A Liquid Gold Rush at the Motherload

Seven months after the birth of my son, who was still nursing and still not sleeping through the night, I traveled to Palermo, Italy for a weeklong artist residency. Until then, he had only been away from me for hours at a time. I hesitated to leave him but I was tempted by the professional opportunity to spend time in Europe, where I had lived for six years while starting my art career. And in my new role as a mother, I was also trying to test what was and wasn’t possible now that I had a young child. Since my son hadn’t started daycare yet, my own mother stayed with my partner to help childcare during my absence. I wouldn’t have been able to make the trip without her. For weeks before my departure, I saved as much breast milk as possible by pumping between my son’s feedings and storing the extra in the freezer. I knew the stash wouldn’t last the entire trip, but I hoped the familiar taste would offer some comfort and satiation that formula might not. Still, I worried about maintaining my milk supply or developing clogged ducts while away.  

By the time I arrived at the Palermo airport, my breasts were uncomfortably full of milk. My driver picked me up and headed to the Piazza Marina, where I would be staying in a historic building overlooking the square, once a swampland during the Middle Ages and later the site of executions during the Inquisition. My driver told me that today it contains the Giardino Garibaldi, a small park which is home to Palermo’s oldest tree and one of the largest in Europe. According to local lore, this particular tree has flourished since it was planted in 1863 by feeding on centuries-old blood that was shed on its soil. Dubbed the Strangler Tree, the 160-year-old Moreton Bay fig (known by the scientific name of Ficus Macrophylla) is an evergreen from the Mulberry family and a native to eastern Australia. The seeds of the Moreton Bay fig germinate in the canopy of a host tree and as the plant grows, it extends aerial roots from its branches to wrap around its host. Once the roots reach the ground, it plants itself into the soil to form a self-supporting trunk. As it enlarges, it slowly engulfs and “strangles” the host who it outcompetes for nutrients and sun. Yet the relationship is not entirely parasitic, for scientists have observed that the fig tree’s intertwining root system can also reinforce the structural integrity of the host tree, protecting it from storms and cyclones that might uproot neighboring trees. 

As we drove up to the square, I found myself face-to-face with the Strangler Tree, whose original trunk was impossible to discern beneath all the roots that wound around it. It stood directly across the street from my accommodations at the Palazzo Dagnino, where I dragged my suitcase across the cobbled foyer, made my way onto an elevator, and unlocked the door to an airy apartment on the top floor. The first thing I did upon arrival was to unpack my breast pump. By then, my breasts were comically engorged, threatening to leak milk onto my shirt. Sitting by the balcony window just a few yards from the Strangler Tree, I plugged in the mechanical pump and emptied my breasts. 

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In Patty Chang’s Milk Debt (2018-), women in different places around the world pump breast milk while reciting fears about love, money, death, loneliness, politics, and climate change. Alongside videos of the performers, the multi-channel installation features screens of scrolling text enumerating fears that Chang collected from friends, family, and open calls to the public. Uniquely personal in its parts and overwhelming in its totality, the list of fears represents the collective unease of the moment in which it was compiled, a moment just prior to and during the pandemic, amidst the rise and fall of the Trump administration, during the anti-extradition bill protests in Hong Kong (where Chang was filming for an artist residency), and coinciding with the worst wildfires in the history of California (where Chang lives). Giving voice to the uncertainties of life and death during COVID-19, Milk Debt functions as a kind of time capsule marking the particular angst of this historical period.

Some performers pump in public spaces like the subway or politically charged sites like the US-Mexico border; others are seen through a Zoom screen in their homes. In one of the shots, the performer sits in a bathtub and pumps milk that pours directly into the water  – a poetic way to release fears down the drain (or a waste of good milk, if like me, you’re a mother who’s always had to supplement with formula). By juxtaposing different settings and bodies, Chang uses lactation as a metaphor for the universality of human anxieties while drawing attention to the public/private divide that characterizes reproductive politics. 

The concept of “milk debt” in Chinese Buddhism refers to the debt owed by a child to their mother for her life-giving milk, a debt that can never be repaid. Chang’s artist statement notes that breast milk production is triggered by the hormones prolactin and oxytocin which are associated with love and bonding. The performances speak to the bodily labor of motherhood, and the embodied anxieties of those who have chosen to reproduce, to love, and to risk losing what they love amidst ecological and political precarity. Milk Debt connects the labor of love performed by the maternal body to the perpetual debt we owe the Earth, our home and source of nourishment. Extracting breast milk while simultaneously vocalizing anxieties, the mothers perform a ritualistic physical and spiritual purging that visibilizes their often unseen labor. 

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I prefer nursing to pumping, and it is said that babies are much more efficient than machines at extracting milk, but after starting a PhD program, I had no choice but to place my son in daycare and pump while away from him. Each day between classes, I sat in the graduate students’ lounge holding the plastic flange against my skin and watching it suck in my nipple, extracting streams of milk that I bottled and sent off to daycare with my son. Some advice suggests increasing yield by pumping while smelling an item of your child’s clothing or looking at a photo of their face. I’ve tried both, but more often, I am taking a call or typing out an email or reading for class, multitasking at the pump to fit in all that I have to accomplish in a single day. I count up all the time I spend nursing my son or using the breast pump, up to four hours a day when he was a newborn and about an hour a day now that he is 15 months old. The time logged could easily constitute a part-time job. 

The domestic burden. The second shift. The chore gap. Double duty. As Milk Debt highlights, the pandemic not only provoked existential fears about our mortality but also amplified the gender inequalities in the domestic sphere, where women disproportionately perform the labor of childcare and household maintenance. There are a litany of terms to describe the phenomenon of women running themselves ragged to fulfill the responsibilities expected of them as paid laborers in the workplace and unpaid caretakers at home. To some extent, affluence mitigates this labor by allowing one to outsource the cleaning or laundry or even nursing (invariably to a woman run even more ragged than yourself). But even for those of us who can afford maids, the gender imbalance in domestic labor persists. This imbalance has also taken on increasingly ecological dimensions as we devote energy and time to puréeing organic baby food and selecting non-toxic toys to protect our children in a compromised world. Worrying, too, is labor – and that worry magnifies with every news report of a virus outbreak, formula recall, and lead-contaminated water.

Here I offer up my own term –  the “mother load” – that acknowledges the distinctly gendered impacts of climate change on care and labor. The risks are, of course, not distributed evenly and range from the major to the mundane.  Some mothers face longer pollen seasons exacerbating their children’s allergies, while others navigate sexual and domestic violence as a result of natural disasters or displacement. The “mother load” also draws a parallel between the extraction of care work from mothers and the extraction of natural resources from the planet, an extraction that over time depletes the one shouldering the burden, burning out the caregiver’s resources and jeopardizing the sustainability of their long-term well-being. The mess left to mothers in the home – the toys strewn across the living room, the banana smashed into the carpet, the unwashed laundry – is a microcosm of the mess we’ve made of the Earth who we expect to magically absorb our waste. The “mother load,” then, speaks to both the human and more-than-human burdens of care. In relation to the Earth, I am the child, and she my mother. If I hope for my son to be more conscious of how he treats our home, might I begin by modeling a better relationship with the home we call Earth? Overwhelmed mothers, with frayed nerves and gnawed nipples, joke that our babies are parasites. Meanwhile, humans suckle at the breast of Mother Earth, exhausting the resources of she who we assume to be infinitely abundant. 

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The “mother load” is also a homonym for “mother lode,” translated from the Spanish veta madre which refers to the main vein of a gold source. One of the best-known areas of gold deposits in the United States is a section of the Sierra Nevadas discovered during the California Gold Rush and named the “Mother Lode.” Prospectors flocked to the area in search of fortune, enslaving Native people and dispossessing them from their land. When gold inevitably dried up, the settlers stayed to set up vineyards, some of which continue to be active today as the region has developed into a destination for wine tourism. The term “mother lode” suggests a maternal source of eternal plentitude, which obscures the often violent reality that follows the discovery of a precious mineral source. Furthermore, such abundance has its limits. Ore grades, which are measured according to the concentration of a desired metal or mineral in a rock, have declined steadily over time since higher-grade ores have been depleted and the energy needed to extract materials has surged. It has become increasingly expensive to mine for certain minerals, such as rare earths – essential for the production of iPhones, Tesla engines, and wind turbines. Mining rare earths requires digging open pits, which can produce toxic wastewater that contaminates soil and groundwater, disrupts the ecosystem, and causes health problems for local residents, particularly for the youngest children .

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Though breastmilk is primarily composed of water, carbohydrates, lipids, and proteins, it is also a rich source of minerals such as zinc, calcium, sodium, chloride, magnesium, and selenium. In the first days after birth, mothers produce a special type of breast milk called “colostrum.” Referred to colloquially as “liquid gold,” colostrum is a thick yellow nutrient-rich substance that provides antibodies and an immunity boost for babies’ still developing immune systems. Like actual gold, this liquid gold is limited in quantity (after a few days, the composition of the milk changes), but colostrum is precious because of its ability to nourish a child and not because of its arbitrary value as a commodity. Nonetheless, there does exist a market for human breast milk and bovine colostrum, which are particularly popular with athletes and bodybuilders. Colostrum is considered so essential for a newborn’s health that experts recommend breastfeeding within the first hour of delivery. After I gave birth to my son, my midwife placed him skin-to-skin on my chest where he crawled with closed eyes to my nipple and latched on for his first feed. This “breast crawl” is a natural instinct that guides babies to milk through a combination of body temperature and smell – much like a mosquito, another creature often accused of parasitism.

Breastfeeding was not easy for me. In the early days, my breasts were rock-hard on the verge of mastitis and once we established a feeding routine, my nipples became chapped and irritated. But now that I am over a year into nursing my son, I find myself looking forward to the end of the day when I pick him up from daycare and upon entering the house, sit down to feed him straight from my body, a moment of reconnection after being separated all day. My son is now independent enough to climb into my lap, pull down my shirt, and latch on to my nipple without any assistance. I’ve mused that even if I were to faint while caring for him, he would still be able to feed himself from my unconscious body until help arrived. Would he react if I were unresponsive? Or would he be satisfied so long as the milk continued to flow?

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In June 2022, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated their policy guidelines to support breastfeeding until two years or beyond, which conforms with recommendations from the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Family Physicians, and Canadian Paediatric Society. Yet such a recommendation is meaningless in the absence of structural change that enables caregivers to expend the time and resources on breastfeeding, a practice which is stratified by age, race, class, and education. Despite my own privilege, I find it challenging to take on the mother load, even as I recognize that my body produces the healthiest food I can offer my child.

And although breast milk is not free from environmental chemicals, such as the “forever chemicals” per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), it is still considered far safer than infant formula, which in my son’s short life has faced nationwide recalls and shortages following bacterial contamination. Breastfeeding is also considered greener than formula feeding, because it reduces carbon emissions from the dairy farming needed to produce milk substitutes. But while there is less of an impact on the Earth, breastfeeding is more demanding on the mother, who can lose 4 to 6 percent of her bone mass while nursing, as a result of the baby’s need for calcium. Unlike the extraction of minerals from the Earth, however, the extraction of breastmilk does not irreparably damage the body, which is capable of reversing most lactation-induced bone loss through a healthy diet after weaning.

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Throughout my trip in Palermo, I repeated the pumping ritual four times a day, which shaped the rest of my schedule – when I could eat, have meetings, or go for a walk. Without a use for the pumped milk but also unwilling to throw away such a precious substance, I decided to keep it for a performance that I had been invited to do at the end of my residency. I collected the breast milk in recycled glass jars in the refrigerator, where the milk separated, forming a creamy fatty layer on top and watery layer on the bottom. 

My performance Mother To Mother took place in the courtyard of the Palazzo Butera, a palace transformed into a gallery and home for Francesca & Massimo Valsecchi’s art collection. In the courtyard, the couple arranged leaves, petals, and other natural elements that had fallen onto the ground into mandala-like forms. At dusk, audience members sat in two lines forming a pathway in front of me, as I ascended a flight of stairs with a bowl of breastmilk. Kneeling down with a paintbrush between the two rows, I began to paint the tiles of the pathway with my milk, inviting audience members to join me with their own brushes. Over the course of the performance, the sky dimmed as the sun set and the tiles darkened with the residue of milk, then lightened again as they dried. Having painted a path to the other side of the courtyard, I placed my palm on the tree that stood there and poured the remainder of my milk into the soil that surrounded it.

I performed on a Wednesday evening, but I didn’t depart Palermo for another four days, during which time I had to continue pumping to relieve my engorged breasts. No longer having a specific use for my milk, I watered all the plants in the apartment. On my final night, I offered the rest to the Strangler Tree, pouring my milk into the same soil where witches once accused of killing babies and mothers were executed.

When I finally flew back to Berkeley, my mother was standing outside my home holding my son and waiting for me. The first thing I did was feed him. I lifted my shirt and brought him to my chest, but after two weeks of drinking from bottles, he didn’t latch immediately. Instead, he looked at my nipples and my face, seeming uncertain or possibly disinterested, until I directed his lips to my breasts, which were full and heavy from the long journey. When he finally latched, I felt the hormones releasing along with the milk as he suckled, a sensation so unlike the feeling of pumping with the machine I had relied on in his absence. Oxytocin, prolactin, it flooded my system, reinforcing how much I needed him and how much he needed me.