Modern Inconvenience

After twelve months, two weeks, and roughly 3,528 ounces, I coil the tubes of my breast pump and cram them along with several collection bottles, two breast shields (the clear plastic forms that resemble miniature bullhorns and literally suck half your flesh into the opening), and a few stray pre-sterilized zip-lock baggies into a black, nylon impostor of a designer purse (aka the Medela Pump in Style Advanced with 2-Phase Expression, “the ideal electric breast pump for active or working mothers to support a long breastfeeding period,” which the WHO now recommends as two years).

I unplug the cord from the wall, making sure to place the small, plastic safety cap snuggly over the outlet. (My husband has almost always had to reminded me to do this a half hour later when he comes down the stairs to present me with our fully-dressed daughter so that the two of us can struggle into the car laden with diaper bag, pump bag, laptop, lunch sack, cell phone, ear bud, pacifier, blanket, teddy bear, rattle, or other musical toy with buttons to push, and begin our morning commute.)

I fold the cord deliberately, taking the time to press it smooth and avoid making knots in the wire. I wedge it carefully up against the small square motor to be sure I am doing no damage to this expensive and irreplaceable part, the soul of the machine that made it thump like a heart beat—suck-release, suck-release—which played as a voice in my head chanting “in a hurry, in a hurry” for some forty-odd cycles per minute for twenty minutes, two to three times each and every day. Then, slowly, I zip the front pocket for the last time. I whisk the bag off my kitchen table, and instead of lugging it into my car, I tramp it down the stairs for storage in my basement.

Today, I am giving up the pump.

As with several first-time aspects of new motherhood, I have experienced a love-hate relationship with my pump. I loved that pumping forced me to sit still twice a day for twenty minutes (a simple sounding pleasure that quickly takes on the dignity of the sublime for anyone with an infant).

I hated that once I started back to work, I often spent those twenty minutes sitting at my desk, checking email. (I've also pumped while driving, although I do not recommend this.)

I loved that pumping enabled us to donate 739 ounces to the Mother's Milk Bank at St. Luke's in Denver to nourish other infants, suffering from digestive problems and whose mothers could not sustain their own supply. (I say “us” because without my daughter, this gift would not have been possible.)

I hated that pumping led me to discover (with increasing disappointment) that bathrooms are designed with outlets only in the most visible of places—always in front of large mirrors at the entrance and never behind the safe seclusion of stall doors—so that more than half of the female student body at the university where I work has probably seen my breasts at one time or another. (This repeated event, of course, prompted me to ask one gawking undergraduate if this was cautioning her to rethink the feminist movement.)

I loved the release, even if it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.

I hated that it was not the same as holding the warm, soft body of my daughter.

First patented back in 1854, the pump is essentially a miniaturized version of that which is used in commercial dairy operations. It has seen little improvement in engineering since Einar Egnell's groundbreaking 1956 work “Viewpoints on what happens mechanically in the female breast during various methods of milk collection.” The fact that this research was conducted at the height of the era of the Feminine Mystique renders our history of that time a bit suspect. While cultural mythology tells me that my own mother was learning the trade of changing her brother's diapers under her own mother's careful tutelage, Egnell was simultaneously laying the groundwork for her to be the breastfeeding working mother she was in the 1980s when I was born.

I hated them both when I finally admitted to the fact that I would indeed be returning to work at the end of my too-short, twelve-week maternity leave and so sat down one night to read the fat, impossible instruction book, complete with threatening chart for when and how your milk would go bad if not properly stored. I also read several online advice columns of a long list of things I would need in order to successfully produce while pumping: a photo of my daughter, a relaxing quiet space, an eight ounce glass of water for consumption before and after pumping. I was also instructed to spread my arms up over my head and flap them several times as well as to message both breasts. Mood music was also recommended, although I never figured out exactly what kind of music was supposed to get me in the mood. (Brahms lullaby perhaps? “Milk” by Garbage or Sons of Leon? “Safe as Milk” by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band? The multi-album recordings by Neutral Milk Hotel?) Because the machine came with a $400 price tag, I was more afraid of breaking it than it breaking me.

Thankfully, I am proud to report that both the machine and my breasts have survived this experience in tact and I did not need to find a breast pumping symphony in order to successfully "produce." My daughter made it through her infancy without a drop of IQ-draining formula (even if no one from the prenatal classes where I first heard this claim could ever actually produce the study that renders this suspect "fact" as truth.)

However, before I go on to bash my pump as a hellish invention, a modern inconvenience that keeps job-protected maternity leave down to a mere twelve weeks (but only for the lucky ones who work for companies that employ 50 or more people, which is less than half of the companies in today's marketplace); my pump did exactly what it was supposed to: enabled me to continue to be the breastfeeding, on-call, ever-present, calm-my-daughter-by-walking-in-the-room mother I wanted to be and be the hard-driving, energetic, I-can-do-anything-you-can-do-better, accomplished career woman I was pre-pregnancy/pre-birth.

Or did it?

The truth is I weep in the privacy of my car nearly every day I drop my daughter off with her nanny, even though she learns sign language or comes home with her wispy thin hair in tiny pigtails I'd never have the patience to put in. She is as eager to see me when I pick her up as she is when I come into her room in the mornings to retrieve her from the crib. She goes swimming and visits the new born foals just down the street from her nanny's house who are growing like she is with every passing day. I cry, not for her loss of happiness (she is actually, delightedly happy), but instead because I am missing it.

The truth is every time I successfully lead a project to conclusion, hear my boss or colleagues impressed with an idea I have at work, make a difference in the way we are doing things, delivering a better experience for our constituency, I am no less thrilled than I was before.

What I hated the most about my pump was the fact that it made it possible for me to step away from my daughter in those early moments when she needed me the most.

What I loved? For those few minutes a day, it upheld the illusion. It made the impossible seem easy, convenient, sane.