Milk Fed

by Melissa Broder

My mother with her archaic ideas about dieting: melon and cottage cheese, tuna and carrot sticks, melba toast. My mother the judge storming into the dressing room at the children’s clothing shop, me age six, her whispering, “Look at Amy Dickstein in that dress. Now look at you.” It was a whisper that implanted itself in me, a whisper that stuck.

I wondered, if I could go back and rescue myself from that dressing room, would I do it? I probably wouldn’t. I thought that soft little girl was disgusting too.

For years I couldn’t be thin enough. Then, in an instant, I was too thin. If I had 20 pounds to lose, I lost 45. I wanted to stay there forever. I pared my food back further: spinach, broccoli, steamed chicken. I called it my Spartan regimen. I felt high on my sacrifice.

But in their equation of thinness with goodness, my mother and Ana were so like-minded. My mother persuaded me to stay thin by insulting me. Ana did it by insulting everyone but me. This absence of rejection felt like an embrace.

I’d entered therapy hoping to alleviate the suffering related to both my food issues and my mother, but without having to make any actual life changes in either area. I’d hoped that Dr. Mahjoub and I could pursue a subconscious, hypnotherapeutic modality, like learning to go comatose while still appearing alive. But Dr. Mahjoub wanted me to take real action.

“So I’ve been a terrible mother,” said my mother. “I guess I’ve done nothing right.” I could feel her opening an emotional spreadsheet that began with the womb. This was why I never confronted her. Now we’d have to go traipsing through it together, cell by cell, until I retracted everything. But what if I just refused to traipse? “I can’t,” I said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.” I closed the spreadsheet.

I didn’t want to mourn. I didn’t want to accept my loss—not only the loss of communication, but the loss of an idea that my mother was going to be the one to change. It made me feel like a loser. It meant I had wanted something and hadn’t gotten it, that I’d been, in some way, rejected. It meant my needs were too big for this world.

I was aware that the mother I truly desired would not be the one who appeared. I’d learned that from Dr. Mahjoub, who I never wanted to see again. I felt resentful toward Mahjoub, exhausted by my mother. I wished that I could procure, from nowhere, an incarnation of a mother I wanted. This interplay between hope and reality was also part of the mourning.

She looked both Jewish and not Jewish at the same time—but there was something distinctly Jewish about her, a shtetl essence that perhaps only a fellow Jew could detect.

When she handed me the yogurt, every inch of that mammoth peak was covered in rainbow sprinkles. It was gorgeous, seamless, as though the yogurt were a rainbow itself: no separation between dessert and topping. Its beauty made me think for a moment that it should have always been this way.

It was like I’d spent my entire life trying to get honey and then trying to avoid it. I wondered what I would have done with all that life if it hadn’t been defined like that. The freedom seemed enormous, monstrous.

The day went so much faster with the burrito and candy to pick from. I imagined how much more pleasurable my life would be at work if I had this every day. Life was a lot less bleak when you were staring straight down the barrel of a burrito. Was this how some people lived all the time?

I thought about how I used to watch my mother sleep sometimes, how innocent she looked with her hands tucked under the pillow. In those moments, I saw her as a little girl, and I felt that nothing was her fault—just a chain of fears and feelings passed down from generation to generation. In those moments I thought, You can show her how to love you better by being loving to her. But it was easier to be loving when the person was asleep.

The Hi was alluring. I wanted desperately to respond to the Hi. What was wrong with writing back a little How are you? or Hey or even I miss you? The Hi was so simple, so casual. The Hi made it seem like I could have an easy relationship with my mother—as though it were not a trapdoor to an emotional onslaught, a bombardment, a PowerPoint presentation of guilt—as though my mother and I were friends, great friends, as though I were one of those daughters who said, Oh yeah, my mother is my best friend. Those women were upsetting.

I couldn’t not want it: the approval, that feeling at afternoon teas past when my stomach rumbled and I was proud of its rumbling, when I knew exactly what was in me. It seemed now that in those calculated hollows there had been total security, even though I knew I was never really safe. The hollows staved off another kind of emptiness, thick with terror and mystery. Now the unknown was sitting on me.

There was, growing within me, a great Fuck-You-ness. I didn’t know if this feeling was surrender, freedom, or a total delusion that was ultimately going to hurt me. Miriam had transmitted the feeling to me, like an infusion—or a disease. It was exciting. But at the same time, it scared me. I googled How to stop the golem.

Hearing Ezra use the word mama made me feel a pang of longing. I was not really longing for my mother, who certainly was no mama. I wanted another mama, a fictional one. I thought about what my dream mama would look and feel like. Would she be like Mrs. Schwebel? Would she be like Ana? If it were possible to create the mama I’d wished for, I wasn’t even sure who she would be. My wish for that mama had always been a response to an absence. I didn’t know how to think about a mama in terms of presence. In my fantasies, I’d cobbled together scraps—fragments of women who’d crossed my path. I’d never come up with a mama from scratch.

“Oseh Shalom” had been my grandmother’s favorite song. Now they were singing it in a completely different tune, and I wanted to say, No! You’ve got the tune all wrong! This is not how you do it! Or, at least, I wanted to teach them my grandmother’s melody.

Miriam and her family made no mention of settlements, nothing political. They spoke only of Adiv, the Negev, the blessing of the nation’s existence. The way they spoke of this blessing, the land of milk and honey, you would not have known that people had been exiled from their homes. Their joy made me wish I could block that out too. Could you will the darkness away? Could you banish it and say, No, this does not exist for me? Was it okay to dissolve in the beauty of fantasy if you found yourself able?

“Shalom,” I said. “Care for a nut?” he asked. “No, thank you,” I said. “Would it kill you to have a cashew?” he asked, smiling. “It might,” I said, smiling back. “Little Rachel,” he said. “Tell me. How are your roots feeling? Have you been going deep?” He tossed a pistachio my way. “To be honest, Rabbi, I feel scared,” I said, catching it. “What’s to be scared of?” he asked. I opened the pistachio like a tiny door. But it was empty, no nut, just a shell. I tossed the shell onto the grass. “Spreading,” I said. “Not so much vertically but horizontally.” “What’s so scary about the horizontal?” he asked, chucking me another pistachio. I caught it and opened it, like a second door. This one was empty too. Now I really wanted a pistachio. “I don’t want to spread out into some crazy far outer reaches,” I said. “What if I can’t get back?” “Eh,” he said. “What’s to get back to?”

“Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu,” I sang to myself, using the old tune I knew. But I felt guilty using my grandmother’s favorite song to animate a penis.

I didn’t know how I would face the day, living inside my body, a conscious being. I only wanted to sleep until all the weight came off. It was Friday; just one more day of work and then I could try to sleep through the weekend—or some combination of gym and sleep—a bare-bones death march. It was what I deserved. I felt disgusting.

I thought about how I wanted to take a knife and cut myself out of me. I thought about how I’d been praying for a truck to just hit me. I thought about death and truth and how, in some languages, they were just one letter apart. I wanted to ask her if she knew that.

My mother had never known me either, though it wasn’t because I hadn’t given her a chance. I’d given her a lot of chances. What was saddest was that she didn’t seem to want to know me, not as I was on the inside. I wasn’t even sure if she could grasp that I had an inside, that I was real. Sometimes it seemed impossible that she had ever given birth to me at all. Other times, it made perfect sense that I had lived inside her for so long. It explained why she could only see me as an extension of herself. There was total silence now on my mother’s end, no communication. Still, I carried her inside me: her voice, her feelings, her fears, her ideas of food, bodies, the world, women and men. She had long ago implanted herself in me at the cellular level, spread into my organs—my brain, my heart—until what was hers and what was mine were indistinguishable.

It was as though I had a knowing person inside me, not the healthy, loving adult that Dr. Mahjoub had said I should try to cultivate in order to “reparent” young Rachel, but some kind of careless skater teen, the lovable scamp I’d never been, who ate what she wanted, when she wanted, and stopped when she was full.

I looked at a photo of the Dome of the Rock, its intricate blue tiles and beaming golden dome. Qubbat As-Sakhrah: Seventh-century Islamic edifice enshrining the rock from which Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven, read the caption. I thought about my grandparents, and I wondered how they felt about this beautiful old mosque. Did they love it like they loved the rest of Israel? Probably not. What did it mean to love something so much and also be wrong about it? What did it mean to love a version of something that might not really exist—not as you saw it? Did this negate the love? Was the love still real?

Then I cried. More than anything, all I’d ever wanted was a total embrace, the embrace of an infinite mother, absolute and divine. I wanted to lose the edges of myself and blend with a woman, enter the amniotic sac and melt away. I wanted a love that was bottomless, unconditional, with zero repercussions. I wanted an infinite yogurt, a mystical and maternal yogurt, something of which I could have unlimited quantities that would not hurt me.

“Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I heard myself saying, roughly from a place in my throat just below my Adam’s apple. “Daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter daughter,” I said again, and found that I had put my arms around myself. I sat down on the wood floor and began to rock myself. Then I moved over to the sofa, because it was softer, and rocked myself there. “I’m so sorry, daughter,” I said, tears in my eyes. “I’m sorry that you felt I had abandoned you.” “That is okay, Mother,” I said. “You were always here. I just didn’t know how to find you.”

Dreams and visions are mysterious. Can we will a dream to happen? Lucid dreamers say yes. If you want to give it a go, place a bowl of your favorite snack mix on your nightstand and consume the snack in the dark before falling asleep. As you chew, imagine being held in the arms of your fave spiritual leader. If you don’t like any spiritual leaders, then imagine being held by an angel or simply by the ambrosial aura of god. If you’re an atheist, imagine being held by the void—but, like, a really loving void. Fall asleep eating. It’s fine. You’re not becoming a fundamentalist, you’re just doing this for one night, so you don’t need to brush your teeth.