The Tiny Thread of Milk
Today, I’m trying to find an old photograph of my mother. She’s smiling at the camera, a small blanketed weight in her arms. She is just about to finish feeding me, about to button her shirt again, to dab a drop of milk from my lips.
In my memory, the snapshot is cast in the golden light of late afternoon. It has the shine of archetype, like a classical image of the Madonna with her child. And because I can’t find the photo album to confirm what I remember—I’m sure Mommy glowed with joy, that she was radiant in the picture — I search the internet instead for representations of mothers and babies. I want to see how the old painters depicted this most mundane of actions, Mary feeding her holy son, a sliver of breast visible to the viewer. I want to find paintings that show us these famous bodies—divine and Biblical — as human, the Madonna tired as any new mother might be after nights of tiny wailing, interrupted sleep, and Jesus, his little fist clenched in hunger.
Mostly, I find paintings in which the figures face the viewer, as if posed for a portrait taken in some photographer’s studio at the mall. The child is often placed on his mother’s lap, one hand grasping the neck of Mary’s red dress. Sometimes they both wear gold halos. Sometimes they sit in darkness or before a delicate landscape, the slight slope of a hillside behind them. Often the artists seem most interested in depicting the luxurious folds of fabric, her cloak, the baby’s swaddling. I could look at these elegant images for hours and not understand what it meant for Mary to feed her child, how she must have felt both the deep maternal pull when the baby latched to her breast, the small contractions in her uterus, and felt something else as well, the knowledge that this son would never be entirely hers, that already he belonged to the glimmering light of prophecy.
Somewhere on the internet, I find a painting known as the Madonna Litta, circa 1490 and attributed to Leonard da Vinci. Mary’s face is a porcelain luminescence. She looks down at the baby in her arms, who in turn stares out, almost toward the viewer, his eyelids beginning to droop, just as an ordinary baby will so often fall asleep mid-meal, lips still pressed to his mother’s skin. I am comforted to imagine that even the newborn messiah requires nourishment beyond the grace of god; the infant Jesus is dependent on a woman, not yet made strange and terrifying by his role as savior. Just after his birth, he too needs breast milk rich in colostrum that helps the young body fight off infection. He too needs the milk that comes later on, thinner stuff full of necessary fats and nutrients. And he needs the milk known as “mature,” antibacterial and alive with white blood cells.
My favorite detail in the Madonna Litta is a dotted line of blue thread pulled open near the top of her gown. In the modern idiom, we might say Mary wears a nursing-friendly garment, the thread meant to be loosened whenever it is time to feed her son. This too comforts me. Even Mary must occasionally worry about a small stain of milk spreading across her bodice. Perhaps, just beyond the frame of the canvas there’s a crumpled piece of cloth she uses to wipe the liquid from her baby’s chin.
For a more secular portrait, I turn to Mary Cassatt’s Young Mother Nursing Her Child, dated 1906. The two figures are joined, not only nipple to mouth, but also connected in the way the baby reaches its fingers to touch the mother’s lips, the mother cradling the child, one arm circling the infant’s back, the other hand cushioned around a tiny foot. Most of all, their gazes hold each other.
When I stare at the painting, my eyes move from her line of sight down to the baby, then I follow the rounded form of the small body to the plump toes, and then to the mother’s hand and up the curve of her arm to her neck, the arch of her hair, a dark chignon, and at last along her head and to her eyelashes. It’s a tight loop of looking.
All begins and ends with the mother and child.
Nothing exists or is needed beyond what she gives and what the infant receives. Even the colors of their two figures join them, her gown in shades of pink that echo the blush on the infant’s face, the tender soles, the dimpled elbow.
Cassatt’s young mother doesn’t seem that dissimilar from the Madonna Litta. Both women hold extremely still. The mouths of the two infants purse and relax in the same quiet rhythm. The two scenes are equally consecrated, equally commonplace.
In his essay, “Goatfoot, Milktongue, Twinbird,” Donald Hall writes about what he calls the “psychic origins of poetic form.” There are three essential delights of poetry, he argues, which appeal respectively to the senses of touch, taste, and sound. The second of those, Milktongue, is the “mouth-pleasure” of poetry, that poems are delicious to speak, the vowels and consonants delectable in their utterance. “[The baby’s] small tongue curls around the sounds,” writes Hall, “the way her tongue cherishes the tiny thread of milk she pulls from her mother. This is Milktongue.” Maybe these paintings provide a similar kind of pleasure. They are Milktongue for the eyes. When I look at them, I am fed by the feeding of the babies. My own body briefly remembers what it cannot, a time before I tasted language or knew the parts of speech, in my earliest days of naps and waking at midnight and a belly full of milk.