No matter what preparation I undertook, there was no tangling with what would actually happen once “the lodger” was born.

The hospital stay was a tad misleading. The baby was ministered by pros: nurses came in to make sure that the bun ate (by grabbing my breasts, sticking one in the tot’s mouth if they felt so inclined), to change his diapers, to look after his every need. And even though the food sucked, it was hot and I didn’t have to cook it. By the time we were ready to check out my husband and I were positively chomping at the bit, filled with confidence about taking care of a newborn. I wasn’t sure of much, but the hospital stay made this parenting thing seem a relatively tidy affair.

Apparently when the papers were signed the honeymoon was over: upon being released, an impatient nurse pushed me and the precious cargo out to the pavement, tapped her foot, and whipped the wheelchair out of sight as soon as my husband pulled up (“What kind of car does your husband drive?” she asked as she was pushing me at a full gallop down the elevated ramp from the lobby. “I’m pretty sure I see him,” she puffed, warming me up for the unceremonious dumping I would be getting curbside). Without so much as a congratulatory pat on the arm (or more importantly, help buckling the baby into the baffling car-seat), she disappeared back into the building.

The momentarily cocksure parents couldn’t figure out how to fasten the straps, so we took our maiden voyage home with our shiny new infant only partially buckled in, breaking the cardinal rule of baby-raising before we had even left hospital grounds. I climbed into the back seat to throw my body across the bun in case there was an unexpected meteor shower, or Truck-a-Saurus went careening out of control while I fantasized my conversation with the police officer after our now-guaranteed car accident: “Yes, I know that we were supposed to buckle him in, but we were in a loading zone and it was complicated, and the nurse was hostile, and we just wanted to get home. Yes, officer, he is only two days old. We’re idiots. I don’t know what else I can say.”

At last we walked into the house carrying the third member of our family. Curiously, I imagined this moment more than any other, but it was the most inaccurate. I felt completely inept as I stood in the door with the baby in my arms. Everything came into sharp relief. The house was a death trap. The cats looked like predators. I had no comfortable chair in which to feed him. It was a perfect house for a couple; it was a terrible house for a family.

My husband and I stood dumbfounded for some time, trying to figure out where to put the baby. Obviously, the coat rack was right out. I sat down bemused and dazed in a stiff-backed dining chair that was to be the temporary nursing station, holding the tiny bundle. Thank god my best friend bought us a bouncy seat or I would have carried him around for days before I ever figured out where to set him down.

The next moments were like the pause before the ignition fires. We had no schedule. We didn’t know what to do. We sat there in silence, the cats slinking around cagily, the air sucked out of the room. There was now a baby: what else can you do in those first creeping minutes but wait for him to dictate what comes next? I exhaled in relief when he started to cry: it gave me somewhere to focus my novice efforts by trying to stick a nipple in his mouth.

That first week was a lesson in crisis management. Things that I had expended tremendous energy planning before the baby was born seemed patently ridiculous once he had arrived, and my husband, always impatient with things he deems inefficient, dismantled every baby object in the house and moved them before the bun had been home a day. Rational thought in a time of crisis is elusive at best, and betraying our complete ineptitude was the rearrangement itself: in a fit of pique, my husband ripped the changing pad off of the cabinet I had set up as a diaper station, and set it on the kitchen table. The bassinet became a repository for anything but the bun: burp cloths, baby books, eyeglasses, water bottles. And the bouncy seat, which was the one thing in the house that made sense to us, was placed gingerly on the coffee table. I’m not sure why. It was as though it was easier to see him there, perched eye-level with my uncomfortable chair, hanging in space where the cats could blithely knock him over as they flicked their tails past the new roommate (the label on the back of the chair, anticipating fools like me and all future lawsuits, warned against putting it anywhere but the floor). In a few short hours the diapers were co-mingling with the dinner plates, the baby was aloft, I had nowhere to feed him, and no idea how to do it anyway. It was entropy.

It was in this climate of swirling chaos that we confronted the cruelest joke in the maternal world.

“Engorgement” was one of the many words that I skimmed over in my obsessive-compulsive pregnancy book readings; because it had no frame of reference, I filtered it out as so much extraneous information. Boobs too full? What could be so bad about that? The kid gets plenty to eat! It was, if it registered at all, one less thing I had to think about.

But on the fourth day after the bun was born, I realized what engorgement meant. I was having difficulty feeding the boy anyway; he had had a troubled entry into the world, and was showing little interest in the finer points of boob-manipulation. An amateur myself, I was no help. But while I was inexpertly trying to convince him that my boobs were the location of the finest dining anywhere, the boobs themselves were betraying me.

At first it seemed that they were just a little on the stiff side, like peaks of over-whipped meringue. We had a free appointment with a lactation consultant referred by our birth coach, and by the end of the day it was clear that I needed it. By the time the lactation consultant arrived, I was in pain and the poor tot couldn’t grab on because the works were stretched taut like skin drums.

I have never been so happy to hand control of my boobs over to another person in my life, including my husband. Earnest and wearing sensible shoes, she poked and pinched and squeezed and asked a battery of questions, which made me realize that all the reading I had done prepared me for nothing, and that answers I should have known were not even in the white noise area of my barely functioning brain. In the span of the two-hour consultation, my boobs went from bad to worse as she watched. It became clear that the baby could not take care of my problem by eating; the consultant needed to bring in the big guns. Out of her car came the hospital-grade double-barreled breast pump with full vacuum-sealed apparatus to hook me to.

She handed me two flange-shaped horns to hold to my poor chest, connected by thin air hoses to what she told me was a breast pump but I’m fairly certain was a converted film projector from my elementary school. A peculiar shade of institutional blue and propped on four rubber feet, what would have been the film threaders were enlisted to rock back and forth, creating suction to the bottles. When she turned it on, I was alarmed to note that I looked like I was hooked up to a prop from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, and felt exactly as defeated as Sam Lowry, consumed at last by bureaucracy’s machinery in a torture chamber. It was embarrassing to be plugged in like a lamp and to watch my breasts stretch and contort to the will of some animate factory-farming device. After she tapped the keg (a paltry ounce was all my congested boobs would give up) and gave me instructions for how to ease the pain and help keep the faucets running, she rented me the milking machine and said her farewells. She assured me that it would get better over the next few days.

That night it became clear that it was going to get worse before it got better. My boobs had taken on a life of their own; an excess of milk was rushing in to feed the boy, but had nowhere to go because the ducts were literally backing up like a stuffy nose. My nipples became so hard and misshapen that the bun couldn’t gain purchase, which compounded the problem: whatever alleviation of the pressure he could have provided by eating was foiled by my alien nipples which he couldn’t latch on to. My skin was hot to the touch and a violent red. Blue veins popped above the surface of my skin. There was so much milk that my breasts began to encroach upon other real estate: into my armpits, up my sternum. My boobs were literally under my chin. I started to cry in earnest horror when I realized that my breasts were now bulging at their topmost point under my clavicle bones. Frankenboobs.

We were using hot packs to loosen the tissues, cold packs to reduce the swelling, hot showers to entice my boobs into giving up their excess baggage. We hooked me up to the milk machine, only to watch in pain and sadness as no droplet was released. By midnight I was an emotional disaster area, sobbing in pain, unable to feed our crying newborn and unable to help myself. My husband, desperate to do something, anything, decided that it was time to investigate the last recommendation that the consultant had made.

He raced into the night in search of this miracle remedy. But when he pulled up to the 24-hour market, its doors were locked. “We’re not 24 hours anymore,” said the sullen employee, standing outside and pulling on a smoke.

“It’s an emergency!” gasped my husband. He paused. Could he convince this underpaid clerk that his wife’s over-abundant knockers were reason enough to re-open the store? The last two firing synapses in his head made him realize that no amount of cajoling would make this person think this was anything more than a cruel Candid Camera joke. “My wife’s boobs are enormous and we need help!” he would cry.

“Where’s another 24-hour store?” he asked.

He flew through the doors in Safeway like a spastic angry mongoose, surprising the security guard and the cashier who were idly bullshitting away the wee hours of their graveyard shifts. It was clear by my husband’s intensity that the safety of the Free World rested upon his shoulders: an international incident could only be averted by his delicate handling of this extremely important mission. Time was of the essence, and by god, the people depended on him!

As my husband sprinted to the checkout aisle, the cashier and security guard stared, their mouths hanging slack in the cash drawer. This anxious and desperate maniac had raced through their store at three in the morning to buy what appeared to be, by all standards and objective reasoning, a head of green cabbage.

By this time I was beginning to panic. Clearly there had been a horrible car accident or a fatal robbery attempt involving my husband since all he had intended to do was buy cabbage and come home. He’d been gone far too long for that. I was hovering over the sleeping baby, expanding and contracting his lungs by sheer will and brain power alone, insuring that he didn’t expire prematurely too. Now that my husband had left his beloved wife and four-day-old son to fend for themselves in the cold, harsh world alone, I started planning my husband’s funeral, which was followed quickly by juggling single-parenthood with the new job that I had to find. By the time I was fending off creditors from foreclosing on our house and selling the last sticks of our furniture to feed the baby, I realized that I should call my husband.

“I’m on the way! I’m almost there!” he shouted before I uttered a word. “I’m so sorry! But I have the cabbage!”

I wept. The hero was returning from battle war weary, not without scars, but intact.

He arrived at last, carrying the priceless parcel with care. He peeled a couple of leaves and crumpled them slightly, just like the consultant recommended. I put the cabbage in my bra. We collapsed into our bed, exhausted and drained. It was four a.m. The house was silent, save for the barely audible sound of our tiny bun’s light breathing.

“I have cabbage on my tits, and I’m so happy,” I said. We laughed as though all was right in the world.