There is no great appetite in this world for tales about breast pumps and bureaucracy, but if there is a story worth milking, it’s this one.
When Miss Patricia Orellana set out to do one of the most natural and noble things—feed her baby—she got tangled not in swaddling but in the tight and binding red tape of higher education. She worked as a graduate assistant at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), a fine institution best known for denying students a refrigerator for their breast milk but offering plenty of cold shoulders in return.
Patricia, God bless her, had done the hard part already—she grew a whole human, brought it into this world via cesarean section (which I understand is Latin for ouch), and returned to work six weeks later because America has the kind of maternity policy you’d expect from a goat rodeo.
At first, she had a hybrid schedule—some work from home, some at the office. Then her supervisor decided, for reasons known only to Heaven and Human Resources, that hybrid was out and in-person was in, like powdered wigs or the Black Death.
Patricia needed to pump milk for her child, which is not a leisure activity, though you’d think she was asking for time off to attend a gold-digging convention in Reno, the way folks responded. She asked for a place to store her milk. They suggested, “Buy a fridge.” She asked for time to pump. They said, “Fine, but you gotta make it up.” Make it up? What is this, breast milk penance?
As a simple man who once watched a cat chase its tail for thirty minutes, even I know a mother with a breast pump in one hand and a ticking clock in the other is not being “accommodated.” That’s not workplace flexibility—it’s maternal Hunger Games.
When she tried to clean her pump parts, she had to battle automatic sinks, which, as anyone knows, are marvels of modern inconvenience. It’s hard enough to rinse your hands under those jumpy laser spigots, let alone machinery.
At one point, they told her to move to a front office with no electrical outlet. That’s like inviting a man to fish and taking away the lake. Or, in her case, the pump, the privacy, and the plug.
Eventually, like many before her who dared to lactate in public, she quit. The Title IX office poked at the situation with a stick and declared it dead on arrival. There’s no discrimination here, they said–probably while sitting near an outlet with a fridge.
Meanwhile, in Carson City, Assemblywoman Cecelia González, herself a new mother, introduced AB266 to protect breastfeeding mothers. It is the part where Hope waddles in, wearing diapers and a sash that says Better Late Than Never.
The bill, among other sensible things, suggests mothers shouldn’t have to play hide-and-seek with their dignity to feed a baby. It proposes lawsuits for violators and education for the confused. It even encourages public awareness campaigns because nothing helps the cause like a billboard that says, “Breast Milk: It’s Not a Crime.”
Miss González herself once found American hospitals so skittish about breastfeeding that she was nearly scared into using baby formula by a doctor threatening her with a feeding tube. “Want your baby to eat or not?” is not the soft touch of maternal counsel.
Now, in the kindest of endings, one noble dean at UNLV gave Patricia a job as a research assistant working from home, studying the very problems she lived through. That’s poetic justice—if poetry came with a benefits package. Unfortunately, the job runs out of money this summer because the milk of human kindness has a budget cap.
Still, Patricia marches on. She’s earning not one but two master’s degrees, making her one of the most educated, underpaid milkmaids the country’s ever seen.
And that, dear reader, is the tale. It’s about a woman trying to nourish a baby and getting met with a wall of bureaucracy so dense it could block sunlight. But she didn’t stop. She just picked up her pump and kept going. That’s the kind of gumption I like to see—especially in a world so determined to squeeze the life out of anyone trying to do something decent.
So here’s to Patricia. And here’s to any mother who’s fought for the right to be what nature already made her. And if this story don’t inspire change, at least let it inspire a laugh—because if we don’t laugh at the absurdity of it all, we might cry into our formula.
The Old Blog in the Desert 