The Story of How My Mother Accidentally Ingested My Breast Milk, or The Funniest Thing that Happened while I was in Pittsburgh

Every night Sam gets a proper supper before his bedtime breastfeeding. We have some type of fruit and rice cereal. For those of you who aren't familiar, rice cereal comes in dry flakes, kind of like instant mashed potatoes, and you add the liquid of your choice to make the cereal your desired consistency. Commonly, the liquid is either water, formula or breast milk. Since I never leave home without my handy dandy breast pump, I use my own milk to mix with the cereal.

At home, Sam sits in his high chair while I spoon feed him and Dr. SOB watches Star Trek. Dr. cannot tolerate the inherent messiness of feeding time and I cannot tolerate William Shatner, so this works out well for the both of us. My parents do not have a high chair, so instead Sam would sit on my lap and my mother would spoon tiny mouthfuls of goo into his chew hole. Occasionally the lad would get rambunctious and start flapping his little arms. During one of these instances, he knocked into the spoon, delivering a small dollop of cereal onto my mother's leg. Without a moment of hesitation, she wiped the cereal with her finger tip and stuck it into her mouth. She then informed me that it tasted sweeter than she would have expected. I was practically busting at the seams. I wasn't sure how she would react, so I tried to be as gentle as possible when I informed her that the sweetness was probably due to fact that breast milk is sweeter than cow's milk. She blanched. I waited, breath held, to see what she would do. She looked around in a wild panic and spotted a 2 liter bottle of soda on the counter. She leapt up, ripped the cap off and began chugging generic caffeine-free diet soda right from the plastic bottle. After a few good pulls on the soda, she set the bottle down, burped quietly and came back to finish feeding Sam as though nothing had happened.

I don't know if we'll ever talk about it, but the memory of my mother eating my breast milk will always hold a special place in my heart.