For the Love of Breasts

I wasn’t going to breastfeed my daughter.

My mother didn’t breastfeed me. The women at the publishing company where I worked told me if I breastfed I’d feel like a cow. But like any good teacher, my newborn daughter took my nipple into her small open mouth the moment they laid her on my chest, and in that moment I felt as if I was feeding her food from the gods.

It was 1993 and I was wrestling with the dream of having it all, but my daughter had other ideas. She didn’t know my mother didn’t breastfeed me, or that I had a boss who began faxing me on that thin, white paper two days after we returned home from a C-section asking for major changes in the budget.

He asked me to come back into the office early while my jaundiced daughter lay in a light box, and I’d lie next to it, holding her hand.

I went back to work early.

I cried the whole way to work that first day in my thin black skirt with some stretch, crisp white blouse and heels, and was met by a boss who suggested I start interviewing my replacement because I was a mother now.

My breasts started leaking in a meeting my first day back. He looked at my wet blouse and asked if I was more into motherhood than planning for the upcoming year, in front of my whole staff.

The next day I carried in the large blue breast pumping box into the office in one hand, my briefcase in another.

What’s that? my boss asked

A breast pump I said, almost whispering.

He informed me I could not pump in my office even though it was private, with a locked door and blinds that closed. I overlooked the lobby of the Spelling Entertainment building then, but I was forced to pump in the handicapped stall in the small bathroom with a large extension cord halfway across the lobby.

The cast of the TV drama Melrose place often filmed there, and the extras in the series were always in that bathroom checking on their makeup and tripping over the cord, complaining about the noise coming from my stall.

My breasts didn’t like the chatter from the cast of Melrose Place. They said Hell No….and nothing would come out.

A month later, a friend suggested I visit her good friend, Gloria Allred, the feminist attorney who later stood up for the women who took on Bill Cosby and Donald Trump. I made an appointment and cancelled it, then made another appointment, and drove to her swanky office, and waited in the lobby with Nicole Simpson’s grieving family.

I brought my shame to her law office. .

I brought the restaurant tables where I tried to hide my baby and my breast under a blanket.

I brought my leaking blouse and swollen breasts.

I brought the faxes and emails from my boss.

I brought all my talented friends who had ever wondered whether motherhood had made them less valuable in the workplace.

For backup support, I brought my father’s mother and her mother and her mother - all the women in my family who tried to have it all.

Gloria Allred held me - not in her arms like a mother, but with her dark eyes and fierceness for women’s rights. She had red lipstick and thick brown lipliner. She had a beautiful, tailored tweed Armani suit.

She said let’s try to change these laws together.

I gave her my fear for my future.

I gave her my fear for my daughter’s future.

I gave her the story of my grandmother who had to give away a baby in the middle of the night.

She said, honey. Let’s do something about this, and we did.

Twenty-one years later my daughter breastfed her own baby in the open, without shame, in the bed of a pickup truck in a parking lot on Kauai. She never had to wonder who fought for that freedom.

Not everybody had Gloria Allred like a hellion putting on lipstick and drafting a letter while answering her phone - a letter that freed me from the shackles of seeing myself through the eyes of an abusive employer.

But we have stories to remind us of the extension cords, the shame and the fight to do the most natural thing in the world - feed our babies without hiding.

I didn’t get to breastfeed my daughter as long as I wanted to. But years later I watched her feed her own children without shame, and I realized that’s how change happens. We rarely receive the freedom we fight for ourselves. More often, we pass it on.

Change does happen - one mother, one baby and one hellion story at a time.

❤

Have a story about your breasts? Join us for For the Love of Breasts, a live two-hour writing workshop on Friday, September 18.

Together we’ll explore the many stories our breasts carry—breastfeeding, coming of age, sexuality, motherhood, breast cancer, family history, aging, body image, loss, healing, and ancestral ties.

This writing workshop is free for Writing at Red Lights paid subscribers, but anyone can register - see link below for registration. If you become a paid subscriber, you will receive information on how to register for free.

Register For the Love of Breasts