Parting with my pump

Anna is just shy of a year old, and I'm packing up my breast pump to part permanently with it. It's not a fond farewell. For the first 3-5 months of their lives, it was with a hefty dose of pain and difficulty that I breast fed both of our daughters, but I grew to enjoy the breast feeding relationship as they grew older and overcame their physical struggles to breast feed. There have been many beautifully intimate moments nourishing my daughters cradled in my lap. However, what I never grew to enjoy was pumping. It is a huge burden for mothers who work outside the home while attempting to continue to provide breast milk. 

When I read Suzanne Barston's book about baby feeding battles, Bottled Up, I was intrigued by her reference to the scholarship of Orit Avishai, who has conducted qualitative research on breast feeding among middle-class American women. Particularly, I wanted to read her 2004 Journal of the Association for Research on Mothering article entitled, "At the Pump." Appropriately, I finally got around to reading it this week, just as I determined I am done pumping. Avishai sums up her own paper as follows: "The paper tells a pessimistic story of working mothers who often push their bodies to the limit as they attempt to meet a goal, measured in the number of ounces of milk extracted per day, and who are deeply ambivalent and conflicted about their lactating bodies." (p. 140)

Several things about the article resonated with me as I packed up my pump. First, Avishai discusses the challenging time bind that women who balance family and work outside the home find themselves in. She refers to it as a "'simultaneous double shift': pumping is experienced both as work, and as a maternal practice that competes with real work." (p. 142). When I was in college, I read The Second Shift (Hochschild 1997),  which investigated two-career couples and the time each partner spent on work and domestic duties. The women in the study working outside of the home were still doing most or all of the household chores and taking primary responsibility of the day-to-day care of the children, resulting in an extra month of work per year for women compared to men (dubbed "the second shift" by the author). I vowed that I would never enter in to a two-career marriage in which I took on all the heavy lifting of domestic duties. And I'm happy to say that I absolutely have not. But Avishai's reference to the simultaneous second shift of pumping is apt. Lactation is the sole responsibility of the mother, and I felt to be a good mother working outside the home, I had to pump. But unlike breast feeding, which at least has the potential to be an intimate act, pumping is work. In an average pumping session, I'd be rushing between meetings, attempting to hook myself up to a machine to express milk, while ideally working at my computer so I didn't "lose" or "waste" that time. I lugged my pump, hands-free pumping bra, nipple shields, breast shield connectors, multiple bottles, ice pack and cooler all over U-M campus for the first year of both girls' lives.

All the gear I daily lugged to my office in order to pump.

I felt I had to apologize when I declined requests to visit 3-hour classes, and bent over backwards trying to figure out how to attend professional events in locations without any lactation facilities. Once, I visited an environmental journalism course that had a field trip scheduled for the first 2 hours of class, so I pumped in my car on the side of the service drive of the Recycle Ann Arbor facility before speeding back to campus to meet the class back at their classroom. While moderating a series of panels on alternative academic careers that I had organized at Rackham graduate school, I rushed to take pump breaks in the public restroom to save time (the nearest lactation facility was a 5-minute walk away and required that I ask a building facility person for the key). When I heard other women come in to use the bathroom, I cowered in my stall hoping no one would ask me, "What in God's name are you DOING in there??" There were times with Lydia when I would stay up late or get up early to try to squeeze in an extra pumping session so that I could be sure she'd have enough milk the following day, and then go in to work zombified and exhausted. According to Avishai's interviews, I'm not special - all the women she interviewed reported a challenging, stressful and physically and emotionally draining juggling act to pump at work.

Avishai also talks about individual attempts to negotiate one's self-image as worker with the embodied practicalities of being a lactating mother. It's kind of comical the things that happened to confound my attempts to appear "professional," which I felt meant revealing as little as possible about lactation. Several times, in my rush to pump and work at the same time, I forgot to attach bottles to the breast shield connectors, leaving a pool of several ounces of milk on my dry-clean-only lap. There was also the conundrum of how to communicate that I was pumping to my coworkers. Initially, when I returned to work after having Lydia, I would put notes on my door saying things like, "In the library" (my first lactation space) or, "Will return in 20 minutes." My boss once came knocking at the library door thinking that the note was communicating to people where they should seek me out if they needed me - we were both mortified. But I felt I couldn't just put it out there and say what I was really doing, since people don't want to know about my biological functions. A coworker (and mother of two) pulled me aside one day when Lydia was about 7 months old and told me that I needed to quit with the euphemisms and just put it out there. So I did. By the time Anna was born, I had adopted a hot pink post-it note that simply said, "Pumping." When I was co-teaching a 5-hour professional development class, on the first day of class I shared with the 60 students that I would occasionally do a disappearing act because I'm a lactating mom. I figured better that they know the truth about my bodily functions than think I'm disrespecting their time. When I told my boss last week that I was finally done pumping, she (half-jokingly) suggested I put a hot pink post-in note up for a week saying, "Done pumping!" One of the women Avishai interviewed put the negotiation between her productive work self-image and pumping this way, "So I'm partially undressed in the closet with this weird apparatus that looks faintly obscene hanging from my breasts. For someone who's in a professional context, it's kind of a mind bender." (p. 145)

Needless to say, I'm not shedding any tears saying farewell to my pump. I also find myself wishing mothers didn't feel so much pressure to do a simultaneous double shift, though I realize that's not easy in our society where workplaces and homes are typically worlds apart and professional and private lives are largely separate.