Our new vocabulary

Tonight in the rush of coming in the door, putting down bags, tugging off coats, greeting the cat, hugging parents and children, Nate said very casually to me, "I think I figured out that pumping three times a day is really the best way to do it." At first I let these words slide right over me, hardly listening. How many times have I prattled on about how many times a day I need to pump or how many times I was able to pump or how many times I didn't get to pump because I was stuck in an awful meeting. But then my ear caught on the fact that he was saying "pumping," and I instantly got a little enraged, thinking how dare he tell me when I should be pumping--they aren't his boobs. But THEN I remembered I don't pump anymore, and I started to look at him as you would look at one who has totally lost his mind, one who thinks he can lactate in the face of our ever-diminishing, almost-out frozen breast milk supply. What the fuck? I started to wonder. Have I slipped into some wormhole? Did I forget I actually have kept pumping? Do I have amnesia?

And that's when it clicked: pumping doesn't always HAVE to refer to breast milk. Not all conversations have to do with feeding a child and there actually ARE other ways to use the verb "to pump" in a sentence that has nothing to do with hooking a bizarre machine up to your boobs and extending the reach of your nipple beyond what is normal to extract little squirts of milk. What a revelation. Nate was actually talking about pumping the waste vegetable oil into his filtering system in order to put it into our car. So, it's still a little weird, and people at dinner parties will probably still look at us a little differently when we talk about our pumping project, but I'm pretty sure they will be much less horrified from now on when we talk about how many times a day we pump.