Quandaries

Today I actually found myself putting my sweet baby girl down onto the floor of a public bathroom while I used the toilet. I was alone, and running errands with no one to help. Before I had her I don't think I ever would have imagined laying a baby down in a dirty public restroom. But sometimes you find yourself doing things the hard way, or the long way, or the dirty way, just to make sure your baby is taken care of.

Here are the quandaries I would have never imagined getting into before having Noelle:

1) Regularly nursing my baby in the car before or after church because there is no "nursing room" in the building, and because service is at that awkward hour between naps and playtime. Would be a breeze, except friends from church regularly stream by the windows smiling and waving. How should they guess what I'm doing?

2) Leaving Noelle locked in the apartment while I run down to get laundry or run back to the parking lot to pull the car up. If we had chosen to live in suburbia with our own washer and drier, or our own garage neither of these scenarios would happen. Actually, leaving Noelle alone in the apartment while she was sleeping or sitting in the car seat never bothered me until I ran into a neighbor one day who asked me cheerily, "Is Noelle with her Daddy?"

"No," I said. "She's in the apartment." The neighbor balked and looked at me as if I was the worst mother on the block. The next time she saw me without the baby, she made a point to ask, "Noelle's not alone is she?"

3) And here's the kicker - the predicament that takes the cake: expressing my milk while driving in rush hour traffic. This is how one ends up in such a pickle. I teach a class every Tuesday and Thursday night. Because of the horrendous traffic in LA it takes me nearly two hours to drive to work. In order to keep the milk supply up, I must pump when I miss a feeding. But what happens if you're running late, or if traffic is particularly slow? You whip out the Medela Pump in Style, and discretely pump while creeping along at 10 miles an hour.

I can't tell you how many times I've panicked over getting in an accident while pumping. In addition to other undesirable consequences, I imagined newspaper headlines - "Mother caught pumping breasts in LA traffic." It's exactly the kind of story that turns up on NPR's news quiz, "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me."