Show Us Your Tits (or Why Moms SHOULD Nurse in Public)

When I had Violet 22 months ago, I knew very little about what kind of Mommy I'd be. One of the few things that I did know was that I would stop at nothing to breastfeed her. I was more determined than knowledgeable at the outset but that determination paid off. After a rough start, Violet and I found our nursing rhythm and it has been (mostly) smooth sailing since then.

Nursing has become such an integral part of the kind of parent I am that we are still at it, 10 months after I reached my personal goal of breastfeeding for a year. I did not plan to nurse Violet this long at the outset, but I can't imagine abruptly stopping right now. This one activity fills so many purposes: nursing is a hug and a nuzzle, it's a pacifier and a nap begetter, nursing is a reassuring squeeze in an unfamiliar situation; it is a snuggle and a refreshment, all mixed into one.

Because I am now nursing a full-on toddler, I have gotten pretty sensitive to what the public perception of breastfeeding beyond a year is. And I am more easily ruffled when I read things like this. Because instead of it just being an anecdote about someone far away, it is a story about someone LIKE me, doing what I am doing, and being judged harshly for it.

I wish I could say that my determination to breastfeed at the beginning translated to me feeling comfortable nursing Violet when and where she required but that was not how we started. When Violet was between 1-3 months old, there were dozens of times when I put off her cries or left a situation in a hurry to feed her. There was a family brunch at Le Peep when she was 3 months old where I forgot my nursing cover and so I scooted off to the car to nurse while my pancakes got cold. I remember a dinner at Charleston's where I spent 25 minutes before we left pumping so I could fill a bottle for Violet to have during dinner. She finished that bottle in less than 5 minutes and I still had to nurse her in the restaurant. I almost made Shawn leave an Indian's baseball game in the 4th inning because I was so paranoid about nursing in public. Thank God Shawn noticed another mom nursing and pointed her out to me. The sight of that mom was enough to give me the courage to nurse.

She probably had no idea that by nursing her kid at the baseball game that night, she made another mom feel normal.

I got pretty good at nursing Violet comfortably around the time she turned 5 months or so. I nursed her at the library, at the State Fair, at the mall, at a parade next to my also nursing sister in law, at P.F. Chang's, in the doctor's office, and pretty much everywhere in between. Those were the glory days of public nursing; I had become comfortable enough to do it almost anywhere and still had a baby young enough to "pass." Not so much anymore.

Violet is a big, old, nursling, now. She doesn't walk, she runs, and she's speaking better each day. She is one of the kids people joke about when they say "If they're old enough to ask for it, they're too old to have it." Again, nursing in public has become nerve wracking for me.

Shawn and I flew to Florida a few weeks back and I knew that when it came to keeping Violet content and thus making my fellow passengers' trip more pleasant, nursing was going to be my ace in the hole. And it was. On the way down, Shawn and I sat next to each other and Violet was a peach. She read books, ate pretzels, and nursed to sleep for the remainder of the flight. After we landed, the older man sitting in the row ahead of us turned around and commented on how well behaved Vi had been during the flight. I don't think any passengers were any the wiser about why she'd been so mellow. The flight attendants might have noticed that she was nursing, but they would have had to been looking closely.

On the flight home, Shawn and I were seated in different rows. I had Violet on my lap and a 40 year old man sitting in the seat 7 millimeters away. My palms were sweaty as I adjusted Vi and I into our window seat and tried to get into a position that would be comfortable for all of us. Since airplane seats have shrunk considerably since I gained a lap rider, I knew there was no way I was going to be able to keep the nursing secret from the guy next to me. Violet's return flight was much like the way down; some books, some snacks, and then nursing to sleep. What they guy next to me thought, I'll never know. He was polite enough, and seemed to be genuinely engrossed in his own book, so maybe it was a non-issue for him. I just hope there wasn't something ugly written about me on the Internet later that night. I guess I'll never know.

So, why, despite the fact that it makes me nervous, do I nurse in public?

Because it sucks that I'm nervous.

Because mothers who feels too uncomfortable to nurse in public are far less likely to meet their personal breastfeeding goals than a mom who is willing to give it a whirl. No one can stay at home forever, after all.

Because there is all kinds of lip service telling women "Breast is Best" but very little societal support for that statement. You cannot say you are "all for breastfeeding" and in the next breath be "NOT supportive of moms" who do so in public.

Because I worked really hard to get breastfeeding established and I didn't want the use of bottles to undermine that effort.

Because the decision to breastfeed Violet is one of the cornerstones of my mothering philosophy and I am proud of that.

Because nursing is NORMAL, for heaven's sake!

When I was hiding in cars or restrooms to nurse, I was doing nothing to help other nursing moms feel normal. As a matter of fact, I was buying into the shame that nursing mothers feel that makes them hide from view in the first place. Unless people see babies at the breast, it will never become the norm. As long as bottles remain in plain sight and nursing is hidden, artificial feeding will be accepted as normal and breastfeeding a baby (let alone a huge toddler like mine!) will remain on the fringe.

The Man in My Life

A house full of chicks, that's what Shawn lives in. A chick wife, a chick dog, a chick baby, and a chick cat. There isn't another Y chromosome in the bunch. His Y is the only Pierce Y for now and it has a lot of man things to do. I need that chromosome to do all the normal man stuff: take out the garbage, shovel the snow, mow the lawn in season. Light bulbs get changed, water softeners get salted, and racing is watched on TV. The Y takes care of all that.

But Shawn is called on to dig deep and use his X chromy from time to time, too. He listens to my "Lesbian Music," a term coined by one of Shawn's less enlightened friends, without complaint. He does diapers without batting an eye and cleans up after dinner most nights. He lets me be indecisive and doesn't roll his eyes. The length of my showers or get-ready ritual has never been called into question. He gossips with me and pumps my gas, watches ice skating and carries my 14 year old mop dog outside for a pee.

Shawn surely wants a son but, if ever there was a man who could survive--thrive, even--in a female filled house, it is this one. If we have another baby, which we plan to do, I know he would welcome a girl as enthusiastically as he would a boy, and for that I am thankful.

As long as it is just us girls, I'm glad we have friends who have sons. Shawn practically choked on his dinner volunteering to dress as Batman for Carrie and Conor's son's 4th birthday party.



That's not Bruce Wayne. That's my husband. In full bat regalia. At McDonald's.

Hands off, Ladies.

Batman was a huge hit with 4 year old Griffin. I know that Shawn would love to share superheroes and slot cars and tackle football--all those activities that are so strongly identified with the male gender--with a son, but I'm sure he'd love to share them with Violet, too, if she was interested. Judging from her reaction to Batman showing up at the party, he may want to wait a couple years for the superheroes.

A Pot to Poop In

As recently as 2009, I was disgusted by the itty-bitty crappers people use catch their toddler mess. We'd get an invite over to a friend's home for dinner and then, sitting there beside the crudites next to the coffee table would be this teeny-tiny port-o-john. Usually it would go unused, but some nights you'd get lucky and actually get to see the kid in question pinch one off before dessert. Why can't the kid sit on the toilet, I wondered, or at least have his port-o-pot in the bathroom? Why does it have to be in the living room for all to observe?

When she first started showing an interest in the toilet a month ago, I bought Violet one of those kiddie donut seats that sits on top of the full-sized john. I figured she could learn using that and we'd never have to go the port-o-tot route. Then, like many of the other parenting decisions I've made in the last 21 months, reason and laziness trumped disgust and I saw why so many parents have chosen to let their kid wee-wee in bucket on the floor.

They can reach it.

Potty Chair, I believe, is the proper mommy term, but they are really not much more than a molded plastic bowl that the kid sits on to take care of business. Obviously, there's no running water attached, so a parent has to clean out the trough after the baby is through. And actually, for me, wiping down a plastic bowl after dunking umpteen cloth diapers in the toilet will be like being a zookeeper transferred from the elephant exhibit to the gazelle run. Still scooping shit, but a vast improvement.

So, a co-worker gave me two tiny potty chairs and they have taken up residence in our bathrooms. However, if Violet agreed to shit exclusively in a training toilet from now on, never again soiling a diaper for me to change, I would let her go about her business perched like a grunting centerpiece on the dining room table if she so wished. I might move her to the floor if we had guests or a piping hot dish on the table, but otherwise, I wouldn't let it get to me. Again, laziness trumping disgust.

Part of me feels like this is premature. She is only 21 months old, after all, and I've watched lots of bright kids who don't potty train until over age 3. But she showed and interest, so I figured, let the kid have a chance to choose not to wear crappy pants. Seems like a basic human right.

I don't know if it was the novelty of the the potty, the glitz of the toilet paper, or just dumb luck, but the morning after we introduced the new potty chairs, I let her have a sit down and discovered this at the end of her turn:


That, next to the penny (which I added as a point of reference on size), is a teeny-tiny turd. I was overwhelmed with pride and disbelief.

Less than 30 minutes after this photo was taken, I was dunking into my toilet a diaper filled with 70 times the volume of crap as is shown in this photo; but still, my little girl made ca-ca. In a potty. And I took a photo. And posted it on the Internet.

This is why childless people don't read mommy blogs.

Our Budget; One Slice of Pie Away From Turning Us Into Cannibals

I spent the better part of the afternoon yesterday linking our family finances up to the budgeting tools at Mint.com. A friend had recommended the site to me before the holidays and it became clear last week when I warned Shawn yet again that our joint checking account was on red-alert that I needed to figure our what is becoming of our money. So I signed up. I inputted all of the ugly details about who we owe, where we shop, and what's coming in. The site sends alerts to your email account to keep you abreast of your finances. Within seconds of establishing our account, I got a low-balance alert.

Thanks, Mint.com. That's why I signed up.

I had been fooling myself into thinking that what Shawn and I had was a cash flow problem; that we just needed to redistribute the pay dates for some of our bills and we'd have hundreds left over at the end of each month. The pie chart generated by Mint.com tells a different tale. When I say we spend the entire pie, I do not exaggerate. There is not one crumb to spare. And, the frequent transfers I make from savings to checking--"just this month," to cover this one time thing (a new set of tires, a special birthday gift, Christmas) are because we routinely spend more than we make. This is hard to admit, embarrassing even, but it's true. I gave great lip service to the cuts we would have to make so that I could work part-time, and then we really didn't make any cuts. We'd go out to eat 5 or 6 times a month and then I'd wonder why we we can't save a penny and why we have to limit our gas fill-ups to 1/2 a tank at a time the last couple days before a paycheck.


Here's the good news; a good chunk of our budget is slash-able. The second largest slice of our pie during January was food.

Oink, oink, piggy.

That includes both groceries and restaurants. The dining out is a no-brainer. We aren't rich, eating out once or twice a month is plenty. The hard thing about that for us is we never want to miss anything so it can be difficult to turn down an invite. But I know we can do a better job of focusing on the "can't miss" opportunities to eat out like birthdays or special get-togethers with friends and skipping the "we are bored because it is January in Indiana so let's go get some nachos" nights. Those nights add up with a quickness when both of us have 2 or 3 drinks. We rarely get out of a restaurant for under $50 once we leave a tip. During the month of January, we spent close to $500 eating out. There was New Years, then Jen's birthday, a random pizza night, a girls night, a book club. You get the picture. Going forward, that is going to be unheard of.

Cutting the grocery bill is a different beast. I am a firm believer that spending a little more on organic milk or pastured eggs not only makes good health sense, but it is also the environmentally sound thing to dol. I buy generic stuff when I can, like mouthwash or canned beans or tortillas, but I need to trust that my freshies: veggies, dairy, fruits, fish, etc...

And don't even get me started about cutting out wine. NOT. GOING. TO. HAPPEN. While wine and beer are regularly the culprit for pushing the total on our Meijer receipt from the tens place to the hundreds, I need to have some release. All budget and no play makes Jill a total bitch. So the wine stays.

After all, if I cut out wine, became a total bitch, and Shawn divorced me, then we would have to pay for TWO households instead of just one, and that would be a complete budget-buster. Mint.com would send an alert for sure.

To Do or Not To Do...

I'm not a big list maker. My sister-in-law makes lists. I've seen them on her chalkboard. She makes the list and then crosses things off when they are finished. Her list might say:

Car wash✓
Pay IPL bill
Get shower gift✓
Iron curtains

Each time I go over to their house, I'll see what she's accomplished on her list. Items rarely fester on that blackboard for more than a week. The task is posted, accomplished, checked off and replaced with a new to-do. What a system.

My To-Do list is mental. It is constantly being revised based on my mood, what time I wake up, how I feel, how Violet feels, what kind of mood she is in, what kind of nap she takes, what I am hungry for, what the weather is like, and how willing I am at each given moment to live with clutter. For instance, a quick glance around my living room right now reveals every DVD we own scattered on the floor around the entertainment center, a dozen or so of Vi's books on the floor near her book basket, one of my cookbooks on an end table, some laundry folded on the coffee table, and 7 other toys laying in random spots. Violet is napping. I could be straightening and making some real headway without the tot-tornado following behind me undoing my work. Cleaning and picking-up, like laundry, is always on the To Do list. But, I'm not into it right now.

There are several things I've done today that haven't been on my To Do list. I've brushed the dog. I made homemade brownies. I cleaned brownie batter off of Violet. I cleaned shampoo off of Violet. I cleaned blueberry juice (which is about as easy to remove as bank robbery ink) off of Violet. I made arrangements to pay two bills once we get our next paychecks. I called to make a reservation for our book club dinner. I'm writing a blog.

The mental To-Do's that I haven't gotten to yet today are also many. Write thank you notes for Christmas. Install printer to the Mac. Workout. Shower. And of course, clean up before Shawn gets home so he doesn't wonder what in Christ I've been doing all day.

The To-Do's I have actually done? I called Allstate and reported the minor accident I was in (2 weeks ago) so we can get my car fixed. Oh, yeah, I've done laundry, too.

Maybe writing the list down would motivate me to do more. Maybe it would help my nieces and nephews to get a birthday gift on time once and a while. Perhaps it would mean that we'd stop getting emails from the chick who bought our house telling us that she has yet another stack of our mail. Maybe a list would help us get those new insurance cards or paint the bathroom ceiling.

But it would probably just make me feel guilty for deviating from a plan. So I'd erase the original list with the thank yous and the workout on it and make a new fake To Do list of things I had already done:

brownies✓
brush dog✓
laundry✓
write blog✓

All those check marks are satisfying to look at. I think this might be a good system for me! And now, since I've accomplished so much, I'm going to take a nap!

Fear of Fuzzball

Fully understanding another human is an impossibility. We come close with some people, spouses, if we're lucky; best friends, certainly; maybe our same sex parent, as we age. I don't know how much I'll ever understand about Violet. I know her better than anyone but I definitely don't understand her. I assume to understand a lot of her toddler behavior and relate to it in the context of "what kids do" but the motivation behind the behavior is alien to me.

Here are a list of "I wonders" about Violet:

Why does she always take a bite of the dog's treat before she hands it over?
Why doesn't the feeling of a turd in her pants creep her out?
What does she like about Dora?
Why does she love broccoli?
Why must she always pull off her socks even when her feet are freezing?
Why doesn't she understand that bodyslamming the cat will hurt her?

As a person who has overcome her share of fears and still harbors a few others, the one thing I respect thoroughly are Violet's hot button creepouts. That is not to say that I understand them all. My childhood fears--water, men with beards--may have seemed irrational to my parents, too. But at least both of those things--water, men with beards--are actually capable of doing harm to a little girl. Whether or not they ever had or would hurt me was irrelevant. I could drown in water. I could be abducted by a man with a beard. It could happen.

Violet's #1 fear right now...? Fuzzballs. Yup, dustbunnies, lintballs, floorfuzz. I don't think there are any documented cases of fuzzballs actually hurting anyone. It makes so little sense, it is hard to not take advantage of the poor kid for a laugh. I'm fairly sure this is how phobias begin...

Christmas Past

Christmas was not my Dad's favorite holiday. Come to think of it, I don't know if my Dad would call any holiday his favorite. He was agnostic, so that ruled out giddiness over the traditional Christian holidays. He worked like a slave, so he never took off on secular holidays like President's Day. And he was not impressed by material goods, for the most part, so holidays that centered around buying trinkets did nothing for him. I guess he liked setting off fireworks when we were little, so maybe the 4th of July would have been a favorite. He didn't like the fireworks nearly as much as my brothers liked them, though, and I think by the 5th he was tired of fielding complaints from the neighbors about bottle rockets scaring their dogs.

So why did I feel the absence of my Dad so much more keenly at Christmastime? He told me once, during one of the years I lived at home after he got sick, that Christmas was always depressing for him; that he didn't much care for it. Lots of people get down in the dumps at the holidays, and I do understand why.

When my parent's divorce was still fresh, Christmas wasn't exactly all elves and peanut brittle. All of the shittiness of the rest of the calendar year seemed to come to a head and there was no way to avoid it. All collected in the same room, gathered around a tree, the tension and annoyance that ran the lines between the 5 of us would crackle to the surface in a sarcastic comment or a more blatant ridiculing. Despite their divorce, we all still always had Christmas together and my parents enduring tenderness toward one another made that possible. We did, and still do, like each other, but, like most families, we are not without our baggage and it is always heavier during the last week of the year.

The first couple of holidays after the split were bizarre as we navigated our way through a new normal, one that included two houses and two trees. My parents were hurting after being unable to salvage a 25 year union; their three semi-adult children were angry, and in true family tradition we dealt with those raw emotions by joking and teasing, occasionally taking it too far, but never apologizing. We were pissed at my Mom and felt sorry for my Dad and we'd swap presents and try to be the first to leave. My feelings would be hurt that Jeff had other plans or that Andy was only home for 4 days. I missed the pajamaed Christmases I'd grown up knowing, with myriad gifts, omelets at 11am, and naps in the afternoon. No hurrying, no leaving. So, I'd drink too much and count the days til it was time to go back to school, back to my friends and the anonymity of a huge university.

But Christmas wasn't always this way. For the first 17 years of my life it was generally looked more like a Folger's commercial. My Mom made Christmas the event that it was around our house. She baked and decorated, bought and wrapped gifts, and created the traditions that I see being replicated in my brother's homes as well as my own. We made lists, got toys and clothes when we were younger, clothes and electronics when we reached adolescence. The homemade fudge and stairway garland and big Christmas party that happened at our house during December helped build the excitement for me and I have never forgotten what that felt like. No memories from the divorce years can dampen that. I can still capture that feeling, though it is fleeting, as an adult.

The lazy but speedy week between Christmas and New Year's was maybe the best part of it all. My Dad would take vacation and be at home working puzzles during the day and making soup at night. The living room would still be littered with toys as no parent would dream of making you take your Christmas loot to your room before the tree came down. Shawn and I adopted that same policy last week, sleeping in, cooking, and playing with Violet's new toys late into the afternoon. The thing that struck me was just how normal it felt to have our little family together and complete for the week. It isn't normal, just like it wasn't normal for my Dad to be puttering around the house when I was young, but it just feels so right.

And that's what was missing from Christmas 2009. And 2008 and 2007, for that matter. That complete feeling of having all my loved ones surrounding me. I still miss my Dad and I suppose that I always will.