I’m breastfeeding an infant during a pandemic, and I’m starting to panic

Since then, I’ve been shopping like a doomsday prepper and eating like a homesteading millennial, just with an added tinge of baby survival panic. I’ve harnessed atmospheric yeasts in a sourdough mother. I’ve curdled milk into yogurt. I’ve started harvesting lettuce and scallions from their humble, scruffy little butts, all while gulping down fenugreek supplements and lactation tea.

Then, one day, my cousin came back from Costco hauling twenty pounds of rolled oats. I officially called off my search for a black-market dairy farmer and fell asleep that night researching oat milk recipes. She also fetched us five pounds of bananas that threatened to turn to mush on the counter before I could clear room in the freezer. Instead of saving them for future smoothies, I mixed them into multiplying loaves of banana bread—treats I whipped up in such a frenzy that I accidentally omitted all the sugar from one loaf, and quadrupled the salt in the next.

These culinary mishaps were oddly comforting, because, despite beating myself up over all the waste—precious flour! butter! eggs!—they allowed me to tell myself that I am too busy to care about trivialities like sugar and salt measurements. For in addition to mammalian lactation research and inadvertent culinary experimentation, I am also very busy these days attempting to chill out—which they say is very good for lactation.