Milk lines: tainted headwaters of heritage

Mothers, through their delivery of breast milk to developing infants, are consistently portrayed as nourishing figures who endow the sacramental gifts of love and health upon their children. Using scientific studies, I catalogue the emotional and physiological benefits of breast milk, but I subsequently move toward the complications of "mother-as-nurturer" in light of the litany of foreign contaminants now found in human milk. I expose and explicate the potential harm of contaminated breast milk upon suckling infants, and suggest that the depiction of the nurturing and nourishing mother figure must be reconsidered as evidence of synthetic chemicals in milk emerges. Modern mothers now occupy separate realms: they are caring and contaminating. I frame my work through a personal understanding of my mother as a contaminated woman, and consider the ways in which my lineage-a lineage embodied in breast milk-is tainted by chemical pollutants and their migration into my own breasts.