Swollen Breasts and Yahweh's Remembering

Sometimes children help us see anew: wonder in the small things, impartial delight in others, or the beautiful audacity to ask for what we need and receive it wholeheartedly.  

Sitting 30,000 feet in the air, with my 10-month old daughter on my lap, I noticed all of these things. But I wasn’t prepared for what else she would help me to see anew before we returned home.

As we bounced along the runway, she bounced on my lap, leaning precariously in order to make eye contact with the people in the next row. Her eyes sparkled, and each victory was announced with a gurgly laugh and a small shriek of joy. It’s no easy task making eye contact these days, but she was up for the challenge. 

Once air born, she would not leave the window, mesmerized by the miniature world spread out below her. As Jack Frost worked his magic on the window pane, we took it all in together—the patterns in the ice crystals on the window, the clouds wisping their way over receding farmland, and fellow air travelers in other planes hurling themselves through the air alongside us.

After wearing herself out with the bouncing and staring and gurgling and shrieking, my daughter settled in to nurse, one eye still open to make sure she didn’t miss any of the excitement. 

During the plane ride, I worried about the noise we were making and what the other passengers must think of me; I murmured to myself about her endless kicking that made it almost impossible to keep her within the bounds of my seat. But two days later, as I sat in tears, the pain in my breasts increasing with each of her wails, my mind raced, searching for something—anything—I could have done to prevent this bewildering mismatch of supply and demand. My body was doing its job, producing the amount of breastmilk usually required; my little girl was doing her job, soaking in the new environment. In the agony of the disconnect, I would have given anything to return to that plane ride and start the trip over again.

It turns out there is a name for this phenomenon—a “nursing strike.” Once I had the presence of mind to Google it, I learned that nursing strikes are relatively normal and “almost always a temporary reaction to an external factor.”  Perhaps in the face of one too many changes, my determined little girl decided to exercise her agency in the one area she had control over. Whatever the case, this experience forever changed the way I read one particular line from the scroll of Isaiah: “Can a mother forget her nursing infant? . . . neither will I (YHWH) forget you.”

I had recently read this selection from the Hebrew Bible with a group of male theology students, and we had waxed eloquent about the boundless love of God—a love unchanged by our behavior. We talked about how it is in a mother’s nature to love, and about how beautifully the poet in Isaiah had articulated the compassionate and loving character of God. 

It never occurred to me that this poem would come alive, not in eloquent, heady discussions with burgeoning young theologians, but in the visceral, embodied experience of a mama desperate for relief. 

Remembering and forgetting were cerebral things in my world. You remembered or forgot spelling words, or that one really important item on the grocery list. But this remembering, or not forgetting—this was in the body.  “Even they (mothers) may forget,” reads the poem, “but I (YHWH) will not forget you. See? I have inscribed you upon [my] palms” (Isaiah 49:15-16). Rather than a heady promise made in a moment of affection, this was a statement alluding to the impossibility of forgetting. And with the added connotations of the word compassion, which is related to the word womb, this divine “not forgetting” was a whole-being, embodied experience. Re-reading this text after experiencing a nursing strike somehow grounded divine compassion, like seeing a fluffy, vague notion descend from the clouds and solidly plant its feet on the ground in the skin of a mama longing to feed her child.

Author: Jody Washburn