The next Baby Moon essay. I really thought this one would be longer. Probably would have if I hadn't waited so damn long to write it - what do you think?

Vagabond Moon

The Cave Baby needed constant motion and visual variety. I got really stir-crazy being cooped up at home. Thus began my maternity leave journeys…my wanderings and explorations into the shops and restaurants and libraries of Corpus Christi. These were the voyages of a restless mama and her newborn babe, and usually the newborn babe’s sister, too. Stimulation and comfort, good food and clean places to nurse and change diapers and pee were our primary missions. Endless were our walks and drives and sit-in-strange-places-to-nurses…we became travelers and urban anthropologists of a sort in the months of my maternity leave, driven to this vocation by our separate needs to get out of the house, a wanderlust mainly unhampered by any real need to go anywhere specific.

Like all anthropology, though, our observations of our expeditions were transformed by our participation in them. New babies are much noticed and we were often a focus of attention in any place we went, whether it was attention of the cooing or the disapproving variety. So we often were only observing reactions to ourselves which some would say is no true science, though most anthropology, it seems, must be similarly corrupted.

Corpus isn’t really a small city – we have almost a 300, 000 pop. – and I am not really all that social. Still, between my contacts from work, child-rearing and just life, I had most venues pretty much covered. It was hard to go anywhere without running into people who knew me. Sometimes, of course, it was kind of nice to run into people to catch up with – I did crave the company of friends, after all. Mostly, however, I did not wish to run into people from work, Mimosa’s school, my husband’s jobs, etc. when I was on a mission. I was just embarrassed to be seen. Life with a new baby gave me little time for grooming and I was definitely not looking my best, not that I was ever what one might call a sharp dresser. Post-partum, I wore whatever loose clothes I could get into quickly as the baby howled in protest of being put down, without much thought for how flattering, or decidedly unflattering, my outfits might be. I tried to remember to wear a bra, but I did not always pull it off and, even when I did, the 24-hour diner that was my bosom was always open. I could often be seen trying to surreptiously reach my hand into my shirt to re-fasten the nursing bra, but, honestly, how surreptious can sticking your hand up or down your shirt in the vicinity of your chest be? And sometimes those damn fasteners just wouldn’t cooperate and I would start to feel like everyone in whatever establishment I was occupying was watching me fumble around under my shirt with one hand so I would just give up and leave the bra open until I thought I had a touch more privacy.

I would often see some stranger looking at me and think that they probably thought I was a homeless person, due to my looking like I had been living hard for a while. Then, it would occur to me that many people in town knew me from news reports on my center. If they recognized me as a minor social services bureaucrat, what did they think of me then? I had never cleaned up as well as a minor social services bureaucrat probably should, always trading rather heavily on my policy expertise to make up for my eccentricity, but, as the mother of an infant, I had definitely sunk to a new level of ragamuffin-hood. I did not really want to dwell on it. Running into people I knew in a slight way brought such concerns to the forefront of my mind and I much preferred the anonymity of the crowd.

We did have some regular destinations for a variety of reasons. We ran a lot of mundane errands, of course – jaunts to H-E-B for groceries, to the gas station for gasoline, to Hollywood Video for movies to nurse by. Barnes and Noble was a frequent destination from the very start – the baby has pretty much spent her entire infancy there and thinks she lives there. It was a favorite not just because of the books, but also because it was a very good place for walking endlessly to soothe Marigold-In-Motion. And also because it had fairly decent public restrooms. Our library was an almost daily stopover. We often hit the big Central Library as well, but our own branch library was our truest, best-loved, most-coziest home away from home. It was nursing and diaper changing headquarters, a haven of safety for the family on the move.

About diaper changing: I do not like public changing tables and pretty much will not uses them. I am just utterly grossed out by the idea of laying my baby down on anything in a public restroom. While this may, at first glance, seem rational, it really is not. I am pretty okay with laying my baby down on a rug that people walk on all day after stepping in heaven only knows what as they go about their lives. The rational part of me knows that the floors that I change my baby on are probably every bit as germ-infested, probably even more germ-infested, than public restroom changing tables – but, as the mother of a newborn, I am inclined to behave according to instinct before reason, so the floor it is. When the baby needed changing, I would put the cloth changing pad from her diaper bag down on any old floor, lay her down, and change her. I did make a token attempt to retreat to a sparsely populated area when I did this, since the baby would be, well, naked…but I did not worry about it very much. I did this in many places - most places were fair game, except restaurants - but the library was the place I was most comfortable changing diapers at, so I would often actually swing by there between other errands for a little clean-up and milk session. The librarians tolerantly ignored me. The patrons were probably scared.

Nursing spots were also much in demand on our jaunts. Marigold nursed around the clock and, since we were traveling folks, she did a lot of nursing all over the place and on the go. Nursing in public makes a lot of women nervous – and rightly so when you hear all the stories of people hassling nursing mothers everywhere – but I was never one of the women who felt uncomfortable about it. Strangers have never hassled me in any location where I have nursed my children, including locations where I know other women have been bothered. I think it is the flinty glint in my eye that makes them keep their mouths politely shut. Only my family and friends give me shit about nursing, because they know my intensity co-exists with a basic lack of meanness, and thereby know they can get away with being nasty to me when they feel like it. Mostly, nursing seems to be the main thing my family and friends like to be nasty about. When you are passionate about something as a parent, people seem to think that automatically means that you are dissing anything that they do or might do differently and some people feel free to direct invective at you as if your passion for one way of doing things meant that you had that sort of venom for them. I know lots of people who talk about how much pressure there is to breastfeed, but people don’t get run out of museums for bottle-feeding in our society and there are not a lot of stories out there about Child Protective Services taking away healthy, happy preschoolers for sucking on artificial nipples in our society, so I am a little skeptical. Also, I am skeptical because so few people actually do breastfeed for very long at all…if there is a lot of pressure, it must be pretty easy to resist.

I have always been a proud public nurser. I consider it an act of public service, as well as a simple, necessary fact of my own life. Many women never see a child nursing until they try to nurse their own, hence the proliferation of comments like “I tried”, “I couldn’t”, “I didn’t have enough milk”. Breastfeeding is biologically normal, but it is not so natural an act that it does not require substantive knowledge and practice for most women to pull it off, as well as a supportive community of women. Most American women know little about how nursing is supposed to work, how to get a proper latch, how it actually plays out in the trenches and most have no circle of nursing mothers to support them, so most can’t do it for very long. Nursing in public is something I have to do for my baby and me, but it is also one little thing I can do to show those girls and women out there, who will be trying to nurse in a short while, how it is done and that it is normal and nothing to be shy about. I nursed Mimosa in City Council meetings, stores of every kind, precinct caucuses…you name it…everywhere. Things were much the same with Marigold. I did not, therefore, require much in a nursing spot…most any place would do. I avoided bathrooms for obvious reasons, but my only other real criterion was a chair that I could sit in while the baby ate. I certainly was more than capable of nursing standing up, as this was sometimes necessary, but it tended to be awkward and uncomfortable for me, so I much preferred to sit and rest. And read - the library, again, was a personal favorite.

So, we spent a lot of time at the library, but weren’t shy about whipping out boobs and diapers wherever. I do remember feeling a bit self-conscious one day at Burlington Coat Factory. We were upstairs in their Baby Depot and I was sort of looking around for some breast pump cleaning wipes, but mostly just hanging out. There are always pregnant women swarming all over that place, so it ought to have been pretty baby-friendly. As I sat down in a chair to nurse, though, I could feel dozens of eyeballs on me… it occurred to me then that my particular brand of unkempt, on-the-road mothering really did not mesh with people’s ideas about respectable, middle-class parenthood. I mean, I doubt anyone really took the time to formulate that thought, but it seemed to be clear in all the quick, disapproving looks that I got, the way people tried hard not to see us. The cultural message that I felt was that I was supposed to keep my yoga pants and my boobs at home. Good mothers wore earrings and make-up and stuff from Dillard’s and carried bottles of formula for such occasions. Fuck that, I thought, grabbing a dumb baby book from a rack to read while nursing – we would do what we needed to do. Still, it did make me feel a little sad and lonely. Not that post-partum hormones were ever known to make people hypersensitive and over-analyzing or anything.

The baby sling was a real attention-getter on our journeys, too. It is mighty hard to be a traveling mama without a baby carrier of some sorts and a sling is versatile and keeps you close to your baby, so it was always my choice. It kept my hands free and my baby happy and was about the only piece of baby equipment I cared for much. Their universality in human history aside, slings still sort of stick out in our culture, though. People were forever coming up to me and commenting on them. Pregnant women, moms and grandmas all wanted to know how it worked and where I got it. That sort of question I was fine with – I happily chatted about the different kinds and why I liked the breathable fabric of mine better than the hot padded one I had used before. I compared different sorts of positions that different babies preferred with other mothers and even handed out La Leche League flyers occasionally when a mom seemed to be seeking deeper information and community, rather than just chatting…heaven knows we all need other moms to talk to when we have babies. Some people just did not think my baby was safe and secure in the sling, though. I had women come up to me in Barnes and Noble telling me that it was cutting off the circulation of my baby’s legs, that the baby was about to fall out, all sorts of alarming things. All of these things could happen, of course, but they weren’t – I was a veteran baby-wearer and knew what I was doing. Lots of people just weren’t comfortable with it. For Marigold and I, it was, however, almost as essential as the boobs…our constant companion in our forays into the wider world.

One thing that I liked to do was go and eat on the patio outside at On The Border. I generally only did this on evenings and weekends when I could leave Mimosa home with her dad. I would drive to the restaurant, then get out and put the baby in her sling. She was never content to just rest in the sling while awake unless I was walking, but a good walk outside in the summer heat generally would lull her to sleep. I would walk around outside the restaurant wearing her and carrying my book and purse until she fell asleep and then go in and sit down. If I only ordered queso and chips, I could sit there in the breeze on the porch, usually almost alone at the off-times I went, for only about three dollars. I love eating outside, so this was nice. I would sit there, with Marigold asleep in the sling on my chest and eat and read while enjoying the breeze and the lack of people to bother us. It got so that the staff knew us and knew that I liked to be outside and what I wanted…it became another nice way to achieve a little serenity.

Our adventures bounced between new venues and the familiar, trying out different things and sticking with what worked for us. I got gradually more confident about navigating town with baby and big girl in tow and felt good about our out-and-about, sanity-saving days. It was a fine way to be. In truth, our travels were pretty mundane. We did not really go anywhere exciting. We went on regular errands, and errands for my job. We went to the library and bookstore and restaurants, to the museum, La Leche League meetings and on walks around the neighborhood. This sort of ordinary out and about was all that we really needed. We just needed to get out and keep moving. So we did.