The morning didn’t start off all that badly—any worse than any other morning where I have to get up and actually go to work anyway.
10 AM hit and lo and behold it was time to head upstairs with my black ‘magic bag’ to pump for Owen (for bottles that he won’t even take from his father in the hours that I am away so that he is so hungry that by the time I get home he immediately wants the boob NOW and attacks my chest with all the delicacy of a rabid badger).
I shut the door to the only single and semi-private bathroom in the entire building (I have no problem pumping, but it really isn’t something I want to share with anyone and everyone who might wander in and out of the women’s bathroom. Besides, anyone who isn’t familiar with the sound of an electric/battery powered breast pump might um…get the wrong idea about what exactly it is that I’m doing in stall #3 and in my building it isn’t that hard to identify everyone by their shoes. So yeah) and proceed to hook everything up, undo my clothes and find my happy place (la la la…think of the boy…la la la…look anywhere but in the mirror…la la la) and then Houston, we have letdown and I am 2 minutes down, eight to go.
When all of a sudden the building’s fire alarm goes off.
Oh crap (which is close to what I immediately thought).
What to do? Stay in the bathroom and continue to pump like I didn’t hear the alarm? Sounds like a good idea…until I hear the building’s safety manager say to someone else “The fire’s downstairs” several times and in a rather urgent tone. Crap, it would just figure that the one time I disobey the fire alarm, it would be the time that it involves a real fire. So I proceed to carefully stuff everything back in my bag (because I will be coming back and finishing up so that I am not in pain and two sizes bigger for the remaining two hours before I can get home and feed Owen at lunch thankyouverymuch) and do my front up (it was either disassemble everything or do up my shirt…hmmm…tough call there) and then head to the front door to go outside. I then remember the temperature has really dropped this week and I don’t have a jacket since I don’t exactly layer up for all possible weather conditions when I head upstairs to pump.
I manage to make it outside (think warm thoughts think warm thoughts) and then notice, right as I join the rest of my co-workers from inside the building, that one of the pump things (um…I don’t know what it’s called…the uh…part that goes directly on the boob, okay?) is trying to escape from outside the top of the bag. I stuff it back in, silently praying that no one notices my distress or that I notice anyone noticing my distress, and wait for the all clear sign to head back in the building.
It ended up being a false alarm after all—they wanted to make sure we knew how to react if we thought it was a real fire, so that’s why the safety manager was telling everyone that there was a fire downstairs.
Sure, I know how to react when I think its a real fire, but how do I relax when its time to head upstairs now?