they kept you awake

I’ve been reading about wetnurses. The Amah. During the glory days of the Roman Empire, the soldiers (legions) came back with women who were nursing. They would measure their breast milk and the women that had the most were sold for a higher price. It’s all a very sad story. One of the journals of obstetrics that I read pointed out the qualities that were desirable: “She must have a good character, modest, chaste and clean.” Wetnurses commonly held a second job as a prostitute. In the 18th century, France passed a law that women had to prove that their own child was 9 months old before they were allowed to become wetnurses because abandoned and smothered children because such a problem. Again, the more that you could produce, the better you were paid. So women were always trying for ways to increase the supply. One 17th century account in Germany recommends covering yours breasts with ashes of burnt owls and eating powdered earthworms.

But the real reason for my investigation is to try to understand the women who were said to go “mad” while they were wetnursing. Most of these women lived on the street, were constantly starving, and often had to give up or more likely kill their own children so that they could produce enough milk to get one of the only jobs available to them at the time. This was even more the case in America, especially in the deep south, with slaves. In that case, when a white woman from the “social” class needed some spare time a nursing slave would be located, and her baby would be killed our sold so that she could become a wetnurse. In Europe, some of these women would put opium on their nipples so that the children would sleep. Some children died.

I wonder what they dreamed about, these women. What they did when a child that was not theirs was sleeping on their chest, their small weight pushing against their bones. I wonder if they thought of their own children, dead or starving somewhere else? I wonder if they even dreamed at all. I would imagine you would be beyond dreams then, beyond sleep. And would it even matter if you knew you were alive, or giving life to another?

I have to write a poem paralleling one of Lee Peterson’s. Her book Rooms and Fields is a lovely set of dramatic monologues from the war in Bosnia. Well, lovely isn’t the right word, but really haunting and disarming. I’m going to write about the wetnurse. The Amah. What happens when she gets away from herself. What she thinks about when she dreams.