Thursday, October 9, 2008

Pump Up the Jam





I recently read an article about how Sarah Palin used to take her baby Trig to her job at the governor's office and breastfeed him during conference calls.


I thought this was cool because a couple of months ago I was doing the same thing. I worked from home for about the first six months of Snookums' life, while she was really tiny and needed to nurse all the time. I'd often have her propped on pillows in front of me while I was conference-calling with some corporate client like Accenture or Bayer. They never knew.


Now I'm going into the office and since I'm not the governor, I can't bring Snookums with me. So twice a day, I go and sit in a storage room for about 15 minutes while I pump breastmilk. (It's not as bad as it sounds -- in our old office, I had to pump in the bathroom.) I've done entire interviews while doing this -- the other day, I interviewed a guy from Colonial Williamsburg and a spokesperson for the TSA, my cell phone in one hand and my Medela Pump in Style in the other.

A lot of mothers have told me their brain didn't seem to work as fast once they had a baby. I never understood this -- the only thing slowing me down was lack of sleep and even with that, I was still able to function pretty well. Was it because these mothers didn't have to work? I wondered.



Sarah Palin agrees. "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time," she says in the article, "I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave."



But when I repeated this quote to my husband, he thought for a minute and then asked, "But shouldn't she be escorting them out of the cave?"


1 comment:

Goody 2 Shoes said...

Isnt it Neanderthal thinking to assume just because Palin has a lot of babies, one in arms, women--such as those who supported Hillary--are going to support her? Gee she she must understand women's issues--like, choice-- since she has the appropriate anatomy.