Spilled Milk (Patreon)

It occurred to me lately that two of the stories I'm featuring on the fiction tier involve lactation. One of those is your fault (haha): "Heather's Metamorphosis" could have gone a few different directions, but I abide by what the people wanted, and lactation won out in the end. I am to please.

The second piece of fiction, my collaboration with Paploman (@paplomancomics on Instagram) has a bit more personal an origin.

It may come as no surprise that I get asked if I lactate, alllll the time. Not just online (I've received more baby bottle emojis than are countable), but in real life as well. The assumption, I suppose, is that if you have large boobs, you must be a walking, talking dairy. Not necessarily, of course. 

But sometimes.

The dawn of this whole ordeal, as I mentioned in the past, began with a failed pregnancy. And while I lost the fetus, that didn't mean that my body hadn't turned into a war zone of chemicals, hormones and physiological changes. Most notably, the boobies (duh), but those took time.

Before any growth started to settle in (actual addition of fat and tissue to my chest), my body took it upon itself to go into "You're gonna be a mama!!!" mode. And with that, just as I was getting back on my feet and on with life, the milk came in. Hard.

My little C-ish cups started swelling. They were pleasant little teardrops before, but now, it looked like I had just gone under the knife to receive a pair of pornstar boobs. They were extremely firm, perpetually pink, uber-sensitive to the touch, and honestly, it was kinda painful, in that "be careful  taking the stairs" kind of way. 

My bras didn't cut it — squeezing them into that relatively small cup was excruciating. I figured it would probably be temporary, and I had heard that this could just happen some times, so I weathered the storm, went to Wal Mart, and got a couple of cheap DD cups to tide me over. 

Fast forward to a week later, at the office where I used to work. It was an early morning meeting, and I was hungover. Sleeping had been a little hard the night before, so I overdid it on the sauce... 

I can't remember exactly what we were all talking about. Some advertiser, some client or something, blah blah. And then, conversation kinda slowed. Throats were cleared. I remember the word "Uh" being used a bit, followed by quiet pauses as sentences simplified.

You ever talk to someone, and they have something in their teeth, and you feel awkward about telling them, because who wants to be the messenger for someone else's embarrassing circumstance? Imagine that, but with a room full of people, and instead to spinach stuck behind an eye tooth, it's two wine-bottle sized dots of liquid, slowly emanating outward, larger and wider, staining a purple blouse. 

People weren't overtly staring, but I could tell from the simple avoidance of any sort of eye contact, or quickly turned heads, that the attention was on me. I blinked, trying to figure out what was up, when our office's version of Janice From Accounting piped up. 

"Hey, Heather... you might want to..." she was trying to be casual and kind as she gestured with her pen toward my chest. I looked down. I was MORTIFIED. I wanted to cry, die, get sucked up into the belly of the earth, crawl into a fetal position and scream, all at the same time. 

Instead, I just said, "Oh, uh... huh. That's weird. Excuse me." I got up from the table, clutching a small stack of papers in front of me, and made a beeline for the bathroom. 

Standing into my reflection in the mirror, I realised that toilet paper didn't do shit at making the dark stains go away. My heart was racing. I didn't have another top, or a coat, or anything. What were they talking about in the meeting room? Did they think I was pregnant? It's not like I broadcast that information to anyone, let alone the miscarriage. Hell, it's not like my boobs hadn't gotten noticeably bigger anyway. I was probably the talk of the office already, and if I wasn't, I sure would be now. 

I wiped away some tears as i stepped into the large handicapped stall. Carefully removing my top, I saw that my breasts, barely constrained by the bra, were a few shades pinker than they had been that morning. I reached behind myself and unclasped the band, conscious of the added discomfort stretching like that caused. When the last hook came undone, the brand popped open, and I felt a strong relief. I didn't realize how difficult breathing had been.

Here's a fun tip. If you ever need to perform CPR, you should administer chest compressions at about 100-120 beats per minute. But keeping count can be hard in a stressful situation like that, so medical professionals (and "The Office," of all things) recommend singing a song while you're performing CPR to keep you on track. Something that most people know and you can pull up easily in your head. "Stayin' Alive" by the Bee Gees, clocks in at about 104, so it works pretty well. Guy saved a woman in New Jersey that way, I read recently.

Anyway, that was about the tempo I heard while my one boob dripped onto the toilet seat. Tap-tap-tap-tap, stayin' alive, stayin' alive. My instinct said that I should try to get the milk out. I squeezed my one boob, hoping to drain some of what was stretching my skin to the max. I hissed in pain. They were too sensitive to the touch for that nonsense. Tap-tap-tap-tap...

My job wasn't on my mind. Finishing the meeting? Nope. I wasn't just going to go back to my desk. And there was no way I was going to squeeze myself back into that bra again. I wadded up a few long pulls of toilet paper, and stuffed them under my blouse, on top of my nipples. Two misshaped wads outlined on the stained fabric, jutted outward by boobs that were twice as big as I had always known them to be. 

Running into as few people as I could, I went home. Later that afternoon, when the dripping still hadn't ceased, I called a friend of mine who had just had a baby, and asked her the most random, utterly (udderly?) awkward favor in the world. Could she come over, and drop off a pump?

This went on for about two weeks. I went back to work. That pump was a lifesaver. Turns out my friend had just finished nursing, so she was happy to give me a couple of her bras (about the same size, a little loose actually, which was a relief) and a couple of boxes of leftover breast pads. I knew nothing about how any of this worked, so bonus points to my friend for helping me out on the lactation crash course.

Still, try as i might, there were moments when I would seep right on through even a double layer of those pads. It was day three when I figured that carrying an extra top in my bag wouldn't be a bad idea.

Eventually, the milk stopped, and my boobs stopped going full Code Red. I thought that would be the end of it, that my ravaged endocrine system was giving one last hormone-fueled hurrah before settling back to normal.

It didn't, of course. I became Heather with the Boobs, for God's sake. But you already have a rough idea about that story. 

So, that leads us to the present day. I've never had kids, but dammit, do I know what lactating is like. It's... odd. Especially when you can't stop it coming out. 

But as I do with some of these uncomfortable situations, I process them, think about them, and ultimately (hopefully) I come up with a way to rectify myself with them. Writing, for me, is how I do that. 

This most recent story, "Heather and the Farm," is how that's coming out (expressing itself? harharhar). What if lactation was something that wasn't odd or taboo, but was actually kind of normalised in society? What if there was an actual industry for it (there already is, if you Google it — full-time wet-nurses, and women selling their milk to needy new moms). What if the women who provided this service could make a living off it? How would they be viewed in their society? What class would they occupy? What would the politics of their inner circles be like? 

It just so happens, in this case, that I get to let myself go a little into the realm of fantasy. Thanks to the talent and encouragement of Paploman, I decided to say "what the hell," an just go full crazy. In this story, boobs will get big; much bigger than they do in real life. Milk will be poured; much more than is physically possible. Disbelief will have to be suspended, sure. But for me? I'm having a blast letting myself go a little and writing all this shit down. I hope the story turns out to be epic, over-the-top, kinky, totally odd, and (with any luck) as fun to read as it is to write.

So, yeah. If you're reading it and enjoying it, there's a little backstory for ya. It ain't a Terry Gross interview, but someday?