Surprisingly my mammaries are still intact. I thought for sure by now they would have exploded. Thanks to my salad bra of cabbage leaves I’m still conscious, but the pain has been excruciating.

Motherhood is pain. You have the round ligament pain and all the backaches and headaches of pregnancy, followed by childbirth, in which your choices are to blow out your vajayjay or have major abdominal surgery.

Then the milk comes in and you live with giant boulders on your formerly insignificant chest for however long you subject yourself to such a thing. For me that has been through the first two months of the most intense pain of my life, through teeth and biting and now through a comparatively lengthy separation. If ever you have become engorged, you understand how breast cancer can live in your armpit or up to your clavicle. The milk, and thus the swelling, is everywhere.

Tonight several of my classmates and I helped with a Thanksgiving crafts and pie party for the kids at Hermann hospital, and the thought actually crossed my mind that maybe somewhere in the building there was a baby that needed feeding. I know – I’m horrified that I thought it, too. I managed to get home without passing out from the pain and decided to pump only for relief. We mustn’t encourage them.

Then my pump broke. I’ll spare the details of what happened next other than to say that I was desperately uncomfortable, and thank goodness I learned how to milk a cow during Howdy Week at A&M.

Before it sounds like I’m complaining an awful lot, let me say that I’d do it all a hundred times for the goodies – the joy – the love. My friends Angela and Fran welcomed their second son this week. And tonight I chatted with Zoe on Skype – hearing her voice and seeing her sweet face made everything else melt away.