A mother expressing milk for her baby in the car was left in shock after being told by an aggressive woman to ‘put her f*****g t*ts away’. Telaine Smith, 31, was sitting in her car in a Bunnings carpark with the windows up when the incident occurred. Ms Smith told Daily Mail Australia while she was too shocked to respond, her six-year-old son Dallas piped up from the backseat and told the woman: ‘If you don’t want to see it, you don’t have to look’. ‘I was sitting in the car with the aircon on with my sons, people who walk past normally don’t look in the car window,’ she said. ‘I noticed people out the corner of my eye walk past, and the woman actually walked back and hit the window.
‘She said “put your f****** t*ts away”,’ Ms Smith said. ‘I didn’t even respond, I was just in shock.’ Ms Smith of Queensland’s Hervey Bay needs to express milk for 30 minutes every two and a half to three hours for her four-month-old son, Pilot. Pilot was born tongue-tied and despite undergoing a procedure to cut the tissue, is unable to latch on to the breast to feed. Ms Smith said she chose to express discreetly for her own comfort and had only used the pump in public once. She said while she has never experienced such a level of aggression, she had previously felt judged by ‘over-opinionated’ passers-by and other mothers while she expressed or bottle-fed.
‘People ask questions when I do it in public,’ she said. ‘But you have the opposite problem as well, with society at the moment it’s very much about breastfeeding. ‘In the baby rooms when I’m feeding with a bottle … [some mothers] get their noses out of joint assuming I’m feeding formula. ‘You feel like you need to justify yourself, but I shouldn’t have to.’ Ms Smith said most people did not realise it is illegal to discriminate against a breastfeeding mother under Australian law, a law that also covers expressing.
‘I think people need to learn to be more sensitive to other people around them as they don’t know the full story,’ she said. ‘Most people who express have children with medical issues, have premmie babies or babies with a cleft palate. ‘People have opinions, but it impacts the supply for someone, the milk won’t come when I’m tense. ‘Nothing I’m doing is impacting anyone else in a negative way, it’s the total opposite.
‘There’s nothing sexual about it at all.’ She encouraged other mothers like herself to remain confident and said she was proud that she continued to express milk for her son. ‘It’s a lot of work and a lot of commitment and there are not many out there who do it,’ she said.‘We should support each other regardless, being a mother is hard enough.’
Source: Dailymail