from the chicken’s nests, and I’d tried not to cry, imagining my baby walking, a thing I’d never yet seen her do.
As I came close and called her name, Derin turned to me and stared with the milky blue stare of an old woman, trying to recall the name of someone she suspects was once important to her.
In a way, I don’t think she ever did remember.
Francesca Leader is a self-taught writer whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Wigleaf, Fictive Dream, the J Journal, CutBank, Leon Literary, Apex Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere. Her story “Waves,”originally published in Vol. 60 of the William and Mary Review, was longlisted for Fractured Literary’s 2022 Reprint Prize. You can find her on Instagram and Twitter at @moon.in.a.bucket/mooninabucket.