Planting Dandelions Read Online Free PDF Page B

baby and were the people who took the baby everywhere. All the women wanted to hold him, and this one practically inhaled him.
    â€œIt’s been years, but it’s like I can feel my milk letting down,” she gushed.
    I was revolted. Not by her phantom milk production, but by the idea that this stranger was responding physically to my baby. I snatched him back, violated, as if I’d just seen her shove her tongue in my husband’s mouth. I regarded it as an attempt at possession. Smelling is acquisitive. The sweet breast-milk smell of my newborn was mine. The smell of my sons’ salty necks when they are bent reading and I crane in to kiss them, that’s mine. The smell, layered and tannic, of the inside of my husband’s robe when I pick it up off the bed in the morning: mine.
    All mine.
    I spoke a half-truth to my mother that day outside the ice cream parlor. I am selfish. But as it turns out, that’s a good thing. It’s easy to give the best of me to mine.

3.
    Attach and Release
    L et me get your number,” I said to the woman as the dinner party came to a close. We had been discussing additives in food, and I was interested in hearing more of what she had to say about it. She obviously knew her way around a nutritional information label. I fumbled through my diaper bag for paper and a pen, and came up with a crayon. She handed me a small card.
    â€œThanks,” I said, automatically flipping it over to the blank side, crayon poised. “Now, what was that number?”
    She looked at me strangely. Then reached out and turned the card back over.
    â€œIt’s printed on the card,” she said. “Right there.”
    I stared at it in wonder. So it was. Along with her name, title, and place of employment.
    â€œI remember these!” I blurted, like a demented person having a lucid breakthrough. “I used to have boxes of them. With my name on them.”
    She extricated herself while I was still studying the card, lost in reverie, as words like “memo” and “payroll” breached my consciousness. Words in a language I spoke once, but had not used in years and had all but forgotten. Cubicle. Break room. Boardroom. Stamps on an old passport buried deep in a drawer.
    I never did call her. She was, according to the embossed lettering on her card, a degreed professional with a job title, an office, and regular working hours. I was a baby-wearing, co-sleeping, breast-feeding new mother; in essence, a marsupial. She probably took a shower every morning and put jewelry on before going to work. I was dressed for success if I could uncover a nipple in less than a minute. She had children who slept through the night and went to school during the day. From where I stood, that sounded like an urban legend, something I heard happened, but not to anyone I knew personally. Getting together would require us to project the movement of our days and plot a future point in time where our lives would intersect again, like astronomers predicting the next eclipse. I didn’t see it happening for at least ten years.
    I was then, and am still, for lack of a better word, a stay-at-home mom. I didn’t intend to be. That wasn’t what little girls who grew up watching Mary Tyler Moore were expected to become. I thought I would have a career. If I had a baby, I would take maternity leave and resume my career once that project was launched and running smoothly. But that idea was based on maternity benefits as they existed in Canada, and children as they existed in my mind. Having real children, in the United States, was a different proposition. There was no career to interrupt or resume. I barely got my U.S. work permit before I got pregnant, and then I worked temp jobs, none of which came with benefits or paid enough to make day care worthwhile. Even if I had a permanent position that paid well, I couldn’t wrap my head around the meager American maternity leave of six