Am I Immodest?

So I'm breatfeeding the Bug. Breast is best and all that. Also, frankly, it is cheaper. I have the time and luxury to do it, so I am. I'm not a fanatic about it, though. I understand that there as many reasons not to as there are families who elect to feed their babies formula. Furthermore, it really isn't my business why another woman makes the choices she makes regarding her own body or her own family. (I won't go into this too much, since Ph.D. in Parenting already did it better than I ever could here.) (See, I told you I was a feminist.)

So I nurse in public. My choice is that or stay at home except when someone else can travel with me until the Bug is between 6 and 9 months old. Like many babies, she refuses to take a bottle from me. I try to use a nursing cover, not so much as an issue of my own modesty, but for the comfort of those around me. Our nursing cover is patterned though, and the Bug decides sometimes that playing with the walls is more fun than eating in her tent. I've nursed at the Y, at the yarn shop, in my car in parking lots, and at the doctor's office.

Last week, we were out running errands. The last thing on the list was the Y, and we rolled in just as she was getting hungry. Usually, when I nurse her there, I take her to one of the rocking chairs in the infant area, but this day, it was before the child care opened for the afternoon, so I took her to a bench near the child care in a hallway really only frequented by Y staff and parents taking children to activities or child care. I got comfy, changed the Bug's diaper, and started nursing her. We started with the nursing cover, but instead of eat, she just played with it. Since I wanted her to eat, I finally gave up, and stuffed the cover back in the bag.

There is a trick to nursing in public with out a cover, and I'm pretty good at it. Simply put, I wear 2 shirts, one that I pull up, and a lower layer that I can pull down. To a casual observer, between the shirts and the baby, less of me is visible than if I wear my favourite beach bikini. That's what I did. The Bug was happy, the few people who passed by largely ignored us.

But, within the same several minutes, I got two comments. One was "awww, isn't that sweet," from one of the supervisors, and the other was "you should really use a cover, a lot of men come down this hallway," from one of the child care staff. My response, as it is to most criticism of my personal quirks, was "if they have a problem with it, that's their problem, not mine." To which the woman said, "well, it's just an issue of modesty." Her tone was along the lines of the lone teetotaler at an Irish wake.

I don't think it is an issue of modesty at all. I think it is an issue of prudishness. If my baby needs to eat, I'm going to feed her. My body, through my breasts, is how I feed her for the moment. When she's older, I won't be embarrassed to give her a ham sandwich in public, will I? Indeed, aside from being rather proud of how well breastfeeding is going, I think I'm being quite modest. Furthermore, breasts aren't dirty. I can even say "nipple" on TV, even if I can't show one there. Our culture has simply hyper-sexualized women so much that it is impossible for some people to see breasts as anything but sexual.

Later, when the same woman came to fetch me out of the hot tub to console my crying daughter, she had an entire conversation with me while I was in my bathing suit. In this case, I was the uncomfortable one.

Dress Like a Mom

I was recently socializing with some of the yarn ladies at a yarn shop.* We were talking about the adjustment to motherhood, and one of them, a 40-ish lady with a middle-school aged son related that when said son was an infant, she told her husband that she was dressed "like a mom" and he said "well you are a mom." This was, for her, the moment it sunk in that she was actually someone's mother.

I've been thinking about this, and here's the conclusion I've come to: I don't know what "dressed like a mom" is. I know how I like to dress and how I generally dress for going out in public, but what I don't know is if I dress like a mom. I do know that my clothing preferences haven't changed substantially since the Bug was born. Okay, nursing tanks weren't a part of my wardrobe before her birth, but an outfit built around jeans and a tank top was a pretty central feature, to be honest.

Just because I'm not happy about my ab muscles (and let's be honest here, I wasn't happy with them before the Bug), I'm not going to start wearing high waisted jeans**; I'm just going to accept muffin top, and start running as soon as the doc gives me the okay.

I might wear a trifle more lounge wear than I used to, but I assume my desire to do that will diminish as my postpartum discomforts also diminish. Washable items seem essential (she spits), but then I'm lazy enough that they were a fairly significant part of my wardrobe. Button downs and wrap-fronts might be more important than they used to be, but she won't be nursing forever (no matter how much it feels like it when she eats every 2 hours overnight during a growth spurt).

I will admit that I don't get make up on every day. But this is something I've gone back and forth with over the years; times when I won't leave the house in full "face" and times when I just accept my blotchy skin for what it is. In recent years, I had found a happy medium of minimal make up that still covered anything I was self-conscious about. But mostly that was what I did for work. When you work with teenagers and don't quite look your 30+ years, you have to find ways to make sure you aren't mistaken for one of them. One that I picked was subtle, tasteful make up.*** I'm not working at the moment, so...

I guess if some hormonal shift triggers me to start dressing badly, I'll have to ask Lady to let me know. Because the DH isn't stupid enough to say anything about it. I hope.


*By the way, hanging out with my knitter friends is possibly the easiest way to get some grown up time with people I'm not married to. As most of them are older than me, most of them have been parents, and know how babies work. Furthermore, if the Bug wants to be held, there are all of these folks who are up for it-- most of them have grandkids in other states, and really want a baby "fix." I get to sit and enjoy the company of adults.
**Sorry to my non-US followers: this inspired SNL clip isn't available on youtube, and I'm betting the Hulu link doesn't work for you. Here are some monkeys dancing, though. Meagre consolation, but... it's the best I can do.
***As opposed to the utter lack or whorish tartiness favoured by most of my students.