Breast pumps suck... no really!

Whether it was O.H. Needham (1854) or L.O. Colbin (1863), when I find out who was the real inventor of the breast pump well I’ll…..! Really, folks. Who had this brilliant idea that a working mom’s breast milk could be drained like that dairy cow we exploit?

The pump is supposed to stimulate the let-down reflex - rather than pry the milk from our bodies - but nobody bothers to tell women that the manufacturers have different sized nipple tunnels ranging from 24mm to 36mm. If you happen to use the wrong size it can be excruciatingly painful... which I can tell you will not stimulate that let-down reflex. We’ve got 30 different bra sizes and yet nobody thinks to mention this?

The necessity for breast milk pumping is just one of an assortment of problems in a society that doesn’t value motherhood. We just don't think what moms do really matters until someone becomes a juvenile delinquent or an ax murdered and then suddenly... it is all Mom's fault. Whenever I hear this routine I want to ask them if they believe that dads have no influence on their children or are they just not held responsible?

Okay, so there's an old joke about a man who routinely calls his boss on Fridays or Mondays claiming this relative or that died and he has to attend the funeral. One day it's his grandfather, than an uncle, an aunt or a father. Then one day the man calls up and tells his boss his mother has died, and his boss responds, "You're fired!" Why? Well,it appears that the man had mistakenly said another time that his mother had died. His boss continued, "You can have lots of aunts and uncles, several sets of grandparents, why you can even have multiple fathers, but you can only have one mother." I don't know why I wanted to share that joke with the punch line out of whack, but it's my blog, gabiche?

Many women around the country feel victimized by a system that expects them to produce 100% (after that generous 3 to 6 weeks of mostly unpaid maternity leave) when they come back to work. Maybe there were women out in the fields birthing their offspring for generations, but they were not also expected to keep their breasts pointing skyward, their upper arms as toned as Michelle Obama’s and their tummies defined like an infamous six-pack. They were also not expected to bring home $100,000 a year.

Nope, those women were allowed to be slowly devoured by the needs of their children and grandchildren, all the while without a word of complaint on their parts. Yessiree, those were the good old days when the only 100% effective method of birth control was to already be pregnant or slowly poison him. Yet when the mother was finally all used up that woman could die knowing she had truly given her all. And she was secure in the knowledge that everyone would worship her memory.

So what is it with today’s outlook on moms? It has been a battle since the hay day of Gloria Allred. Over three-quarters of Moms work, so let’s start with those luckiest of the lucky – stay at home moms. What do they really think about us working moms? Working moms cannot budget. Working moms don’t volunteer. Working moms don’t reciprocate play dates. Working moms are self-indulgent. Working moms don’t love their children unconditionally. Working moms are materialistic. Working moms are arrogant and condescending. Working moms use stay-at-home moms.

That's an awful lot of resentment and baggage and some of it is true for some of us. The rest of us feel insulted, by the way. Of course, there are the fathers of these children. You know all those complaints if you watch any of the soaps, so I’ll move on.

And then there’s the business community. Unlike male employees - whom they traditionally paid more because the men needed to support their family - working moms are perceived as only needing to earn ‘secondary’ income for all those luxuries. This is completely true, of course. We work because otherwise those things we call food, medicine and clothing are luxuries on a single income.

Plenty of subsidies go to the dairy industry, but adolescent orthodontics get no such benefit. Daycare for infants can be over a thousand a month, which means most women work that first year just to keep their job. Maybe we are lucky to still get hired given the myths that circulate about a working mom being a ‘lesser-than’ employee. There is always grumbling among the childless and empty nesters about how unfair it is when one of us gets to leave to pick up our children from daycare. After all, the kids have already been there for ten to 12 hours, what’s another few? Obviously a working mom is a flake if she can’t find a way to work in some unexpected overtime and has the gall to put her kids’ welfare above that of the opinion of her coworkers.

Let’s give moms a break. Early childhood doesn’t last forever. That's the end of my rant.