i am totally jacked up on coffee and v8 right now.
a little background: i work in an office building downtown on monroe. it's 10 stories high. we're on the 9th. we're the only people on the whole floor. last week, i was surprised when i walked into the bathroom to find a lady in there with a duffle bag on the counter and the water running and her hands all up in her shirt. figuring she was a client of one of our attorneys, i decide not to be too weirded out. about an hour later (i drink a lot of water and coffee) i walk to the bathroom door and hear this bizarre buzzing noise. i press my ear to the door, it sounds a little like a vacuum cleaner. so... i decide to hold it rather than bust all up in some uncomfortable bathroom situation.
this afternoon, i was coming off of the two fisted coffee/v8 binge mentioned above. i blindly rushed into the restroom only to find the source of the whirring, buzzing, mechanical suck. it was a breast pump. that's right. a business woman in a severe pantsuit and sensible shoes was stripped to the waist with her jacket hung on a hanger on a stall door and implementing this artificial milker right there on the sink. she looked intentionally blase and smiled as if to indicate that there was nothing out of the ordinary going on, as though she were only washing her hands, not massaging breast milk out of her tits with an apparatus concealed in a black nylon bag and an air horn with a lab flask and hoses attached to it.
look. i know that motherhood is a beautiful thing or something. and maybe you want to breastfeed but still have to go to work everyday, or whatever happens that calls for this behaviour. i don't know, that's not the point. it's not that i find the act of breastfeeding disgusting or unnatural (just icky and weird, but i can deal with that), it's the fact that she came upstairs to OUR bathroom to do it! there's at least one bathroom on every floor of the building. and at least one floor has only one small all male office on it. absolute solitude to do your necessary deed! what's better than that?
am i just being neurotic here? or am i justified in wanting to go to her and say, 'ma'am, there are four women who work here and several female clients in and out of the office all day. i think that i can speak for them all when i say please, please for the sweet love of the gods, select a bathroom a little further away from all of us to celebrate this natural, if presumptuous, dance of motherhood and life'?
A very quick update
2 days ago
2 comments:
Oooh.. This is a touchy one for me. On the one hand, I completely understand being shaken out of one's comfort zone when confronted with something one finds disconcerting. Still, I have real strong feelings about breastfeeding/pumping, etc. In many ways, it is culture that has created the breast as something so incredibly sexualized that its other purpose--nourishment--is devalued by society. Because the breast is more readily connected with arousal, it becomes something dirty, which, in turn, forces the tit into hiding. As a staunch advocate of breast feeding, and with my personal sympathy for the plight of the career mom who wants to have it all, my support lies with the bathroom lady. It isn't as if breast pumping is the most pleasant/convenient acitivity anyways. Maybe she felt ashamed of doing it on her own floor for fear that this act would be misconstrued as a sign of weakness, even by other female coworkers, since, let's face it, sometimes women are their own worst enemies. (Re: Sarah Palin) That could be the reason she showed up on a foreign floor.
Go here for another bathroom shenanigans story: http://thegaragesaleofignorance.blogspot.com/2008/11/and-then-hero-comes-along.html
Just before I hit submit, I want you to know that I am NOT comparing you to Sarah Palin. You are much too smart and sassy for that, madam. It was just an example, which is something I do when I put on my teacher hat, or vest, etc. Ha.. WTF?
well, let it never be said that i am against in an absolute way to something as natural as breast feeding. it's just that, for someone who has no designs on experiencing child rearing herself, to be confronted by something as personal and intimate as that in an environment previously regarded as private and secluded.... well, i hope that you can see and understand my discomfort a little.
i know that our culture turned the torso of the female into something to be reviled when it denied the sensuality of fertility, but i'm still struggling to be cool with a half naked woman in my semi-private bathroom.
for all of my pretensions towards embracing the feminine, i have always had issues with things like this. i had a hard enough time when my best lady friend pulled out her breasts without warning to feed her infant babe. i think it's because i have little to no maternal instinct. i don't know. it's complicated.
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