Twenty-Five Weeks. Four Days. Day 181 in the quest to meet our little miracle George
As we drove to the coast this morning and as my mind wandered a thousand miles away i remembered a few years ago there was a story in the news about a woman who was kicked out of a restaurant for breast feeding. It caused such an uproar in womans rights groups, and it was in the media for weeks, people debating what was right, what was wrong, what was fair, who had the most power, whos choice it was in the end… On and on round and round! I look back on that now and it gets me thinking about what i may do in such situations, what i will do when it comes to feeding my child in public.
Now i am not a judgmental person, i am not someone who would tell someone else what to do, and i certainly have no problem with women feeding in public – Each to their own, thats what they say – if a woman chooses to feed her child in public than that is the mothers right – agreed? Yes i agree, however i also believe there is a way to go about it, a discrete way where no one feels offended or uncomfortable.
My husband and i were shopping a year or so back and we decided to stop for lunch at a coffee shop in the middle of the supermarket – you know the ones, the ones where the chairs are so close together that you are basically sitting on top of the next patron. We ordered and sat down with our number. Then a woman and her child sat down in the chair behind me, before anything further happened she popped out a boob and started feeding.
Now before you go and get crook at me for saying it like that, it was literally like that – she seriously popped out her boobs in the middle of the cafe! She was not wearing the right sort of clothes to inconspicuously feed, she was not wearing a feeding bra, she just lifted her shirt up popped one of the arms out so her shirt was half off and lifted her bra – she was basically half naked. She chose not to use one of those breast feeding blankets, and basically everything was on show.
Now the problem was not the fact that she was doing it, nor the fact that she chose not to cover herself or the baby, it was just simply the fact that everyone else felt uncomfortable. It was one of those situations where you dont want to look, but you cant avoid not looking, where when ever you turn your head in that direction you are confronted by boobs. My poor husband was trying so hard not to look in that direction, he just didnt know where to look! If he looked at me, it appeared like he was staring at the lady, if he turned his head away, it appeared as if he was trying not to look at the lady… i had to laugh at the relief in his eyes when his food came just so he could look at it!
So i wonder, not that there is a right way to go about it or a wrong way to go about it, but what is the polite way of feeding?
When you are at the shops, do you go to the mothers room?
When you are at a family gathering, so you excuse yourself for a while?
What do other people feel comfortable with? Not me specifically, but the people around me?
What do you do when you are confronted with situations where people arnt understanding? And does that happen often?
And my other question is, which may be a completely different blog post…. 
How the hell do those contraptions work?
A man cannot be comfortable without his own approval. Mark Twain
