“‘Smorgasboard grabbed me from the beginning — I was immediately in the narrator's world; in the ladies room in Pennsylvania, breastfeeding. The themes of hunger, desire, and craving were well executed throughout the piece and made for a satiating read. In my opinion, the tinier the detail the more dazzling, so the moments of Cheez-Its, Banana pudding, and Shady Maple’s famous roast beef helped the piece come to life for me, along with the moments of humor and levity. Using the "smorgasboard" as a circular structure for the piece worked well for me. The essay is deceptively simple — on the surface it's about "breastfeeding" but it's so much more —a subculture, an identity shift, a shock to the body. The breastfeeding genre of literary work has been ignored for hundreds of years, and pieces like this can help break that stigma.”
—Chloe Caldwell, contest judge and author of The Red Zone: A Love Story, Women, and I’ll Tell You in Person

Smorgasbord

by Molly Tolsky

Winner of the 2023 Essay Contest

In the ladies’ room of the largest smorgasbord in Pennsylvania Dutch Country, I’m offering my infant daughter her own all-you-can-eat buffet. Every woman who walks in and sees me breastfeeding my child smiles at us, lets out an “aw,” some adding “enjoy this stage” or “I remember when mine were that little,” implying their large grown children are out there somewhere, maybe even fetching their third helping of ham balls on the other side of the bathroom door. I am indeed enjoying this stage quite a bit while wistfully looking toward the next, when my daughter won’t be attached to my chest at all hours, when my schedule won’t revolve so much around her hunger, as insatiable as she seems to be. When I, too, am not voraciously hungry all the time. 

Third trimester hunger has nothing on my fourth trimester appetite. I eat and eat and eat all day and still my stomach growls empty. Every night I refill the mason jar of granola bars I keep on my nightstand for middle-of-the-night snacking. Chocolate chip, extra chips, bought in bulk at Costco. I imagine the cashier assumes we’ve got a gaggle of toddlers at home tearing through them, not just one very hungry mother. You can find stashes of these bars in my car, the diaper bag, pockets of sweatshirts, the bottom of the stroller. They have even weaseled their way into my dreams.

Between meals are just more meals: peanut butter sandwiches and apples slathered with almond spread and oversized muffins and fistfuls of Cheez-Its. If we have ice cream sandwiches in the house I’ll eat one every night, but we often run out of ice cream sandwiches because I eat one every night. After dinner at my in-laws, baked ziti and crusty bread and two types of cookies with ice cream for dessert, I get home and ask my husband what’s for dinner, my body already forgetting the heaping portions of carbs it’s just consumed. And so after we put the baby to bed, it’s frozen mozzarella sticks, a microwave pot pie, the leftovers optimistically taken home for the next day. 

This is our cycle: my baby eats until she falls asleep. I eat until she wakes. 

I am trying not to write about my body, but obviously I am writing about my body. To the many women, mostly of a certain age, who told me that if I breastfeed the pregnancy pounds will just fall right off: stop fucking lying. They don’t! They just don’t. Whatever calories I burn by creating the milk to feed my child are replaced twofold by the snacks I need to sustain any semblance of satiety. The only pounds that fell right off were the six pounds, fifteen ounces of perfect baby and an extra ten of bloat which threaten to return. What’s more, my pregnancy cravings of cherries and fresh fruit have been replaced with postpartum cravings of junk, all the junk, just give me the junk. The saturated fats, the added sugar, everything prepackaged and overprocessed—shovel it into my mouth and watch as the crumbs cascade onto my daughter’s wispy hair. 

We celebrate every pound she gains. We count her rolls of fat, her extra chins, and talk about how delicious she is, my chunky monkey, my little plumpster, so big, so big, so big. Her chubby thighs are a sign that she is healthy and growing. My chubby thighs don’t fit into any of the pants I own. The highlight of each month is when she’s weighed at the pediatrician. There is no celebration when I step on the scale, no gold sticker on Mommy’s growth chart.

Inspiring quotes on the internet tell me I shouldn’t feel bad about my postpartum body. It is the very same body that grew an entire human being, after all, complete with a nervous system and complicated ear canals and two whole eyeballs, magic seeing orbs of blue. It is not cool to be insecure about your body. We are supposed to be over that, body positive, celebrating the stretch marks and stomach pouch like the badges of mommy honor they are. So not only do I feel bad about my body, but bad about the way I feel bad about my body. I am not supposed to want it to look different. But what if I do?

Here I am at the smorgasbord. The hostess explains that behind our booth are two hundred feet of all you can eat. She suggests we walk the entire length of the cafeteria before filling our plates because there are different offerings to be found on each end and we don’t want to shoot our shot too soon. I leave to do the first reconnaissance while my husband stays in the booth with the baby and I ignore her advice, knowing I have an infinite number of shots to shoot, of plates to fill, of Amish delicacies to devour. I am immediately inspired to grab a fried chicken leg and a scoop of mashed potatoes as smooth as velvet and two tongfuls of Shady Maple’s famous roast beef. On my way back to the table I spy a little glass cabinet labeled the “bread corner” and it beckons me to take a piece of corn bread, still warm. There are laminated signs taped to every wall that kindly state, “We hope you will eat as much as you like, but ask that you only take what you will eat.” They are worried about customers’ eyes being bigger than their stomachs. I am worried that my stomach has grown bigger than my car. 

My husband taps out while I keep going, grabbing a freshly grilled kielbasa and a ladle of goopy mac and cheese and some steamed broccoli for good measure, a glass of chocolate milk to wash it all down. Then it is finally on to the dessert section, where there are slices of every kind of pie in the world and a wet bar of flavored puddings. I am at a standstill, stunned by indecision, when I remember I do not have to choose, so it is blueberry pie and banana pudding, making sure to get extra vanilla wafers with each scoop. At the last minute I throw a whoopie pie onto my plate.

As we shuffle out my husband says he won’t be needing to eat for the rest of the day and I laugh and agree but know it is not true. Sure enough, four hours later I Google Map our way to a place called the Freeze & Frizz, where I order a cheeseburger and french fries and a soft-serve cone dipped in chocolate from a skinny teenage girl behind the counter and where my husband eats nothing as promised, holding the baby while I clean my disposable plate. 

My daughter keeps eating, too, each time ravenously gulping like she didn’t just eat two hours before. I feel my body emptying and recall the lactation consultant in the hospital who explained that I may feel sleepy while she nurses because she is literally sucking the life out of me. I thought it was a joke but she didn’t laugh. When the baby comes up for air, there’s a huge toothless smile on her milk-smeared face, a happy customer, satisfied. She burps as soon as I sit her up, compliments to the chef. I am inspired by her, so unthinking in her want, so unselfconscious in her need, jaws wide open when she’s ready for more. She is always ready for more.

It is that face I see after my third, fourth, fifth helping, when the grey-haired lady in the smorgasbord bathroom catches me nursing my child on the couch and quietly utters, “Just beautiful,” surely remembering a time when she nursed her babies, too. I choose to believe that it is not only the act of feeding my daughter that she finds beautiful, but the act of feeding myself. That the hunger alone is beautiful, the wanting, the need to fill in the spaces of my body that I empty out for somebody else. A future, kinder version of myself convinces me that the rest of it must be beautiful, too, the thigh fat and belly rolls and extra pounds and crinkled wrappers and chocolate chips found in the sheets of my bed. The bad feelings. The ill-fitting pants. The endless appetite at the all-you-can-eat buffet. I imagine what I would tell my daughter, should she ever be in my place: You can get new clothes but you cannot get a new body. For a few minutes here in the bathroom it’s not even a new body I want. I just want us to always want more. 

Published February 5th, 2023