So we sat up in the balcony with our two and three kids respectively, while the pastor stood up at the pulpit and made it very clear that noisy/crying/distracting children should be immediately removed from the service, as we would not want to hamper the work of the Holy Spirit. Who is, apparently, a lot less powerful than I always gave Him credit for. So five minutes into the song service, my eighteen-month-old started talking. Loudly. So I took him to the designated "cry room," which had been pointed out to me the moment I stated that my kids would be sitting in the service with me. Yes, even the baby.
The cry room was--weird. There were no less than thirteen people in there, several of them men. The chairs were arranged in rows, facing the front of the room, but no one was at the front of the room. The sermon was being piped in, and everyone was sitting in the rows of chairs, facing the empty front of the room, listening to the sermon. I was one of two people with a child. I sat in the back, next to a lady that I had known when I went to the school, and started to discreetly nurse my baby.
"Do you have a blanket or something to cover up with? That doesn't bother me, but there are men here."
"No, and my baby won't nurse under a blanket."
"Here, I'll get you a blanket from the nursery." She laid her coat over my baby's head and stepped out.
My baby immediately threw her coat on the floor.
We stopped nursing, and tried our luck walking around in the lobby. We ran into her as we were leaving--I told her my baby was done, and she handed me the blanket anyway. "The nursery has little curtained rooms in it if you need to nurse again."
Honestly, I was annoyed. Probably incensed. I was nursing my baby in the only place I knew to nurse him (and really? I'm supposed to shut myself up in a little curtained room every time my baby wants to nurse?). I was covered, but apparently, because that covering was a tank top, my shirt, and my baby, instead of a giant flannel blanket, I was being dirty. Immodest. Disgusting. Probably causing men to have lustful thoughts.
In the five-and-a-half years that I have been nursing, I have never encountered negativity while nursing in public until now. And of course, it had to be in a church, because obviously, God hates breasts. Especially those used for nourishing a baby.
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| A mom nursing her infant as discreetly as I was nursing. |
