Blog Post: Reading Response 11 (Discussion Leaders 9-12)

For this post, I chose to write about the text Nightbitch. A theme I found interesting in this excerpt was the way that women are expected to be both full time moms and work at the same time with little to no help from their husbands/the father of the child if that mother wants to continue to have a career. A passage that was interesting about this theme revolves around milk and the way that women completely loose themselves in their career by being treated basically like a milk machine.

“And the milk. The milk! The milk was so important! This
cannot be stressed enough. It was the most important thing in
the entire world of the infant, the books would have all the
mothers believe, and this mother believed” (10).

The narrator also explains that the lactation room in her work “might as well have been the smallest, ugliest chapel in the entire institutional building” (10.)

I found these quotes to be interesting in that they show how mothers who want to work are expected to be full time mothers AND full time workers. There is this push and pull between the two that makes mothers loose themselves. If they want to have a career, they feel they are failing at being a perfect mother. The narrator then explains that even if she is not with her child the whole day, at least she can still provide it with food and nourishment. But this only minimizes her to a food source, where the only thing she thinks she can give her child because of being absent is food.

Along with that, the small lactation room shows how the work industry treats motherhood as a second thought. Mothers with full time careers are expected to do it all without being seen as doing anything. The lactation room is so small that I interpret it as being similar to a locked away prison–something characterized as shameful. The room also says that mothers should not leave any equipment behind as if breast milk is ‘disgusting’.

This section was particularly intriguing on the way it commentated on motherhood and working moms. But not only that, it shows how women become minimized to a ‘milk machine’ and how the very milk that nourishes all babies is characterized as disgusting by rules made up by adults who were once babies that drank milk.