Thursday 24 October 2013

Spilt Milk

One of the pitfalls to being a full-time student and a mum to two young children is that you constantly feel a bit inadequate. To help address my shortcomings as a mother and to alleviate some of the associated guilt I have tasked myself with the job of continuing to provide breast milk for the 6-month-old while she's at nursery. This, of course, entails expressing milk multiple times a day at university to keep up with demand.

Now I'm no earth mother and expressing milk is possibly one of the least fun things you can do with your funbags (one can only assume it is exactly like being milked as a cow, all rather unpleasant and certainly nobody's idea of a good time), but I dug my own hole as Child 1 was breast fed till he was 12 months old and all being fair I suppose Child 2 deserves the same. Well, that was my reasoning anyway for setting myself this exhausting, time consuming and logistically challenging mission.

One particularly fraught Thursday last week, as I was still coming to terms with the newness of my surroundings, workload, timetable etc, I found myself in the unfortunate position of it having reached 3.30pm and not having had an opportunity to express. Needless to say I was up to my eyeballs in unexpressed milk and feeling decidedly woozy.

At that point the tutor suggested we have a 10 minute break. I saw my chance and dashed upstairs to the Equality & Diversity appointed expressing-cum-first-aid room; a sparsely furnished cold, grey box of a room, littered with old filing cabinets with the only defence against a rogue intruder and a hallway full of staring students being a flimsy 'do not disturb' sign on the door.

I whipped out my double action, super suction, hospital-grade breast pump (a frightening contraption) and set to work. Ten minutes later, feeling suitably drained and having produced a pleasing amount of the good stuff I was feeling quite smug about my university/baby-rearing juggling abilities. Of course what should happen two seconds later? In my haste to get back to class I proceded to drop the entire contents of the bottle, causing a veritable tidal wave of milk to spill all over myself and the floor. What a dick.

I returned to class somewhat less smug, but certainly more damp, and feeling decidedly despondent about whether or not it was all actually worth it. But as my husband so glibly put it later that evening, there's no point crying over spilt milk.

Onwards and upwards.

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