the squibix family blog

I put my head down on the wet surface and started to sob.

Dan came into the room to see what was the trouble.

"I know what this looks like," I said.

Dan looked at me quizzically. "What?"

"Crying over spilled milk."

"Oh," Dan said.

"Whoever said that spilled milk wasn't a big deal? He never had to pump it out of his own breast."

By way of explanation, it's been a rather hard month in our household. After half a year of home-office mommy-hood, I'll soon be transitioning to working outside the home. This is not a situation I'm excited about. Indeed, I wouldn't choose it if there were any other choice. For the next four months I'll spend about five hours every week sitting on the floor of a public rest room with a vacuum hose attached to my tit. And if that's not a metaphor for modern motherhood, and all the bullshit we have to put up with in this mother fucking capitalist shitsdom, then I don't know what is.

You can see that I'm rapidly cycling through all the stages of grief. And then repeating them.

A week ago I went to interview at the office of the big company who is acquiring the small company I work for. The first man I talked to had a picture of a newborn on his desk. I inquired, and he gushed about his new baby girl, now three months old.

"My wife is just ending her maternity leave," he said, "and it's really hard on her. I mean, she has to work for the money and all, but she doesn't want to leave the baby. We've looked into daycare, you know? or having a family member do it? But we have a certain way we want to raise our child. And we want to be able to do that. But with the working and everything, I don't know if we can. It's just really hard."

"I know," I say.

"Anyway," he says, "we're really excited to have you come on board."

Yesterday I went into the office again to meet with my new boss. Even though it was only a lunch meeting and I only went about 3 hours between Harvey feedings, I developed a clog in my breast which turned into mastitis. By five o'clock I was in bed shivering with seven blankets pulled over me. And what felt like a display case of Cutco knives angling to escape from the confines of my breast tissue.

I called up the doctors office and begged them to send a prescription. The nurse asked me 20 questions, agreed it sounded like mastitis, then asked some additional questions to assuage her curiosity.

"How often are you feeding him?" she asked.

"About once every two-and-a-half hours."

"Wow! And he's eight months old???"

"Well, yes." I got that feeling in the pit of my stomach when my mommy sense tells me I'm about to be criticized. "He's eating solid foods too, but he does like nursing."

"And you're home with him to let him do that?"

"Well, yes." (For the remainder of the week at least, but I don't go into that.)

"Wow! Good for you! You know that's the best thing for them, but it can be so hard to pull off."

Oh yeah? Tell me about it.

"My sister," she continued, "has a baby who's 9 months old. She's a teacher, and when the baby was littler they were sympathetic about her pumping during the day. But now that he's older they're kind of tired of it. They want her to come to staff meetings during lunch. And it's hard on her, because she's having a hard time finding time to pump."

"Yeah..." I say.

"When I had my babies I worked nights," she goes on. "My husband would put all the sleeping kids in the car and bring them to the hospital where I worked so that I could feed the baby in the middle of my shift."

"Wow."

"But it's hard. I was committed to breast feeding until a year, but it was a hard thing to pull off. Kudos on you for doing that. Anyway I'll call in this prescription now..."

In America today we have a new "problem that has no name." We've gone from being bored alone in the house, to being screwed alone in the workplace, because that boring house now costs us more money in financing each month than three new shiny sets of washer and dryer.

We keep saying to each other "It's hard. It's so hard." and then we go back to work, because sympathy don't pay the bills. Because when every family has two incomes suddenly everything is more expensive and every family NEEDS two incomes. Because imparting your values onto your children is less important than owning a place to stash their exersaucer.

It makes me want to start a revolution, but I can't leave the house today because my tit's all swelled up and I can't put on a bra.

And the pump doesn't come with a car attachment.

And I have so much work to do.

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