That Time My Brother, Possibly, Maybe Drank My Breastmilk

A beautiful thing happens when two adult siblings decide it is once again time to cohabitate in a dwelling together.

One of them will inadvertently drink the other’s breast milk.

In 2010, my brother Dustin was between homes and asked to come and live with my family and me. It was a great idea because Dustin is one of my favourite humans. Plus, we could use the extra $400 per month he offered as rent money.

Being a young family, we were always searching for an extra 400 bucks. Wait, I’m still in search of an extra 400 bucks, so some things never really change.

At the time, Sophie was a newborn babe, and Lars was a two-year-old tyke with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

With Dustin came his one-year-old Australian Shepherd, Ace. Ace was a good boy only in the sense that he was cute as sin. Everything else about Ace screamed Demon Hell Monster on four tan-coloured legs.

Dust lived with us for a year while he saved some money to purchase his first home. We had many adventures during that period of our lives.

Here are three that come to mind:

1. Speaking of unexpected monies appearing out of thin air, did I ever tell you guys about the time our laundry room ceiling started raining dolla dolla bills?

One fine Sunday morning, Dustin was in the basement laundry room washing his clothes for the following week when he noticed a five-dollar bill fall lovingly downward into the open washer.

“What!” he exclaimed, wondering if immaculate money conception was actually a thing. At that exact moment, he heard a snap, and dozens of bills started falling from the ceiling.

“Oh my God!!” my brother screamed in elation, “Linds, get down here, we hit the jackpot!”

In Dustin’s euphoria, his brain told him that, obviously, the previous owners of the house must have stashed a shit ton of cash between the floorboards because they were, like, dirty drug dealers or something, and now it was him, who had discovered their booty.

Of course, who forgets about stashing hundreds of dollars in the floorboards? Come on, people, drug dealers are a lot smarter than that.

This is what really happened: above the laundry room was the master bedroom ensuite. Under the sink was the tiniest laundry chute you’ve ever seen. It measured roughly 6 inches by 3 inches. Enough to drop a few pairs of panties down, but there was no way you were shoving a complete pair of jeans or a flannel down there.

The chute wasn’t even really a chute; it was a hole. So rather than use the thing for dirty underwear transport (we had laundry baskets for that type of thing), we sealed it off with some cardboard and used it as a stash place.

Anytime we had a few extra dollars, we’d toss the bills in the boarded-up hole for a rainy day.

And that day came when Dustin was doing laundry.

Poor Dust was so sad when we told him the true reason for his financial windfall.

2. Part of the deal with Dustin moving in was that he would occasionally babysit Lars and Sophie. Dust has always been exceptionally good with kids because he is just a big kid himself.

However, this particular day was not his best example of that theory.

It was indeed the perfect storm of a series of unfortunate events. Sophie had the poopiest of poopy diapers. While Dustin was trying to clean her up, Lars heard the doorbell ring and toddled toward it. Ace, being utterly obsessed with the small boy, followed closely.

I’m sure the pizza delivery man was not expecting to see a 2-and-a-half-year-old answer the door and was also surely wondering where this child was keeping the $37.50 to pay for the pizzas.

Dustin noticed three things as he walked out of the nursery with a still half-poop-sullied babe in his arms. 1) The pizza man looking confused and a little scared. 2) Lars laughing gleefully and a little maliciously while staring right through the pizza man’s soul. 3) Ace, eyeing the outside world and thinking, “This is my chance!”.

And that’s when Ace the Australian shepherd bolted.

Abandoning the pizza man with the still-grinning Lars, Dustin took off after the dog with Sophie in his arms. His nephew’s joyful gales of laughter echoing behind him.

Eventually, he retrieved the dog.

The day that Lars assisted Ace in the Great Pizza Escape has become a sort of family lore, and we all revel in the retelling to this day.

3. During the era that Dustin lived with us, he was but a young buck who still enjoyed the occasional night out at the bar. I often heard him stumbling in at 3 a.m. and rummaging through the fridge for his beloved late-night snacks.

One night in particular, I heard such events happening, and then mere moments later, the distinct sound of gagging and retching filled the halls of our single-family home.

Of course, I could have dragged my tired body out of bed to see if my kid brother was okay, but I figured he’d sort it out one way or another.

The following day (afternoon), as I heated up a bottle of pre-pumped breastmilk I had stored in the fridge, Dustin stumbled upstairs from his bedroom. He took one look at the cream-coloured liquid in the bottle and again started gagging uncontrollably.

My brother is the loudest puker I’ve ever known, so as he loudly made guttural gagging sounds, I cringed. Sophie giggled her baby giggle, thinking that Uncle Dustin was just being his funny self again.

At that moment, neither Sophie nor I knew that Dustin had drunkenly grabbed a container he believed to hold cow’s milk the night before. After taking a good long slurp, it became abundantly clear that it was not milk. At least it wasn’t cow’s milk.

His vision may have been a little blurry, and his cognitive skills not firing at peak capacity, but as he gazed in at the fridge and saw the plethora of containers of his sister’s boob juice sullying up the refrigerator, his brain told him that he had just drank breastmilk. Human breastmilk.

That’s when he puked all over our kitchen sink.

Later, with an empty stomach and a clearer head, Dustin managed not to upchuck all over me and his niece. But he did tell us the story of his woes the night before.

“But wait, you said it was a carton you drank from? I don’t store breastmilk in cartons, Dust. It must have been milk; maybe it had just gone bad?” I looked in the fridge, desperately trying to find a solution to this disturbing story my brother had just spun.

For you see, I, too, didn’t want to possess the knowledge that my brother had tasted any sort of fluid that had come from my body.

Fucking yikes.

That’s when I spotted the carton of buttermilk.

“Oh my god, it was the buttermilk!” I screamed in glee. “That shit tastes disgusting on its own. I bet you anything, you slammed some buttermilk, that’s all.”

The relief on Dustin’s face was overwhelming. I, too, felt immensely relieved. Sophie continued to laugh and laugh at her mother and uncle.

To this day, we manage to convince ourselves that it was simply buttermilk my brother had slammed that night while he was utterly slammed.