I’m reading Meg Wolitzer’s novel, The Ten Year Nap. It hasn’t kidnapped my attention or anything, but the writing is super smart and I’m enjoying its topic: educated women who temporarily leave the workplace to raise children and who can’t seem to find their way back. I just came across a scene that was killer. Moms and their babies are having lunch. One mom excuses herself, leaving her baby with her friends. Eventually the baby becomes hysterical, inconsolable, and so one mother picks him up, pulls down her nursing bra and the baby latches on. When the other women disapprove she says something along the lines of: “What? He doesn’t know the differance. Look at him.”
I loved the ickiness of this scene, the abstract problem. The women liken the act to coming into a room and seeing someone giving your husband a blowjob, but I’m not sure I feel that way. If someone were to occassionally do my breastfeeding and blowjobbing for me, I think I’d feel pretty lucky.