When I Said I Wouldn't Write About My Breasts I Lied

Monday was my first day back in the working world. After a short morning sprint through the 34th St. subway station (during which two people yelled at me "Don't run!"), across 32nd St. and into the bowels of Penn Station, I met my client and traveled into the wilds of Philadelphia for a four-hour meeting. The meeting was pretty typical of the types of meetings I tend to find myself in, where a bunch of people sit around an oval conference table and complain about stuff and ask me or whomever else they've hired to fix it, and all was fine for the first hour or so. Until my boobs started to hurt.

At which point I found that my brain started thinking about Milo and breastfeeding him and how cute he is when he's trapped under my enormous right breast (which has always been the more over-achieving of my breasts, and as such not only produces more milk but is also currently the size of Texas) and I stopped being able to concentrate on my meeting. And I also began to wonder how on earth I was going to be able to get myself out of the meeting, which naturally was filled with men and therefore under no circumstances would I have felt comfortable announcing that I needed a ten minute break to go pump my breasts.

And so I sat, and my breasts filled with milk, and I thought about my little baby who I suddenly missed so much I thought I might die, and every half hour that passed made my breasts hurt a little bit more. Which explains the To Do list I doodled during my meeting (other people make little smiley faces or boxes or copies of Munch's The Scream when they doodle - I make lists):

1. call editor to touch base
2. find out about night nurse
3. rent Stairmaster?
4. review publicity proposal
5. I am my boobs

Thankfully the meeting ended an hour early and I rushed off to the bathroom with my hand pump, locked the door and spent perhaps the most ridiculous ten minutes of my life stripped naked from the waist up, suctioning milk out of my breasts in a large office building in downtown Philly. Some part of me had thought that pumping at work would be more glamorous. Working mother, business woman by day, nursing new mom at night. But it wasn't remotely glamorous, especially not when the pump slipped and I splattered my pants with breast milk.

And it continued.

Once I arrived back in Manhattan I tore through Penn Station, hopped on the subway and raced up the stairs and out of the station, trying to get home as fast as I could. I called Steven on my cell as I ran down the street.

"Is he awake?" I shouted into the frigid night air. "Did he eat yet? I'm on my way! The boobs are on their way!"

"Ma!" Steven screamed down the hall. "Don't give him the bottle!"

"Can she give him a pacifier?" I said. "I mean, if he's starving let him eat, but try to hold off for ten minutes. I'll be home as fast as I can."

Ten minutes later I flew in the door, unbuttoned my shirt, popped the pacifier out of a very crabby baby's mouth, who wanted to know why the hell he couldn't just have some formula, and shoved him on my breast.

As I sat on the couch and nursed Milo I forgot that I was starving, that I'd had to pee since Philadelphia, that my nose was running from the cold street air.

"I missed you so much," I told Milo. "I missed you more than I've ever missed anyone in my life."