Few things throw a new mom into the reality of her dignity lost forever than the almighty breast pump.

I had my first date with one a good eleven years ago when the baby accessory industry wasn’t as fancy as it is now. Nowadays I’m seeing sleek and fabulous milk-extracting contraptions. They seem almost… quiet.

Not so in days past. Not so.

During pregnancy I traded up from a meager training-bra size to a modest and respectable mid-sized set. “Great,” I thought, “This is what it’s like to fit properly into women’s clothing. I could get used to this.”

Then came the baby.

Everything seemed to be going well for the first 48 hours aside from the not sleeping and the puke-poop fest and the whole postpartum depression thing. Did I say it was going well? What I meant to say is I didn’t think it could get any more undignified. And then the baby’s food supply pulled into the station. It felt like the whole year’s supply was delivered at once.

Oh God, have mercy on my double A-sized soul.

What were once breasts were now hard, veiny footballs, swollen and shiny, taut and throbbing to the point of bursting. I thought they might literally rupture and wondered if that would feel better than continuing to host these new obtrusive milk melons. Too tired to draw any logical conclusions and unable to get my teensy human boy child to latch on to my bloated monstrosities, I gave up.

As luck would have it, I married well.

Like a perfectly timed balloon popping, in walks the husband with an industrial looking device to free me from my misery. “Try this thing,” he said. Fine. Hook me up, baby. Bring on the milking of motherhood.

Boy, was that thing ever LOUD. 

At the time, we lived in a small, old, poorly built apartment complex where all of the crawl spaces above each unit connected. You could pop your head up there and see the length of the complex– a little like the creepy one CS Lewis writes about in The Magician’s Nephew. No insulation. No privacy. You could hear your neighbor clipping their fingernails if you get my drift. So you can easily imagine the sound intrusion one could inflict with, say, a motorized pump humming in all it’s glory, “BRRRRRR-Nrrrrrrrrr!”

Over and over and over.

Did I forget to mention it was the middle of the night? Yeah. Our neighbors were probably plotting our painful demise. But…

oh

           my

                          gosh,

…it was a humiliating glory.

I worried about the noise and the neighbors for about 47 seconds until that relieving moment when I knew for certain my body was no longer going to explode. I’d been freed from my pressurized prison.

In my rush of relief came a disharmonic wave of emotion.

I felt triumphant as a legitimized provider of nutrition and at the same time oddly demoralized. I had become one with the rows and rows of cows I’d seen on Sesame Street and the Discovery Channel and on the stinky farms in the middle of Nowhereville, California. And now I was one of them, a legitimized milk factory maiden. I raised a fist in solidarity and yelled, “Mooooo!”

Ahhhh, sweet victory.

A few weeks into my dairy farm festival I discovered among all the baby shower gifts piled in a closet that someone had bought me another pump. It did not plug in or make deep, guttural sounds and it worked ten times better than the ACME 2000 hospital grade model.  It was not exactly noiseless, but is was a welcomed improvement, swapping heavy duty construction site noise for awkward squeaking and wheezing.

Still, it was easily heard through the thin walls of our home, but after what I had put our neighbors through for a few solid weeks I’m certain they didn’t mind a bit. What they regained in peace, I regained in dignity.  And I felt a little less inclined to moo that day.

A bonus for everyone.