One-by-one the babies were picked up and put on their respective mother’s laps. Bri-Bri too, found himself sitting on Anita’s lap watching the other infants. The mother’s smiled at the infants on their laps and chuckled at the antics of the other infants that faced them. The infants gurgled and bubbled in delight up at their mothers while the other mothers exchanged complementary comments on how charming each other’s babies were. Soon one infant’s hunger made him fussy, causing his mother to get his bottle from the diaper bag at her side. Once the other infants saw the baby with a bottle, they began to cry in hunger too. Within minutes, the room was filled with wailing babies and mothers rummaging through diaper bags to find bottles. Only little Bri-Bri remained silent. One mother, who knew she was among friends who had seen her feed her baby before, opened her blouse and unfastened her bra to begin shamelessly breast-feeding her baby. Bri-Bri watched in awe as the little one grasped his mother’s tit in both hands and suckled noisily at her breast. For some reason, he sight made him feel lost and abandoned. He screwed up his face in anger and frustration and began to cry. Anita promptly got up and carried him to the kitchen to get a bottle of formula, then returned and reseated him on her lap. When she tried to put the bottle in his mouth, he turned his head away in disgust. The other mothers took note of Bri-Bri’s reaction and said, “It looks like little Bri-Bri misses his mommy’s titty. It’s too bad you can’t nurse him, Anita. It’s obvious that he wants a woman’s breast rather than a bottle.”
The woman who was breast feeding her baby looked at her sleepy-eyed baby and tenderly took her tit from his mouth and slid it inside of her blouse. Then she burped him and walked over to the playpen to lay him gently down on the plastic pad for a nap. She eyed Anita’s tearful baby and said, “I’ve plenty of milk left, Anita. If it will keep him quiet so we can talk, I’d be happy to nurse him for you.”
Bri-Bri was astonished when Anita handed him over to the woman. She took him over to the couch and sat down with him in her lap. After making sure he was comfortable, she took her other breast out of her blouse and caressed his cheek with her nipple.
Bri-Bri turned his head involuntarily toward the stimulation and closed his mouth on the proffered teat. He instinctively began to suckle as the tit filled his mouth. He relaxed in her arms, peeing a little in his diaper as a warm fuzzy feeling began to cloud his psyche. Memories of himself as a kindergartner flashed through his mind, followed by scenes himself as a toddler, then a two year old and finally as a ten month old baby. Each memory brought him back to the same emotional state he had felt at the exact moment that the scene was recorded in his subconscious. He could feel his mind becoming duller and his attitudes becoming more immature and primitive. In another minute his mind would be gone forever, not as a result of physical regression, but as a form of psychosis that threatened to destroy his last connection with his real self. The first trickle of milk had barely run down his throat when his adult mind awoke and began to fight his reflexes. The gorge rose in his throat as he pushed her teat away with his tiny hands. He finally managed to regain of his mouth and spit the nipple out with a scream of utter horror.
The woman who held him dropped her mouth open in surprise and looked at Anita for an explanation for Bri-Bri’s incomprehensible revulsion to her teat. Anita shrugged as if to say she had no idea why Bri-Bri had taken such a sudden dislike to a woman’s tiddies. Anita came over and took the squalling infant away from the insulted woman and sat down with him in her lap. She took the bottle he had rejected earlier and stuck the nipple in his mouth. Bri-Bri’s howls had made him thirsty and he began sucking on the latex nipple immediately. All the women in the room shook their heads and smiled at the babe’s outburst. He may have wanted titty, but it obviously had to be Mommy’s tiddy! No one else could substitute for her. When he finished the bottle, Anita winded him and put him on the floor with the other babies to play. Bri-Bri sat on the floor at Anita’s feet and cogitated on what had happened to him in the woman’s lap. As he ruminated, he stuck his fingers in his mouth and idly sucked on them, not noticing the smiles of the assembled women as they gazed down at the charming baby at Anita’s feet. He peed in his diaper again, this time flooding it, but he never felt it. After awhile he felt sleepy and he got up to creep away. A yawn took him, making him kneel where he was. His arms seemed to fold in slow motion as his head descended to the carpet. A minute later, he was sound asleep with his thumb in his mouth, still kneeling on the floor. His legs were tucked up beneath him with his little diapered bottom perched high in the air. He had moved less than a foot from Anita. The party went on for another half hour, then the women gathered their babies and the diaper bags and said their good-byes. When Bri-Bri woke in his crib at noon, he thought it must have been a dream. Surely Anita wouldn’t let another woman breast feed him like an infant, would she?
His memories of his former job became a meaningless blur. On Tuesday he tried to remember what his real mommy looked like when he was younger, but he discovered that his childhood images of his mother had all been replaced by memories of Anita. He simply couldn’t recall a time when she wasn’t his mother. During the second week his solid food was further reduced while the frequency of his bottle feedings was increased. By Thursday he was only getting a few spoonfuls of baby food at each meal. Howard wasn’t distressed by his weaning from solid food. Sucking on the nipple of the baby bottle was more satisfying than eating the tiny amounts of pureed vegetables that comprised his solid meals and nursing distracted him from the boredom of the nursery longer than the short time it took to ladle a few scant spoonfuls of baby food into his mouth. As far as Howard was concerned, eating was hardly worth the effort. At least with a bottle, the experience lasted a half hour or more. They would let him lay on his back in the crib and suck on his bottle while he occasionally reached up with his hand and gave the mobile over his head a little push to make it turn. At first the mobile had seemed ludicrously infantile, but after a day or two, Howard found the motion soothing. Every time Howard felt the slightest tinge of hunger he would whimper, causing the attendants to rush over and give him a fresh bottle of formula to assuage his craving for food. The smell of dirty diapers lost their unpleasant associations as the reek of sour urine and baby poop became part of his everyday existence. By the second week, his smelly little baby farts seemed pleasant and homey to him. He was only slightly dismayed when he discovered that his vocabulary seemed to be shrinking. Whenever the women in the nursery talked, many of the words they said sounded like so much gibberish. It made their talk almost impossible to follow unless he brought to bear all of his powers of concentration. He rarely expended the mental effort. The women’s discussions were mostly boring recitals of how the other babies were faring in the nursery or narration’s of their uneventful lives with their boyfriends or husbands.