Thank you for this brilliant piece, Reshma Saujani. You really hit the nail on the head.

Breastfeeding is so hard. It’s physically demanding and mentally exhausting. And time-wise? Gosh, the amount of time spent either nursing, pumping, or throwing a quick meal down your throat so you can make more milk is immeasurable. When you could be laying in bed, recuperating from having an entire human being pushed or otherwise removed from your body, you’re doing 2 a.m. feedings. Instead of taking a much needed nap, you’re chugging water as cluster feedings start. A trip to the store solo (the most rare of experiences) is spent glancing down at your shirt 25 times to make sure you haven’t leaked, all whilst trying to remember exactly how long you’ve been gone and oh no. It’s time for another pumping session! Sometimes it seems, perhaps rightfully so, that a nursing mother’s entire life becomes breastfeeding. Nursing is sacrifice.

Then we bring our precious little one in to the pediatrician for the monthly check up and have barrels of “supplemental formula” tossed at us. Our pumps are designed to look discrete, as if the very thought of someone seeing a Medela bag on our arm would send shock waves through the nation. Our employers ask if another pump break is absolutely necessary, imply it could be done on a toilet, or look at us in confusion when we’re panicking, realizing we forgot our empty bottles at home. (Side note: a male supervisor once said to me “Why can’t you just wait until after work to bother with all of this…whatever it is you’re doing?” when I forgot my flanges.) We stay in the car to quickly nurse in the backseat before eating dinner with our family because heaven forbid you do it in front of the men/children/all-you-can-eat-buffet!

We speak out about how we need a world where we #normalizebreastfeeding and can’t even be heard over the backlash.

When we point out that what we’re doing is natural, sometimes the first voices to speak out against us are those of fellow mothers who, for a myriad of reasons, don’t breastfeed. They feel that any advances we make in acceptance is an attack against them. We’re not in a battle for maternal superiority; we want to be treated fairly.

Our lives become nursing. Our lives become breastfeeding. Our lives become, minute by minute, the production of our infant’s sole source of nourishment. When people act like what we do is a nuisance, they aren’t just being inconsiderate: they are minimizing breastfeeding and, to some extent, us.