At six months old, before food had ever touched her lips, my infant daughter went into anaphylactic shock. Her eyes swelled shut, hives blistered over the terrain of her tiny body, her blood pressure plummeted, and she vomited uncontrollably until her throat clamped down. She was having an allergic reaction to the food proteins transmitted to her through my breast milk.

The doctors who saved her life at Boston Children’s Hospital told us that such a severe reaction via breast milk is rare, but not unheard of. Her doctors then painted a grim picture of what our daughter’s future with life-threatening allergies and respiratory issues would look like, and told us that although the best thing for her would be to keep nursing, I would have to eliminate several major food groups from my diet. They also told me that it would be too dangerous to give her any of the freezer stash of milk that I had already pumped. I’d have to discard it.

If I hadn’t been wholly consumed with fear for my daughter, I would have felt sorry for myself. I looked at the freezer shelves filled with frozen bags of milk. Pumping was not something I did with joy. It represented everything I hate about the kitchen — the appliances and cleaning — combined with everything I hate about a trip to the gynecologist — the indignity and intimate body parts being tugged unnaturally.

But I did it. I was trying to return to my career as a lawyer. And this was my first child, which to a Type A mother like me, meant doing everything in my physical capacity, no matter how unreasonable, to protect whatever raw idea of “best” had sunk in somewhere along the way. So I obstinately filled shelf after shelf of my freezer with frozen bags of milk that stiffened as they froze, like soldiers coming to attention. As much as I loathed the pumping, I felt less anxious with those bags standing watch over my baby.

On a rare night out, which had come at the intervention of close friends, I sat taking pursing sips of a too-sweet margarita. I had insisted on the mostly empty restaurant with stale chips, because of its proximity to our apartment. I was struggling to leave my baby, feeling a base-level terror that even the warm, syrupy tequila couldn’t touch. While I was filling in my friends about my daughter’s recent diagnosis, the hospital visits, specialists, diets and all that entailed, I mentioned in passing the pang of suffering I felt at having to dispose of my freezer full of pumped milk. 

Immediately, a woman at the table perked up and explained that a new mom in our neighborhood was experiencing her own serious health issues and could not produce breast milk for her preemie babies. She gave me the woman’s contact information and encouraged me to offer her my stash of milk.

What kind of person would want a stranger’s breast milk; isn’t that just a bit gross? I wondered aloud. “Well,” my friend shrugged, looking down at her cheese enchiladas, “it’s not that different from this milk, is it?” “Perhaps,” I admitted. “But in a lot of ways, it’s just not the same, right?’ Another friend chimed in, giggling, “If it is, your being a vegetarian, means that’s some of that fancy grass-fed milk you’re slinging.” I felt grateful that she tried to make me laugh, but I couldn’t quite muster it.

Before I had a chance to settle on if I was the type of woman who would be comfortable sharing something as intimate as breast milk, the woman seeking milk called me. She told me about her year and the fear she had for her babies. She told me that the doctors had told her how beneficial breast milk would be for her fledglings and her sense of loss at not being able to provide it to them. “I’m trying.” She whispered into the phone. “I’m trying.”

She wanted the milk.

When her mother (the babies’ grandmother) came to pick up the freezer of milk that I couldn’t safely give to my own baby, I was overcome with grief.

The truth is that I had given that milk an unholy amount of symbolic value. It was the only thing that had made me feel even remotely successful as a mother. I knew that the World Health Organization, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommended exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months of life and continued, along with complementary food, for two years. 

And I was raising my children in a community where there was tremendous “support” for breastfeeding. “Nursing is the gold standard,” a male pediatrician instructed. “Of course you want what’s best for your daughter and ‘breast is best,’ even if it means a little hard work!” The lactation consultant cheerfully crooned over my bleeding nipple. “The Nine Hidden Super Powers of Breast Milk” read an email from a new-mom friend. “The best medicine is breast milk–it’s liquid gold” coached the pediatric nurse pasting electrode heart monitor stickers onto my baby’s chest.

However, in recent years the assumption that breast milk is a panacea has been called into question, notably with Cynthia Colen’s study, published in the journal Social Science & Medicine, which looked at 1,773 sibling pairs between the ages of 4 and 14, where only one sibling had been breastfed, and on 11 measures of health and intelligence found negligible long-term differences. I had nonetheless become highly attached to the idea that breast milk was nothing short of a magical elixir, because I needed to believe that there was something I could do to heal my daughter. Despite the reality that it had nearly killed her.

So when this stranger carried out the heavy coolers filled with milk, I felt her ripping away the life I had imagined for my baby, who would now need more care and attention than I knew how to give.

Halfway out the old wooden door that had looked after the comings and goings of a hundred years of families, the grandmother stopped. She squared her shoulders and said with a frightening vulnerability, the kind that you feel when your dad cries, “Thank you. My daughter has had an unfair go of things lately, and I know this will help ease her mind.”