A Breastpumping Nightmare

Warning: This entry contains references to boobs, breastmilk and breastpump accessories!

I had to attend a burial last Friday (on Halloween, of all days). The burial was at 2 p.m., I needed to get in some reasonable time at work beforehand and then drive two hours to get there, so I was in the usual pickle: how to find that extra 40 minutes to pump.

As some of you may know, pumping milk at work is a decided pain in the ass. You sit there for 20 to 30 minutes hooked up to this annoyingly complicated machine, watching nebishy little squirts come out and praying it won't take too much longer because someone either knocks on the door or you need to run to a meeting. I find that while I have the one boob hooked up, the other one starts to leak, so I end up with milk dripping all over the place and I've usually forgotten to bring in paper towels or a diaper cloth. It's all very obnoxious (but worth it, of course! it's all about the little munchkin's health).

So anyways, to make a long story short, there I inevitable found myself, desperately negotiating early afternoon traffic while hunched over with no seatbelt, PUMPING WHILE DRIVING. It was the most humiliating and dangerous thing I've done in a while. I won't go into the sordid details, but that experience will stay with me for a long time. I've vowed never, ever to do that again. I vividly recall trying to stay hunched over so the milk could flow downward into the bottle without backfilling and spilling all over me, all the while praying a cop wouldn't stop me for not wearing a seatbelt. I had the pump and battery pack set up on the seat next to me, which happens to have a hard plastic back made for laptops, but I think I can safely assume they did not make this handy feature with breastpumps in mind. The pump kept sliding all over the plastic surface. And on top of all this, I had my Mapquest directions lying out and was trying to follow those - which, I should add, included 10 miles on dirt roads.

Now I know for a fact that motherhood = multitasking!