Read Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace for Free Online Page A

milk. And while you’re evaluating the relative merits of different literary properties up for adaptation, I am—without irony—evaluating the relative merits of Huggies and Pampers. Lucky, lucky me.
    I went back to work.
    But not, as it turned out, for long.
    I made myself a little sign for my office door. “Pumping, please knock.” Three times a day I would put up the sign, and within three minutes the door would burst open and reveal one of the guys from the mail room bearing a stack of letters or an urgent fax. “Oh my God,” he’d say. “Am I interrupting something?” It turns out that young men are unable to resist the temptation of bared breasts, no matter how pendulous and mapped with bright blue veins. The first few times I sprang back, grabbing for my blouse and spraying precious breast milk in all directions. But after a while I would simply roll my eyes and shove my nipples farther into the horns, as if the clear plastic provided any kind of concealment. Why it never occurred to me to just not put up the sign, Ihave no idea. Perhaps because I refused to give up my belief in people’s better natures, or perhaps because I was too addled by hormones to realize that the guys were matching their mail deliveries to my pumping schedule.
    I made an art out of multitasking. I could do anything while pumping—research a motion, write a brief, negotiate a plea agreement. Figuring that a twenty-two-year-old slanger from the Raymond Avenue Crips 102 was not likely to recognize the rhythmic suck and hiss of a Medela Pump in Style, I even accepted collect calls from my clients in lockup while pumping. If they asked what was going on, I would fob them off with a puzzled “Noise? What noise? I don’t hear anything.”
    The various frustrations and humiliations of pumping—the forty-five minutes spent with my nipples clamped in a vise in order to produce two ounces of watery blue milk, the embarrassment of being the object of the (truly) indiscriminate lust of postadolescent young men, the lugging of the pump back and forth, the incessant jocular comments (“Better label that clearly or someone will use it in their coffee, heh heh heh”)—were not what led me to quit my job. What finally drove me out of the office and back to my baby was
jealousy
, bilious green envy. I was jealous of my husband, who spent his days with her, and I was jealous of my daughter, who spent her days with
him
.
    There I’d be, crouched in my car trying to pump a few ounces before going into the Metropolitan Detention Center to explain to a client that he had less in common with O. J. Simpson and more with, say, Bruno Hauptmann, and Michael would call to tell me how cute Sophie looked playing in her new baby pool. I’d be stuffing Kleenex in my bra during court recesses, and Michael and Sophie would be enjoying a picnic lunch in the park. I’d be frantically finishing a sentencing memorandum, trying to convincethe judge to overlook my client’s really very short flirtation with that whole Aryan Brotherhood thing, and Michael would be reading Sophie
Goodnight Moon
, putting her down for her nap, and doing his e-mail.
    I grew more and more frustrated with myself. I was confident that I was still doing a good job at work—I had a few important victories during this period, including the dismissal of a serious ten-year mandatory-minimum case against an innocent client (a rarity for a public defender—both the dismissal and the innocence). I was doing my job well. A competent, confident working mother, just as my own mother expected me to be. At least that’s how it seemed.
    Caring for my clients took a tremendous amount of emotional energy. So much so that even when I was able to get home at a reasonable hour, I found myself with little left to give to the person who was most entitled to my maternal devotion. I would walk in the door and dump my briefcase, my bag, and my pump just in time for Michael to pitch Sophie at my head like a