Hello, Chicago.

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

I came to abortion work in a rather circuitous way. It was not expected after seven years of strict Catholic schooling and twenty-one Thanksgivings full of staunchly conservative, pro-life family debates. By the time I arrived in Seattle in 1998, a newly graduated college-educated feminist, I had left all of the conservative Catholicism behind me, but I still did not anticipate that abortion work would become my passion.

When I was 19, I was in a car wreck. As a result I had a spinal fusion that was successful for two reasons. First of all, I can walk and second, the fusion is in excellent shape twenty years later due to an excellent surgeon and prudent care on my part.

However; this puts me in a category known as "pre-existing condition" to insurance providers. Once you have one, you must stay insured at all times or you will never be insured again.

With all the media and political talking heads yakking about teen, unwed, or single mothers these days, I have a wake up call for everybody...

I have been a teen mother. I have lived with a man just to keep my baby. I graduated from a high school for teen mothers. I have been a single mother for eight years. I know a bit about this issue. Most of these politicos and talking heads have never lived my life, never had an inkling of what it's REALLY like to have a baby at sixteen and another at nineteen, and I cannot be silent about this subject that has, for the last few days, replaced the MISSING WHITE WOMAN headlines or CELEBRITY O.D.s on 24 hour "news." This does not happen often. Maybe in the last year, teen moms have been on the radar, in the form of US Magazine or whatever trash people are reading these days, because of what? Britney Spears, our tabloid queen, with more covers than Princess Diana, her little sister got pregnant at sixteen, sold her story to a trashy magazine for a million dollars, and suddenly teen pregnancy is a hot topic again--that and the fact that it has, for the first time in decades, increased. If the topic of teen/single moms can only be brought up because of some chick I've never heard of, in a National Enquirer-type magazine, which sadly is more widely read than newspapers.....Well, I quote Thomas Jefferson: "I tremble for the fate of my country."

I am not Jamie Spears. I am not a millionaire fake celeb. I am not Bristol Palin. Do you think either of these girls will walk into their local welfare office and wait hours, just for that extra $100 a month in foodstamps? Will they ever spend week after week on the phone with operators hired by a privatized Medicaid system, trying to find a doctor who will actually see their asthmatic child? Will they spend years fighting the Attorney General's office for child support, waiting a year just to get to court? Will they ever try to pay for their generic can of beans with WIC coupons and be treated like a leper? Have someone roll their eyes as they buy food with food stamps after they just got off an eight-hour shift standing on thier feet, cutting nasty hair?

First Ricky Lake made a movie, the Business of Being Born, inspired by her own homebirth and actor John C. McGinley (Scrubs) and his wife Nichole had a baby at home and People magazine wrote a nice blurb about it.

Then ACOG (the American College of Obs and Gyns) felt so threatened they issued a press release reiterating their "long-standing opposition to home births" in which they state:

"Childbirth decisions should not be dictated or influenced by what's fashionable, trendy, or the latest cause célèbre. Despite the rosy picture painted by home birth advocates, a seemingly normal labor and delivery can quickly become life threatening for both the mother and baby."

Apparently childbirth decisions should only be influenced by celebrities choosing planned cesareans, despite that being a much riskier option.

"I don’t know how you do it," my neighbor’s girlfriend commented. My five-year-old daughter Siu Loong was at her father’s house and I had taken advantage of my free night to attend and photograph a march against police brutality, then stayed out till midnight developing the film I had shot.

"I dunno. I just do," I mumbled, not knowing what else to say.

But that’s not entirely true. To simply say that leaves out the resources and community I’ve gained from years of being engaged in social justice work.

A couple weeks ago I traveled to New York City for work. It was my first visit to the city, and on my one free afternoon, I shot out of my hotel room and into the city like a pinball. I popped in and out of stores. I raced up and down streets. I bounced in and out of subway tunnels. I wanted to see it all: the visual assault of Times Square; the carousel at Central Park; the tiny, closet-like cafés in the Soho district; the children skipping through the fountain at Washington Square Park. I was so busy shopping I didn't even have time to buy anything. In the evening, as I made my way back to my room, I passed a street vendor selling t-shirts for children printed with images of pop icons. The shirts seemed like the perfect New York City souvenir for my children: hip, edgy, irreverent. For my six-year old daughter, I chose a purple shirt with Einstein sticking his tongue out for the camera. For my two-year old son, a bright blue shirt with Che Guevara's chiseled profile set against a red background.

I was pleased with my purchases, and so were my kids. The first morning after I returned, I dressed them in their new shirts. On the drive to my son's Spanish immersion daycare, my daughter amused herself in the back seat by teaching her brother to say the name of the man on his shirt. He caught on quickly. Over and over in the car, she pointed to his shirt and asked, "Who's that?" And he responded proudly: "Shay Gebaba," and all three of us giggled. When we arrived at his classroom, he ran up to his teacher, a soft-spoken Cuban woman who never failed to greet him with a hug. He pointed to his chest and squealed: "Shay Gebaba!"

Monica and Me
By Laura Fokkena

Some people remember where they were when they heard Kennedy was shot. Others remember where they were when they watched the moon landing. I remember where I was when I first realized Bill Clinton was lying about his sex life: Falls Church, Virginia, on the balcony of my friend Erik's apartment.

My daughter and I were crashing at Erik's while we waited for the triple stars of housing, job, and day care to align in exactly the right combination. It's a trick, that. Find day care without a job and you won't be able to afford it. Find a job without day care and you won't be able to go to it. And find either without an apartment and, well, let's just be thankful that Erik had a couch.

War and Protest: Scenes from the Homefront on the First Day of Spring
by Shaunna Harrington

My day officially begins when my four and a half year old daughter runs into my bedroom and announces, “It’s the first day of spring, Mama!�

Zoë’s nursery school has been counting down all week. We toast “Happy Spring!� to each other and to Ennya, our 5 month old baby, and the three of us snuggle under the covers in my bed and talk about the great things that happen in spring: leaves and flowers and chirping birds and going to school without snow pants.

We eat breakfast and get ready for school. I open the kitchen door and the fresh smell of early spring immediately greets me. With the first gulp of warm air, I feel the winter tension in my body begin to dissolve. I smile uncontrollably. I know I will not spend this day counting down the hours until bedtime.

The Necessity of Involvement
by Laura Fokkena

I've always taken a great deal of pleasure in mocking people who believe there are earth-shattering regional differences within the United States, as though people from California and Ohio are formed out of some fundamentally different DNA, as though they don't all get screwed over in their jobs every day and then go home to watch the same episode of Friends.

But I'm having a seriously hard time listening to Boston radio talk about the Iowa caucuses as if they are some bizarre Martian ritual. The same argument within Iowa would bother me not at all, but for some reason hearing Joe Klein argue that "Iowans don't have three hours to spend on this" makes me want to grab him by the throat. How would YOU know? It brings out the inner provincial in me.

Armistice Day
by Muffy Bolding

Though it is now officially known as Veteran's Day, I prefer to call this day of remembrance by its original and much more poetic title: Armistice Day.

This morning I woke, made some good, strong coffee and sat in front of the television with my husband, both of us too young to have ever feared a draft. We watched C-SPAN while an endless parade of senators (all Republicans, for reasons I still haven't figured out) made four-minute speeches honoring the veterans and war dead of this, arguably the greatest nation on earth.

They stepped solemnly to the podium -- many wearing red poppies of remembrance on the lapels of their dark, finely tailored suits -- and spoke with great awe and reverence of the veterans of World Wars I and II. They spoke with gratitude and respect of the veterans of the conflict in Korea. And they spoke with a sense of renewed pride and profound regret regarding the treatment of the veterans of the war in Vietnam.

Yo Mama and the New Economy
by Bee Lavender

In the last year or so I've watched lots of my friends lose their jobs in the so-called High Tech economy. I've read about business after business shutting down, stuffing their post-it notes and dry erase markers into boxes, and locking the door. Most of these businesses lost money; but at the very top, many people also *made* a huge amount of money.

I really missed the boat on this whole New Economy deal. If I had been a little more motivated, maybe I could have been one of the sterling citizens who made a fortune off the internet. Instead of running a service site, a not-for-profit venture, an online parenting zine for people seeking community, I could have lined my own pockets.

Wedding Bells and Welfare Bucks: For the Bush Administration, it’s a perfect marriage
by Alana Kumbier

Attention, Single Mamas: George W. Bush has a proposal for you: a marriage proposal. That’s right, he wants you to get married. You’re particularly encouraged to don a bridal veil if you’re on welfare and/or parenting as part of an unmarried couple. If you act now, you might even be able to get hitched before Congress makes its decisions about Bush’s plan to fund marriage initiative and abstinence-only education programs with welfare dollars. The Administration is proposing the allocation of $400 million for marriage initiatives ($300 million at the federal level, with an additional $100 million dollar bonus for states that get the most women married or have ‘successful’ marriage initiatives), and $135 million for abstinence education, to be drawn from welfare funds.

These marriage initiatives are part of Bush’s proposal for the reauthorization of the nation’s welfare laws. In late February, Bush unveiled his welfare plan during a speech at a Catholic church in Southeast Washington. In his speech, Bush stated that the welfare policy should focus on the creation and maintenance of stable families, announcing that his “administration will give unprecedented support to strengthening marriage.� As Washington Post staff writer Amy Goldstein reported, the White House plans to require states to include “explicit descriptions of their family-formation and healthy-marriage efforts� in the welfare plans they submit to the federal government. The House passed Bush’s welfare legislation (HR 4737) in May, and the Senate is working on its welfare reform bill now, with hopes to have its work finished in July.

The proposal for welfare reauthorization put forth by the Bush Administration builds upon the “success� of the 1996 reforms. Bush’s proposal calls for tougher work standards, which would require welfare recipients to work 40 hours per week (supposedly, in 1996, states had the option of allowing 20 hours of work and 10 hours of flexible activities, and states chose to enforce 30 hours of work instead, allowing two of those days to be used for narrowly-defined education and training activities), allocating $400 million for marriage promotion campaigns, and spending $135 million on abstinence education. Increased spending for childcare (for mothers and fathers who have to work those 40 hours), or for training or education for welfare recipients, aren’t part of this proposal.

What’s happening with welfare now

In order to better understand Bush’s proposals for welfare reauthorization, as well as their potential effects, it’s a good idea to revisit the 1996 reforms that created the current welfare systems in place across the U.S. Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWOA) in 1996. This new law replaced existing welfare programs with Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), which was enacted with the stipulation that Congress would have to reauthorize TANF by the end of September 2002. The TANF law defined primary objectives for welfare reform as “promoting job preparation, work, and marriage; preventing and reducing the incidence of out-of-wedlock pregnancies; and encouraging the formation and maintenance of two-parent families.� In this formulation, states were able to define who constituted a family, and what types of assistance different family units might receive (note that the language of the law does not require that parents be married, only that they share parenting responsibilities in the home). Immigrants (even those with children who are U.S. citizens) are ineligible for any assistance, regardless of their familial status.

The TANF reforms set a five-year lifetime limit for welfare recipients (such that if an individual or family has received five years’ worth of benefits, they will be ineligible for future assistance), and increased work requirements, while simultaneously creating stricter definitions of countable “work� activities. Under TANF, single parents must work 30 hours per week, and parents in two-parent families must work 35 hours per week (though in many states, like Montana, two-parent families have to work up to 60 hours a week to qualify for assistance) to be eligible for welfare assistance. Parents cannot receive TANF funds while pursuing further education or training, unless this training is part of a vocational education program or is specifically applicable to the recipient’s job, and is supplemental to 20 hours of other work activity. Recipients cannot count parenting/childcare, literacy education, ESL courses or college study as work activities. While TANF does provide some childcare benefits, and may waive work activities requirements for parents who cannot find adequate childcare, recipients are often not informed about these benefits.

The TANF legislation’s efforts to reduce out-of-wedlock births materialized in the form of annual $100 million “illegitimacy bonuses� to the five states that had achieved the greatest reduction in the number of out-of-wedlock births. These efforts were supplemented by federally funded “abstinence-only� education programs, for which $250 million was allocated.

According to some poverty rights and feminist activists, TANF’s effects have been detrimental to welfare recipients, and their status as a foundation for similar legislation is highly problematic. In response to TANF’s flexibility on family formation initiatives, 23 states have instituted “family cap� policies for welfare recipients, denying welfare assistance to children born to parents already on welfare, or placing tougher work requirements on mothers who exceed the family cap. NOW-LDEF notes that non-marital births have not decreased as a result of these initiatives. In at least one state (New Jersey), the reduction in out-of-wedlock births was concurrent with an increase in abortions.

We don’t yet know the results of “abstinence-only� education, but as the NOW-LDEF site observes that the “education, mentoring, and counseling programs funded under the law must adhere to a specific set of eight tenets, such as ‘sex outside of marriage is likely to be psychologically and physically harmful’,� while not providing important information about taking measures to prevent sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies.

Even with TANF funding, families on welfare often don’t receive enough assistance to make ends meet, or to avoid serious hardship. Though they may be working 30 to 40 hours a week, recipients still may not rise above the poverty level, if their jobs pay less than a living wage. Without the education or training necessary to prepare for better employment, parents may find themselves without viable options for advancement once their benefits run out.

State Marriage Initiatives

As a result of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act’s emphasis on the formation and maintenance of two-parent families, several states have begun to experiment with different initiatives linking marriage initiatives with welfare funds. In West Virginia, TANF funds have been allocated to add a $100 bonus to families’ monthly benefits if the parents on welfare marry each other. Oklahoma is working on a $10 million Marriage Initiative plan that includes public education campaigns, youth outreach and education, the integration of pro-marriage counseling in social service programs, and a specific religious initiative encouraging religious leaders to encourage their church and synagogue members to undergo pre-marital counseling. The Michigan Family Independence Agency, partially financed with welfare funds, was established to provide marital and family counseling and anger management courses to interested individuals. Utah has allocated a portion of its TANF surplus for a marriage education campaign that will be developed over a two-year period, and the state legislature raised the minimum age for marriage from 14 to 16 years old.

Arizona has been particularly gung-ho in its marriage initiatives. According to the NOW-LDEF, the state has allocated $1 million for marriage skills classes offered by community-based organizations, and it has established a Marriage and Communication Skills Commission, whose projects include the creation and distribution of a “healthy marriage� handbook to all couples applying for a marriage license, and funding vouchers for low income couples attending marriage-skills classes. The Arizona legislature also passed a Covenant Marriage law in 1998, “under which couples promise to stay married for life and renounce their legal right to a no-fault divorce.�

Fighting for alternatives that empower single mothers

The very real possibility of building further ties between marriage initiatives and welfare money has been a call to action for a number of welfare advocates and activists, for feminists, for civil rights leaders, and for those in support of individual citizens’ privacy and right to choice regarding marriage and family planning. These activists and advocates are working to raise awareness about flaws in current and proposed welfare policy, and to warn Americans about the threats such policies pose to families on welfare, as well as to the public at large.

In a recent interview, Dorian Solot, Co-founder of the Alternatives to Marriage Project, an nonprofit advocacy organization that works to promote “equality and fairness for unmarried people, including people who choose not to marry, cannot marry, or live together before marriage,� identified several flaws in the logic of state and federal marriage promotion initiatives.

“The first problem is there’s no evidence that promoting marriage will help anyone get out of poverty,� Solot said. “If we agree that the purpose of welfare is to help people escape poverty, then we have no reason to believe that marriage is going to help us achieve that goal. The second problem is that there’s an assumption that anyone who wants to can get married, and so of course there are gay and lesbian people who can’t marry, heterosexual people who can’t marry because they’re not in a relationship, because their partner is abusive and not marrying is a really wise decision. Perhaps the third problem is the belief that if women marry, the guy they’re marrying is going to be the guy on ‘Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire’—when the reality is that the men that most poor women marry are poor men, and don’t have the resources to get their families what they need and to get on their feet financially.

“There’s a certain body of research about the positive effects of marriage, and that’s what a lot of these policy arguments are based on,� she noted. “But we don’t know anything about whether marriages that are produced or coerced by government agencies have those same effects—in fact, there may be good reason to suspect they don’t have the same positive effects, because maybe we need to be trusting people to make that very private decision themselves.�

Solot acknowledges that it’s difficult for many politicians and public figures to openly oppose these marriage promotion proposals. “Everyone loves marriage—there isn’t really anyone who’ll say ‘I’m against marriage,’ which makes it hard to criticize these proposals and means that all politicians need to be behind them, politically. But the reality is they don’t even begin to address the realities of peoples’ lives, particularly poor peoples’.

“I think that most of the people who are opposing or critiquing the marriage promotion proposals think marriage is great and don’t have any problem with the idea that we should help build strong families and strong marriages, but do have problems with spending money to do that.�

For Kate Kahan, Executive Director of Working for Equality and Economic Liberation (WEEL), a grassroots organization that started in response to welfare reform, fighting marriage promotion campaigns at the state and federal level has been both personally and politically important. Kahan, a single mother with a nine-year-old son, was on welfare and going to college when the 1996 welfare reforms happened. “I experienced that big transition of welfare reform personally, and barely finished college,� she said in a recent interview. “I bring a strong feminist element and approach to this [work], and one of the big issues that everyone in this organization has had is this direct attack on women’s private lives by trying to control who they marry and whether or not their children are illegitimate through welfare policy.�

Kahan and her colleagues made an important discovery early on in their poverty-rights work, that they could build power through coalition-building with similar groups in the region (WEEL is based in Montana). “One of the things that’s significant about what we’ve done is we’ve figured out pretty quickly that we are totally divided along state lines,� Kahan said. “All of our welfare programs are different, and even if our folks are experiencing the same circumstances, all of our policies are so different. We figured out that what we needed to do was work across state lines and build our power, and so we started a regional network of seven western states working on welfare issues.

“People in the progressive community were shocked we were able to figure that out; it was pretty soon after welfare reform. We immediately identified the reauthorization of the welfare reform bill as something we needed to be involved in, and because we had the experience from the ground—our members, some of us staff members, had been there directly. That element was missing in ’96 in the debates, and is an absolute necessity for the 2002 debates.�

Through a particularly serendipitous turn of political events, Kahan’s home state was thrust into the welfare-reform spotlight. “Montana has key congressional delegation for the welfare reform issue,� she said. “Montana Senator Max Baucus is chair of the powerful Senate Finance Committee, the committee which holds jurisdiction over welfare. Essentially, Senator Baucus will be responsible for creating the welfare bill that will go to the President. Given this situation, WEEL and allies on the state level began an assertive education campaign focused on Montana’s experience with welfare reform. This education work has led WEEL and their allies into the national spotlight due to its level of success in educating Senator Baucus on which welfare policies make sense for people on poverty. Senator Baucus has publicly denounced government involvement in whether or not low-income families should be married, thanks to WEEL’s efforts.�

“I see this as an issue of choice, hands down,� Kahan continued. “We can relate this to issues we’ve seen in the past where restrictive policies have begun with low-income women, but didn’t stop there. For example, the Hyde Amendment that restricted money going into any sort of abortion services for low-income women has resulted in tremendously scary debates about whether or not you should be able to get birth control if you’re on Medicaid. Or, there are the sterilization efforts on the reservations—those are all direct, concerted attacks on low-income women, and they end up domino-effecting to affect all other women. I see this as the exact same thing—when restrictive policies start with low-income women, they don’t stop there.�

Aside from the potential future ramifications these marriage-welfare policies may have for low-income women and the public at large, feminists and welfare advocates are concerned with the effects these policies have on women and children who are facing domestic violence situations, for whom barriers to getting a divorce can be deadly.

“We do advocacy work at WEEL, so we help people navigate their way through the very complicated welfare systems we have now,� Kahan said. “One of the main reasons that people call here for advocacy, over 50 percent of the time, is domestic violence, and they’re in a situation where they can’t get on assistance. I see this marriage promotion piece as being another barrier for women leaving, because if you go into a welfare office and you see a poster with a nuclear family saying ‘You want more welfare benefits, talk to your caseworker,’ or you have your case worker saying ‘No, you should really go to this marriage counselor before you leave,’ it’s going to be deadly. That’s one of my main concerns.

“I have personal experience with having been a young mother. I had little to no job experience when I went to apply for welfare, and I had $7 too much in my bank account, so I got turned away. I ended up not being able to get a job, and I got married to the father of my child. Two years later, I left a very violent home. Marriage wasn’t the solution to my poverty or my son’s poverty. If I hadn’t left that home, I would have died, and that’s reflected in so many of the women’s lives that we work with.�

Kahan realizes that the struggle to raise awareness about these marriage promotion campaigns, and about the importance of questioning and critiquing the Bush administration’s proposals is a rhetorical one. Effecting specific material changes to improve the lives of families on welfare means going beyond simple, individual “solutions� like marriage. It also means making these issues relevant to the population at large.

Kahan and other welfare and civil rights advocates are ready to make specific arguments to populations who might not consider themselves implicated in welfare reform or marriage promotion. In Kahan, and WEEL’s, case, these arguments come in the handy form of an activists’ handbook that Kahan has produced to inspire and inform people who want to fight conservative welfare reform plans.

“Different people will relate to this issue from different angles,� Kahan said. “There’s the choice angle; this really starts to get at reproductive freedom. The privacy issues, we’ve all seen these when addressing healthcare and women’s healthcare. There’s also a lot of racist policy—this is really geared towards getting African American women to marry and get off welfare. There’s a wage gap argument: these proposals totally ignore the fact that women don’t make as much money as men. There’s a discrimination argument: this clearly discriminates against gay and lesbian folks.

“I think it’s racist and sexist policy specifically veiled in family values rhetoric,� Kahan added. “We’ve seen this strategy before, many times. The Bush proposal for welfare offers over-simplified, band-aid solutions to the complex issues surrounding poverty in our country. Framing such superficial proposals in family values rhetoric completely avoids addressing the very real issue of poverty. So far, the democrats haven’t figured out how to get out of the familiar corner such rhetoric has backed them into. It seems pretty obvious to me that capturing the debate back to one that addresses poverty and the needs of America’s poor is imperative and not that difficult. After all, Bush isn’t talking about poverty reduction in any way, shape or form.�

Even some Republicans may find themselves siding with folks like Kahan and Solot. “It’s so contradictory to the spiel you usually get from Republicans, that the government shouldn’t be involved in people’s private lives,� Kahan said.

Strengthening families

It’s important to note that most people who are opposed to policies that link marriage to welfare are not anti-family. Kahan and Solot agree that there are reasonable, constructive ways to help families on welfare. Both women stress the importance of creating and supporting policies that would allow mothers and fathers to care for their children materially and emotionally. WEEL’s “Family Strengthening� proposal calls for an end to discrimination against unmarried, two-parent families, funding for at-home care programs that would allow low-income parents to choose to stay home with their children, increased funding for high-quality childcare, working to ensure that child support dollars are received by families, and protecting families in domestic violence situations as well as helping them through crisis.

“Parents need to be able to take care of their kids in a real way that makes sense,� Kahan emphasizes at the end of our interview. “They need to get the money that’s owed to them through child support, and we need to create more opportunities to help struggling families get out of poverty.�

“If your criteria are children’s well-being,� Solot observed, “the programs that helped children the most were the ones that raised their parents’ incomes, whether that was through helping them get jobs, or jobs that paid living wages, or less direct ways like ensuring they had transportation to get to work, or child care. When you add up families’ total assets and incomes, the families who have more have their children doing better. Those kinds of programs are a lot more complicated, and nowhere near as appealing as just saying ‘Oh, get married.’�

+ + + + +

For more information:

To find out more about WEEL’s work, or to request a copy of WEEL’s activist handbook for fighting Bush’s welfare reauthorization plan, visit weelempowers.org or e-mail weel@weelempowers.org

Visit the Alternatives to Marriage site

And learn more about the status of welfare reauthorization legislation before the senate at the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund site.

Pumping-in-Style
by Christine Ferris

I am a shameless breastfeeder. I feel completely comfortable lifting up my shirt and letting my baby nurse in restaurants as I peruse the menu, in bookstores as I sit on the floor in the mystery section, in office waiting rooms as I wait for my cat to be vaccinated.
But I will not pump milk in front of anyone.
It is a strange and vaguely embarrassing thing to do. I find it hard to separate it from the other bodily functions of elimination. We are trained to think of our excretions as dirty, something we do in private and then wash our hands. I know the milk that flows, or sometimes trickles, out of my breast is clean -- full, in fact, of antibodies; I still wash my hands after I'm finished. I never know what to say to people at work when I have to go do this pumping thing and yet I'll be absent too long not to excuse myself in some way. I have to go pump milk? Excuse me while I go express myself? Moo? Usually I end up vaguely gesturing at my chest and mumbling, "I have to go aahh, be in my office for awhile."
Once alone in my office, with the door locked and the blinds closed, I sit and face my "Pump-in-StyleT." The squarish, black, leather bag disguises itself as a large purse, or small briefcase. The flaps unzip and reveal the dials, plugs, and white diaphragm that creates the pulsing suction action which so mimics the baby's suckling (not!). One compartment holds ice packs and up to four bottles. The other holds the power cord and the nursing shields, which I must clutch to my breasts. I can't do anything else while I am pumping, as I must hold each of the two shields up over each of my breasts with a bit of pressure and at just the right angle or I'll lose the seal and the suction. So I am stuck, staring into space, thinking about my baby that I am not with, or all the tasks I was in the middle of at work but now must wait to complete, or I sit listening to the phone ring, wondering why my boss has such a knack for calling at this very moment.
Sometimes I feel frustrated and I wonder why someone hasn't invented a single- handle, double-cup version, so I could at least hold a pen, or turn a page, or click a mouse. But other times I listen to the mechanical diaphragm breathing in and out rhythmically, and I start hearing it say words to me "Clark Gable, Clark Gable, Clark Gable" or "time matters, time matters, time matters" and I think it is good for me to sit and do nothing else as the milk flows in tiny streams and slowly fills up the little bottles. I think about breastfeeding, working moms around the country, all of us with the same black, square bag holding our labors of love in disguise in the workplace. All of us sitting behind closed office doors, or in the bathroom, or in a storage closet, or in a car, waiting for the tingling sensation of the milk letting down, sitting with our corporate suits unbuttoned, our T-shirts hiked up, our uniforms in disarray, our nursing bras with the flaps down. Here we are in post-feminism's version of modern motherhood breastfeeding a machine so we can be at work while someone else feeds our babies.
I am thankful for feminism, I believe because of it we are sharing the power and responsibilities of work and home more equally with men than ever before. I also know that parents of both genders are struggling to be able to meet the demands of work and family. At work women, even nursing mothers, can be grown-ups with power, earning money, making decisions that matter, and we aren't forced to stay at home like our own mothers may have been. But we are vulnerable at work, with our tops opened up to reveal our breasts, both our hands occupied, in a way no man ever is. We are interrupted at work at regular intervals to feed the baby, even though the baby is not physically present, like no father ever is. And I think, how do we do it? How do we work and nurture our babies? How do we be competent professionals and caring mothers of infants? How do we do everything?
At work, three days a week, I am late, disorganized, forgetful. At home the rest of the week, I am tired, irritable, inattentive. I cling to my job, my identity outside the home, my power in society. I equally cling to motherhood, a role I cherish, and I choose breastfeeding, the most natural and healthiest way to feed my precious baby. I do everything by doing none of it well and I wonder what other choices could there be? I have friends that have put their own careers on hold and found personal satisfaction through their mothering. They face the tedium involved in full time childcare, a sometimes uncomfortable level of financial dependence on their spouse, and a few live on the edge of poverty. I have other friends who have hired nannies and gone back to work fulltime. They face a constant, painful struggle with guilt for both not being there enough for their child and never being able to put in as many late hours at work as their childless colleagues. The majority of their salaries go to childcare expenses.
As I leave for home, my pump-in-styleT slung over one shoulder, my briefcase over the other, and exhaustion hanging around my neck, another woman in her late thirties enters the elevator. She points to my pump. "I remember those days," she says and then sighs. She smiles at me sympathetically. "They are babies for such a short time." I nod and smile back. I still want a better answer for all of us.