Hip Moms Who Work

Until you discover this blog (I believe I am just speaking to myself at this point) I will go ahead and kick off this storytelling session.  

When I had my first child I was working in a middle-aged-white-male-dominated office so I made sure to frequently contact the company while on maternity leave to ask them if they would be able to designate some place for me to pump when I got back. They assured me it was handled. Riiiiiigggghhhht. I show up my first day back and there’s no decent place to pump. So there I am engorged, going through nursing pads every 15  minutes and they tell me I should go ask Sue (I guess because she was the only other somewhat-new mom on the floor) if I could use her office to pump. Since that wasn’t happening, they said they’d give me an extension cord so that I could pump in one of the bathroom stalls.  Seriously? Food for my precious baby prepared in a bathroom stall? It became a big deal around the office and all of these men were involved in my pumping dilemma. So we decided that I could use the women’s locker room. Sounded good to me. Since this was SO high on their list of priorities, they assigned the 22-yr-old security guy to make up a sign for the room (it did not have a lock on the door, of course) to show when it was in use. Genius uses the largest, boldest font possible and prints out a 8.5 x 11 sign that reads “LACTATION ROOM”.  Oh yeah, that’s a great visual for everyone when they walk by.  

Setting: Large conference room full of 8 men

Co-worker #1: “Where’s Andrea?”

Co-worker #2: “Didn’t you see the sign?  She’s lactating right now.  She’ll join us in a moment.”

Needless to say, I revised the sign to plainly read “Room In Use” and there I pumped for the next three months…

Your turn.  Leave your story below.