Making It Up As I Go Along Paperback - 2006

Chapter One
"One, two, three--latch."
I glanced around the room, quickly taking in the semicircle of five somewhat traumatized-looking women sitting cross-legged on a carpet that smelled of breast milk and lavender. Had their babies latched? It was hard to tell without raising questions as to my prenatal sexuality. If I even mentioned the word "partner" or even worse "no partner" (as was my case), my days at the Pump Station, the holy Mecca for the politically correct, socially conscious, newly nursing moms, would be over.
I looked down at Halla. She was fast asleep, curled under my heavy breast as though still in my womb, totally unaware that she was supposed to be performing on cue. There was nothing in my thirty-eight years that had prepared me for the beauty of a sleeping child in the arms of its mother. It was the face of joy and peace, as though the baby was wrapped in a shroud of faith and its soul was dancing with the angels.
Unfortunately for the church, it was the kind of faith that could not be taught, bought, or guilted into.
"Okay, Saffron--did I get your name right?" The teacher, an ex-Leche League representative who probably pumped milk for her teenagers' lunch boxes, cocked her head to the side as she peered at my sleeping child. "You need to wake her up." Both hands on ample hips. "Now."
"But look at her." I glanced at Halla, a name that a tribeswoman from northeast Sierra Leone had given her when she came up to me, patted my cramping belly, and announced that I was not sick with too much African beer, but with child. She pointed to my stomach and said "Halla" over and over again while she giggled. The irony was not lost on her that she, a woman who could neither add nor subtract, knew about my pregnancy before I did. The name meant unexpected gift. It described my baby perfectly.
The Leche woman stomped over to where I sat quietly mesmerized by my child and squatted next to me. She was earthy, but fortunately still feminine enough. In other words, she was a kinder, gentler version of the in-your-face-breast-feeding dictator of the eighties; the short hair was a little longer, the chin hairs were tweezed, there was even an attempt at wispy bangs and light mascara; the Birkenstocks were trendy now and the soy latte, Starbucks.
"Drag your nipple across her face." She peered down at my breast. "Stop when you get to her mouth and then tease her with it."
I hoped she would go away. I could feel the heat rush to my cheeks as embarrassment pumped through my entire body. I had never liked being the center of attention, I preferred to be behind the camera, taking notes and telling other people's stories. Gretchen--I wasn't entirely sure that was her name, but she looked like a Gretchen--stood behind me impatiently.
"I'll be back." She gave me a nurselike pat of encouragement that was totally utilitarian and devoid of personal feeling. It was the same pat that the ob/gyn nurse had given me throughout my labor and recovery. Because I was doing it alone, she probably rubbed and patted my shoulders far more than she would have patted a woman whose husband was present, but I knew as I pushed and labored that she would forget me as soon as she took off her uniform, found her car keys, and made it to her poorly operating car in the farthest reaches of underground parking reserved for employees.
"That's it." Gretchen walked in a circle behind the nursing mothers, bending down every so often to make certain that their child was indeed "on" properly. "Remember, get the whole areola in his mouth, not just the nipple; that's the only way you're going to keep your nipples from cracking and bleeding."
Nearly all the babies had successfully latched on, their mouths suctioned tightly around the entire circumference of the breast, sucking away as their mothers looked on in raw amazement.
"Excellent." Gretchen stopped in the center of the circle, nodding at everyone. "I don't see an areola in the room and that's saying something." She squeezed out a laugh, most likely the same one she emitted each and every time she delivered the line, and everyone but me managed a responsive laugh. The almost unnatural enlargement of our nipples accompanied by the dark spreading miasma that was the areola--and who even knew what that was before childbirth--was old news by now.
I went back to gazing at my daughter and felt a soft tapping on my shoulder. "You need to wake her up."
"But she's so happy," I said. "Can't I wait a few more minutes?"
"She needs to eat." Gretchen took Halla's two-week-old head in her palm and moved her toward my swollen breast. "Take your breast and tickle her mouth with it."
I looked up from our little powwow and was relieved to see that the other women in the room were not tuning in. They did not care to see my breast, nor were they interested in my humiliation at having to grab it like a sausage. In the ten years that I had covered Africa, Asia, and the Middle East for London's Sunday Times and the Economist, I had seen my fair share of women breast-feeding their children. Did someone have to teach them how to get their babies to latch on, or did it just come naturally to everyone who lived outside of West L.A.?
Then without so much as moving an arm or a leg Halla opened her pink mouth expectantly. A large part of me wished that she had not done exactly as Gretchen had predicted, at the very moment of prediction.
"Now hold your nipple with your left hand and her head with your right, tilt her head back and when you see her mouth open as wide as it can, push your nipple into her mouth and clamp her head onto your breast."
And then before my very eyes my areola--or that black thing that had suddenly appeared around my nipple like a stain--disappeared into her mouth.
"Like that." Gretchen folded her arms across her chest like a Serbian training officer and moved on to the next soldier.
Yes. For the first time since being birthed, Halla had latched on properly. There was no pain, no frustrated cries, just free-flowing milk for her and physical and emotional relief for me. As I sat on the floor, partially undressed, surrounded by strangers also partially undressed, I finally felt like I was a part of something since leaving the ravaged city of Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, an African country no one cared about except for greedy diamond traffickers and a few selfless--or selfish, depending on how you looked at it--war correspondents.
I had been there with my pen and paper when the city was overrun in the late nineties with rebels, when the "liberating" army hacked away civilian limbs with the mindless ease of a butcher chopping meat for his counter display. I was among the few who remained when Reuters and the Associated Press pulled their people out, when it became blatantly unsafe for anything that had blood in its veins. I had remained because the man, the surgeon, who had made me fall in love with Africa had remained; I stayed because I had fallen so deeply in love with both the man and place that I could no longer define myself without doing so in their context.
But I was stupid. Neither Africa nor the doctor had ever really claimed me as one of their own. Once the revolutionary fighters started swinging their painfully dull machetes in the streets of Freetown, previously open doors were shut, warm beds and hidden safe houses were suddenly occupied, and the eyes of the West were unwanted. People were no longer acting like people. There was no vocabulary left to describe the evil I saw on a daily basis. Nothing could express the horror--not words, not sound, not even the camera could capture the totality of it.
But it was not the butchery of the people that made me leave Africa; it was the discovery of dozens of handmade tape cassettes in the good doctor's bedroom, like the ones people in new love make for each other. They were addressed to Oscar with curly pink cursive writing and it was this handwriting that made me board a series of planes out of Africa. It was almost the end of 1999 and the war had literally destroyed the entire country. And although I didn't know it yet, I was pregnant.
As I followed Gretchen's commands and switched Halla from one breast to the other, I looked up and accidentally caught the eye of the woman sitting directly in front of me. Her blue eyes did not flinch when we connected, nor did they drop quickly to my wrist to evaluate my watch or my ring finger to ascertain marital status and husband's bank account. Her face was wide open, her eyes deep and warm as though she had enough room to take me in. In them I could see Good Housekeeping recipes, Tupperware parties, and prized secrets to successful stain removal.
I yearned to be absorbed.


Chapter Two
Who would have guessed that lactation counseling was such a lucrative business? From the moment you stepped through the double cream doors into the Pump Station on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica and pushed your stroller across the plush wall-to-wall carpeting, you were initiated into a lifestyle and all the gadgets that went along with it: rooms filled with soft cushions to rest your child upon while nursing, bras, pads, books, embroidered pillows, as though advising all who could read that Mommy was busy doing something so fragile and precarious that there must be a sentinel, or at the very least a sign, at the door. Only in L.A.
It was psychological warfare in the worst way. On the one hand these consultants bombard women with soft sounds and comforting voices that told them that they were doing just fine, that it took time to adjust to motherhood and there was no wrong way. And yet under all that mock-Zen smooth talk, they were actually making those choices, the right choices, for them by telling them that they did need help, that they couldn't do it on their own, that they needed the assistance of a lactation consultant as well as an assortment of products to make the whole breast-feeding-mommy-bonding thing go according to plan. And it's like taking the stray cat you found under your car to the vet and being told that it needs a thousand-dollar procedure to live--you simply can't say no unless you're prepared for the consequences, all of which could lead to poor SAT scores, community college, and a job in retail.
You have to have the infant bath soap, the only one Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jodie Foster use on their children's bodies. Otherwise there could be exzema. The new Olga nursing bra at $60 a pop and that new elastin belly/breast cream for nursing moms that Jada Pinkett Smith swears by at $75 an ounce--a definite yes--otherwise your boobs could bear a frightening resemblance to Tetley tea bags by the end of the year. The place was a bloody factory and underneath the piped-in soft sounds of llamas mating in the high Peruvian plains in one room and dolphins courting in and around Polynesian motus in the next, there were two large blue-haired ladies perched like birds in front of their computers building customer databases that rivaled Neiman Marcus's and filling their coffer with cold hard cash.
But even more important, by giving the subliminal message that while you could probably figure out motherhood on your own, you could never do it as well and as quickly as you could after a month-long series at the Pump Station, they tapped in on what every new mother knew that she needed but didn't have--a completely neutral mother who never overstepped the line and a group of women who were going through the same things, both physically and emotionally, at the exact same time.
You were being beckoned to join a club, to become a member of a group. And while I was never a fan of groups or clubs, there was something about this that drew me. Perhaps it was the same thing that drew all of us--the need to belong somewhere, sometime.
"You were great in there. Sometimes those lactation people need to back off." She put out her one free hand. "I'm Anika, by the way, and this"--she pointed at her sleeping baby already strapped in his perfectly starched blue-and-white Graco car seat--"is Jeremiah."
"Saffron Roch." I stuck out my hand and, judging by the look of pain on her face, shook hers more like a war correspondent than a stay-at-home mom.
"A few of us from class are going next door for lunch." She lifted an index finger toward the door. "Would you like to come along?"
A few of us? I'd missed two classes and there was already a clique inside my lactation class. "Thanks, but today is not such a good day." I came up with three or four excuses that would get me out of it without closing the door completely. I wanted to make friends--hell, I had been hanging out in the nursing moms' areas of Nordstrom's, Macy's, and Bloomingdales chatting with other first-time moms (and complete strangers) while feeding and changing Halla. I had even called my ob/gyn's office--in London, for God's sake--to chat with one of the nurses who had taken it upon herself to lie to me during my last trimester of weigh-ins. I missed them. I was in new-mom limbo and needed to latch on to something myself.
"Next week then," she said and disappeared out the door. I wondered who the others were. I tried to remember the women in the class, what they wore, how they dressed their children, whether they used pacifiers or not, were pro- or antibottles, and had a pretty good idea of the ladies who would be joining Anika.
There was Sophia Gilot and her daughter, Rain, who stood out in any crowd and not simply because of the name. They were celluloid beauties, both of them. Sophia was the kind of woman who would cause civil unrest in the streets of Freetown. She would never be hired as a correspondent because she would become the story wherever she went. I could say that she was perfect in an L.A. kind of way but that would be unfair. She was beautiful in a universal kind of way, the way young girls and old women in France, Italy, and the Ukraine defined beauty. Blonde hair to her hips, straight but not blown-dry; tight skin, tight everywhere as though she were a Fuji apple wrapped in a sheet of translucent Saran Wrap. Blue almond-shaped eyes and black eyelashes that had to have been dyed were set high in a face that was structurally without fault. Sophia was young, midtwenties I guessed, so I was fairly certain that her face was the result of good DNA and not a skilled plastic surgeon. As for her profession, I would take the easy way out and say she was a model.

“In Making It Up As I Go Along a savvy war correspondent faces the ultimate challenge of single motherhood and, fortunately for her readers, brings us along for the ride. And what a ride it is, from the first hilarious account of breast-feeding with her newfound women pals until the heartwarming ending. Don’t miss this one!” —Cassandra King, author of The Same Sweet Girls and The Sunday Wife

“Maria Lennon creates, with pitch-perfect details and an incredibly vivid voice, a real modern-day character who’s smart and gutsy and fallible. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever had to make a tough choice about family, career, or love. You’ll find yourself cheering for Saffron on every page!” —Lisa Tucker, author of The Song Reader and Shout Down the Moon

“New mothers will surely identify with Saffron Roch’s struggle between her love affair with her new baby and her identity loss at leaving behind a worldly career. This is a compulsively readable novel with lots of laugh-out-loud insights into life.” —Paulina Porizkova, former model, current mother, and novelist


From the Hardcover edition.

An honor graduate of the London School of Economics, Maria T. Lennon now finds herself living under a heap of Disney paraphernalia in a slightly disheveled tree house in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, with her husband, three children, a dog, three cats, and a caterpillar named Harry.

"From the Hardcover edition."