I’m sitting on a stool in my mother’s apartment kitchen thinking about tomorrow when my first child will be induced. She has no interest in departing the womb—nor will her future siblings—and is now three weeks beyond the due date and the necessary dilation announcing her imminent arrival. I am barely twenty-three; too excited to sleep aware my life is about to change forever. I have no idea what this means but I know it is true and I can’t wait to see the baby who is presently distending my middle to a believe-it-or-not degree. The back of me still shows the indentation of a waist, my sides are slim which means she, though we don’t yet know her sex, is in residence high up and out in the front of me, like a cantilevered rotunda. The skin around my navel has long-since reddened and stretched all around so that a split seems inevitable. When I carry my next baby, born eighteen months later, a hernia is diagnosed when his head presses against this area causing severe but temporary pain.

My husband drives me to Lenox Hill Hospital the next morning, deposits me with admissions and departs not to be seen again until evening–hours after our daughter arrives, I have nursed her for the first time, and she is back with the other babies. He seems pleased, places a flower arrangement and card by my bed. Good job, it reads. I don’t tell him that earlier I scream when the doctor performs an episiotomy without warning or, apologize when he chastises me saying “there’s no reason to scream,” or, when the nurse presents my fat-cheeked ruddy-skinned daughter say “hello, darling” and kiss her damp dark hair. I’ve been in love with her for months.

My mother appears bearing a pink satin coverlet to put on my bed in the private room I occupy for seven days where many friends and family members visit. My nursing bra is stuffed with kotex to soak up leaking milk. I have become a manufacturer of sorts. I smell like the inside of a refrigerator when milk has spilled on a shelf. I arrange and rearrange myself inside a rubber doughnut to relieve the tiny balloons of hemorrhoids I’ve acquired during labor. When I stand up it feels as if my insides are going to fall out. I have unfamiliar large, hard, alabaster-white breasts. My nipples do not turn brown but like my mother’s remain pink which I am told signifies never having given birth. My daughter sucks them vigorously and before I leave the hospital they have begun to bleed.

My sister-in-law tells me it’s disgusting to nurse. She makes a face. “Like a cow,” she says as it were a brilliant remark and then repeats it for the weeks and months to follow. “Like a cow”. It is April 11, 1956. When I sleep, I dream of my little girl.