Slugging from the Jug

     My family were milk fiends.

     It was commonplace for our father to come home from work with an empty lunch bag and a four-litre bag of milk, no questions necessary.  There were six of us under one roof at the time, and we drank milk with a frenzy that made our fingernails shine with calcium stains.  It didn’t matter whether it was breakfast (cereal, though never in coffee; that’s just weird, that’s what cream’s for), lunch (sandwiches and a bottle of milk with a big old ice pack), dinner (meat, vegetables, starch, milk) or snack time (chips or homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with milk, respectfully), milk was always well represented.  In-between meals and especially in the middle of the night, with a quiet house and the sole light beaming from a full fridge, there were always jug slugs, and I’m sorry to say these were exactly what they sounded like.

     If you caught someone slugging from the jug, you had a free pass to give them a smack and sound outraged, but we all did it, this delicious hypocrisy, and we all habitually screwed over the next person who needed milk next by leaving about a teaspoon in the jug which my Mum always had to change, (though she got us back by the ruby-red lipstick marks on the edge of the bag in a small yet poignant protest of maternal duty).

     I know it’s gross, and I’d like to say I’ve stopped.

     A former co-worker of mine, a charming man named Duke, once chastised me for drinking milk as a grown woman, scorning it as “the tit-juice of some other land beast,” and I laughed because he was right and because that was the most ribald thing I’d heard in a while.  While I could fleetingly grasp at a concept that suggests a missing comfort in my infancy, bolstered by the slugging of the jug, I’d rather not complicate simple joys in seeking to justify a guilty pleasure that I’ve little intention of stopping.

     Recently, I dropped my son off at my Mum’s for an overnight, and helped myself to some leftover pork lo mein from a container in the fridge.

     “Are you going to put that on a plate?”  She asked me, incensed.

     “Have you stopped slugging from the jug?”

     My Dad has ceased drinking milk entirely, and tries to flog both chocolate and white off on me after my other siblings have been over to visit, but I prefer my milk in stolen sips in the middle-of-the-night, on a cold tiled floor, in-between dreams.