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I'm crouching on the floor of a grimy one-room "family" bathroom, the roar of the crowd in the distance. My knees hurt, as does my brain, from calculating exactly how many quarts of Purel it will take to fill my bathtub when I get home.

There's an angry knock. "Excuse me," someone snarls. "There's a whole line of families out here with babies." Chastened, I pack up, feeling their pain. After all, I'm making everyone wait because I'm without my baby.

It's the seventh inning of a Mets-Cardinals game at the (mostly) shiny new Citi Field, and I'm just a nursing mom trying to pump.

When I open the door, I see just one family with a baby -- perhaps the others gave up? -- and I apologize to the mother, explaining my predicament. She just scowls. Seriously, scowls. And there I thought the Mommy Wars were a myth.

I return to my seat, rattled, with less than one ounce of milk to show for my maternal efforts. Mets 1, Nursing Mom 0.

Click here to read the rest, after the jump.


Land of Milk and Honey
For the record, Citi Field does have a designated nursing station. Not that they tell you that on the Web site; I found out by calling the press office ... the next day.

Apparently it's in a first-aid room in (fancy) section 118, approximately seven miles from our seats in section 500-something. Better than nothing, but honestly, there's room for improvement, especially in a stadium that made such a huge deal about its great strides toward "potty parity."

But this is not really to slam Citi Field. The beer prices are fair, the sight lines excellent, and the Mets won. It's to point out that when you're a nursing mom, it's not easy. You know, to leave the house.

Part of that is the reality of parenthood, of course; we made our bed, we sleep in it (for 2.5-hour stretches). But part of it is that while we are so strongly encouraged to nurse -- for the right reasons, mostly -- we live in a culture that still makes breast-feeding pretty difficult.

Sneaking Around
Friends of mine have had to resort to pumping in: cars (with newspaper over the windows), cars (while driving), the gym of the high school where one worked (surrounded by walls of mats). Right -- if it's hard to manage when we're out having fun, imagine having to do it at work.

(As Marjorie Ingall wrote at Babble.com, "Show me how the girl working the fry-o-later ... is going to inform her manager that she's going to take 40 minutes off every four hours to haul her electric pump into his office, which he should obligingly vacate for her, then provide facilities and opportunity for her to sterilize her equipment and store her milk.")

Not to mention: women busted for nursing in baby stores, nursing photos censored on Facebook.

Help Us Help You; Tell Us How to Mother
I'm not saying every single public space or private establishment needs to provide plush digs for women to curl up with their babies/pumps and their "girls." But we do need better, easier access -- as well as humane, paid maternity leave to help support the recommended minimum six months of nursing. So those who say "breast is best" -- in many cases, making women who don't, or can't, nurse feel guilty -- have also got to join efforts to make "breast" doable.

If breast-feeding is really a matter of public health, then everyone's got to play ball.

Lynn Harris is an award-winning journalist, author of the comic novel "Death by Chick Lit", and co-creator of the venerable Web site BreakupGirl.net. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband and two young children, Bess and Sam, who are polishing up their Vaudeville act.