Most states protect the right to breastfeed anywhere the mother and the child have a right to be, but don't provide women with a way to enforce their right. That's why when my friend Nancy was on vacation at Disney World, slouching in the backseat of her car while nursing her three-month-old daughter as her husband drove around a parking lot, she could only have been fined for violating the car-seat law. If the Florida cop also tried to charge her for being "lewd," the charge wouldn't have held, but Nancy also wouldn't have been able to bring legal action against the cop for interfering with her right.
Luckily for Lisa, a woman I know in Ohio, that state and six others do give moms recourse, so she was perfectly safe when she
was in the car and her three-month-old son was crying and her husband was "about to lose it," and she did "the hover": gymnastically positioning herself so she was half-lying over her son's infant seat so she could nurse him while he, and she, were still buckled in. "I was turned in such a way that I was staring out his window," Lisa says. "A female passenger in a neighboring car made eye contact with me and smiled." Of course, if the woman had called the cops instead, Lisa could have filed a complaint against her. And that's exactly what Emily Gillette did in Vermont in 2006 after Freedom Airlines forced her to get off her flight before it took off because she refused to cover up while nursing.
But . . . no. I'm not aware of any of this as I sit in the backseat of the minivan.
She did "the hover": gymnastically positioning herself so she was half-lying over her son's infant seat so she could nurse.
I am only aware that it is time to switch Blair from the left boob to the right boob. A better parent probably would have checked into the laws. A better parent would certainly have considered the risk of us getting in an accident. I know that's what the cop will say when he pulls us over: "What if you got in an accident? What if something happened to the baby?" Which is why, as a slink down a little in the seat, I plot the baby-freaking-out defense I'll spout in response. "But, officer . . . she was crying."
Meanwhile: "Mom!" I screech. "Don't let him into our lane, Mom. Pull up!" I know my mother thinks that the fact that I'm making her drive the minivan during Philadelphia rush hour is a far worse offense than what I'm doing in the backseat. She knows nothing about what I'm going through. She didn't nurse me: her doctor instructed her not to. And, considering that old car seat she showed me last summer at a yard sale, the laundry basket with lace on the ends that was "exactly like the one we had for you," she also knows nothing about safely restraining children in moving vehicles.
"MOM!" I yell again, focusing entirely now on getting home, since Blair is nursing. And happy. And quiet. "Pull UP!"
I realize then that there is something about this experience that my mother and I have in common, that crosses the generational boundary in this car. And it might have made me laugh, had I not still been squinting through the windows, on the look-out for Johnny Law. We both now know what it's like to be driving a car while your daughter screams at you from the backseat.
Photo by Rachel Valley
©2008 Vicki Glembocki and Nerve Media
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