“She’s breastfeeding,” one uniformed man said to another in lieu of an introduction, “but she didn’t get approval from HR.”
Swallowing a surge of indignation, I didn’t bother to repeat that I had read the HR website before coming back to work and thought I’d followed all the instructions outlined in my company’s Lactation Policy. I shifted the bag, holding my pump further on to my shoulder as I glimpsed the gun sitting on the officer’s holster. A third officer wandered up, eyeing me with a suspicious squint.
“I really need to pump,” I said, and glanced down at my body, hoping for an ally in this saga. Met with a blank stare, I shut my mouth again.
Upon request, I produced my employee ID for the college I’ve worked at as an educator for eight years. I’d returned to my office that morning for the first time since having my second child.
Through the thick July air, I’d lugged my computer, my lunch, and the two additional bags full of the equipment and supplies I’d need in order to pump: the electronic machine, the ice, the sealable baggies, the tubes and the nozzles, the markers, the thermos, the plugs, the bottles, the covers and the nipple lubricant.
Now I stood in the Public Safety Office trying to access my workplace’s “Designated Lactation Room.” I tried not to think about the tearful goodbye that morning when I dropped my child off at day care. I needed to focus on the goal I had failed to achieve with my first child: to pump milk for him when I returned to work from maternity leave.
It’d already been an hour since I had left my shared office space. Because I work in an urban public university, our Public Safety officers work closely with the Police Department ― and are hard to tell apart from them. As I stood there waiting, I felt like a suspect in a procedural drama, “Law and Order: Lactating Employees Unit.”
I’d sterilized my supplies, steeled my emotions, and peppered my child with kisses as if I could give him a reserve of affection for our hours spent apart. But I was not prepared to be told that the only person who could give me keycard access to the lactation room was working remotely that day.
Photo Courtesy Of Molly Rosner
Pump parts and insulated thermos for transporting milk, April 2024.
“He’s not in,” I was told, the male pronoun making my spine prickle as I tried to navigate this deeply intimate, biological process. I tried to imagine my child’s father dictating when I could pump, and the thought made me scoff ― and yet this stranger could? Did every single pumping employee and student go through this man to access the room? How many of us were there?
“I still need the room today, can someone else help me?” I could feel my chest swelling both literally and figuratively, and tried not to let my breasts’ increasingly urgent plea for relief come through in my voice.
Between my burning cheeks and sweating armpits, my body was melting alongside the bag of ice in my thermos.The college’s campus is deserted in the summer, and I knew the room was waiting there for me, empty. Pingpong-ing from one desk to another might’ve made me cry in the past, but now, as a mother of two, I was fortified by milk, hormones, and a mission to get someone to open that door.
Four phone calls later, the officers located the Man In Charge of the Designated Lactation Room, and I was treated to another small lecture as we walked to his office.
He reiterated that I should have contacted HR while I was still on maternity leave about using this room, and he waited for me to thank him for showing up to grant me access to it. By now, I had added the worry about how long I’d been missing from my office to my concerns about pumping.
“I can give you 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., does that work?” he asked, without looking away from his computer screen on which flashed a completely empty calendar. He prompted me to confirm the exact two 20-minute slots I’d need to pump throughout the day.
I tried to explain that I didn’t always know precisely what time each day that I’d need ― and be available ― to use the room. When he told me he could not give me any additional access, I accepted his terms, if only to put an end to the interaction.
At last, I opened the door to the Dedicated Lactation Room, finding disappointingly little that required all of that police protection. It was just a chair in a windowless yellow bunker and a table that was absurdly tiny for this singular task. The round 10-inch surface could precariously fit my pump and the bottles, so long as I didn’t put any other supplies there, and balanced the resulting liquid carefully.
No mini fridge, no extra supplies, and certainly no footrest or pillows. I was on company time, the HR booklet ― and now the barren room ― reminded me.
Don’t mistake this for a break, the room suggested, while conveying only a fundamental understanding of what pumping milk entails. Don’t even think about distracting yourself, since the tiny table won’t allow you to forget for even one second that you’re at work.
Words I’d read in the lactation policy rang in my head, “The employee may … ask her supervisor whether it would be possible for some or all of the time used to express milk to be made up at the beginning or end of the work day.”
The policy’s suggestion ― that I “make up” pumping time by working late ― revealed its true function: to ensure motherhood never disrupted the workday. Each line of the policy treated lactation as a concession, not a right, a duty or a biological necessity.
Hooked up to the whirring machine, and with little else to look at, I stared at the decal of a clip art-style tree that was adhered to the wall, a single leaf floating down from the branch in the otherwise bare room. The indication that someone had tried to decorate the room somehow made me even sadder.
As I sat there, with the machine attached to me through my carefully selected pump-friendly blouse and bra, I wondered how many of my stress hormones were transferring into this hard-fought eight ounces of milk. I wondered idly if the lactation rooms at Google’s campus have robotic mini fridges that drive themselves to your house after work to deliver your milk, which has been kept at an exact 37 degrees.
I texted a picture of the room to my postpartum mothers’ group, each member of whom had navigated their own returns to work. Some had private offices (but still faced awkward interactions and clothing mishaps), while others faced 12-hour shifts and resentful bosses. Either way, the chat was filled with stories of forgotten pump parts, spilled milk (absolutely worth crying over), and disheartened comments about how few ounces they’d be bringing home that day.
I tried to tell myself the hardest part was over and that soon I’d be transporting my “liquid gold” home. After sloshing around in my thermos across two boroughs and eight flights of subway stairs, I would transfer it to bottles in the fridge, wash all the parts and immediately repack them for the next day.
But the level of interrogation, the flurry of confusion, the strictness of the policy on an empty campus gnawed at me. It was clear no one else had used the room recently. The only conclusion I could draw from this experience was that it was yet another way mothers and employees ― and, God forbid, those who are both ― are not to be trusted.
I returned to my office, double checking that I’d buttoned my shirt, where my supervisor asked why I’d been gone so long. I plopped back down at my computer and began to type an email to HR asking why the procedure to access the lactation room was so arduous.
Clinging to the hope that my experience could inform a better policy going forward, I asked why a lock and knocking first wouldn’t suffice. Why did I need so many people’s involvement in this fundamental and already challenging maternal act?
Photo Courtesy Of Molly Rosner
The author carrying her baby to daycare drop off and her backpack for returning to work, Summer 2024.
During a meeting the next morning, I watched as the clock ticked up and into my allotted pumping time. I finally admitted to my colleagues why I had to go, unable to think of a lie that contained the necessary urgency. I couldn’t waste time explaining that my rush resulted not from biological need, but from the demands of my new keycard overlord.
By the time I’d sprinted to the room, I knew the minutes had slipped by and my access would be denied. I blinked back tears as the red light blinked back at me, adding this to the mental checklist of ways I was failing as both an employee and a mom.
By day 3, I began using our communal break room to pump, with a hastily scribbled “Do Not Enter” sign keeping my co-workers from their water cooler and office supplies for 20 minutes at a time.
By week 3, I received a response to my email from HR which read, “I reviewed our policy and found no issues with the procedure for reserving the room.” In other words, it was me. I was the problem for not knowing how to better navigate a flawless system.
By then, both my stamina for this fight and my milk had dried up.
I hadn’t really expected the constraints of lactation access on a public campus ― where security protocols and scarce private spaces collide ― to be solved by one HR administrator. It isn’t just about one room; it’s about how workplaces systemically force mothers to choose between their jobs and their children’s well-being.
The U.S. continues to rank abysmally on parental leave and workplace protections. Even as more states pass laws requiring lactation accommodations, stories like mine show just how far enforcement and cultural change lag behind. If the absurd hurdles I faced while simply trying to use my workplace’s lactation room taught me anything, it’s that the few systems in place to support mothers are, at their core, still distrusting of them.
And until workplaces stop treating motherhood as anything other than essential, both birthrates and employee productivity will continue to decline.
This article originally appeared on HuffPost in August 2025.
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