Chapter Six
Homecoming
Motherhood is as natural as making cheese.
When I arrived home from the hospital, I looked at myself in the mirror and cried. My eyes were puffy, my hair was limp, and my stomach had betrayed me . . .
I still looked pregnant.
For nine months, I had pictured myself sitting by a sunlit window feeding my baby like a serene Madonna, bonding like denture glue.
Nobody told me it would hurt.
That my breasts, with n*****s the size of beer mats, would have minds of their own, and that the whole “baby latching onto my n*****s” thing would require an entourage of nurses to navigate behind a curtain that flapped open at the mere whiff of a trolley passing.
I just assumed I would know what to do—that the baby would attach as quickly as a bath plug in a plughole. Baby Bea,
