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« on: Dec 20, 2012, 04:47 pm »
First, of all, congrats BayAreaSM! I'm glad you were able to figure out things that worked for you/your team/your son. I hope the show is going well. And it is SO nice to hear others' experiences with this - sometimes I felt totally alone. The lactation consultants would ask me when I had gone back to work and what my work environment was like, and I would have to say "Well, I work gig to gig, and my rehearsal/performance hours vary a lot, so...nothing is consistent. Sorry I can't be more specific." They didn't seem to know what to do with my crazy theatre schedule!
I had my first son at the end of January (AHHH! He's almost a year old!!!), and started rehearsals 3 weeks later. BAD idea. Now he was a week late, but still... So that's my first piece of advice to anyone out there. TAKE THE TIME YOU NEED. "It's just a human being small enough to fit inside my body," I thought. "How hard could it be to take care of? And millions of women have squatted to give birth in the fields, stood back up, and kept working. How long could it possibly take me to recover? A month should be PLENTY of time!" Well, maybe I'm just soft, but I can tell you that I wasn't ready emotionally or physically to return to work. But the worst part of it was my brain! Nobody said I was doing a horrible job, and looking back on it I don't think I was, but at the time I really felt like I sucked as a stage manager. I was used to being super on top of everything and all of a sudden my brain was a hot mess! The hormones and the sleep deprivation turned my previously-organized brain into goop. Nobody could have prepared me for what postpartum, in all its glory, really meant. It is INTENSE, in many wonderful AND awful ways, and trying to throw work on top of such an intense experience was a silly idea.
Well, I know for next time.
But back to the point of this post - breastfeeding and pumping. I found it crucial to talk to the director and my SM team beforehand to give them a heads up of what I would need, and come up with a game plan. I found a quiet place to pump on breaks (I got permission to borrow someone's office who wasn't around during our rehearsal period), and we had code to communicate when I needed to "do my thing". I would pump right before we started, and my ASM would field questions, and I planned to be finished about 5 minutes before we started so that I was available for anything last-minute before rehearsal began. Since we were not under an AEA contract, I worked it out with my director to take one break that was longer than the others so I could pump once during rehearsal - and if I didn't come back right on time, my ASM called everyone back and ran things for a few minutes until I was finished. I told them that I was available via text if absolutely necessary, but I found it extremely helpful during that 15-20 minutes that I pumped during rehearsal to pretend rehearsal wasn't happening. I needed some time to "center" myself you could say, to just relax so I could go back to rehearsal refreshed. I used my phone to play soothing music while I pumped, and sometimes I flipped through pictures of the baby to help get the milk to letdown faster and make pumping more efficient (though sometimes this made me want to cry because I wanted to be home with him instead of at work!).
During performances I was lucky to have the only other person in the booth with me be a girl, so during the intermission I was able to move away from the window and turn to face the back corner, and pump discreetly. A couple of times I had to take care of urgent things during intermission, so I ended up having to pump while calling cues. Not ideal, but it worked and the show went on. Once I actually forgot my pump at home, so I bought a small bottle of apple juice from the vending machine, drank it/washed the bottle out, and hand expressed into the bottle. Again, not ideal, but it's amazing how resourceful you get when you have to.
The second show I worked on, a few months later, I was backstage crew. I admit, it was SO nice to go to work, come home from work, and BE home. When I SM'd I was constantly doing paperwork at home and prepping for the next day's rehearsal and responding to emails, but when I was a crew member I had no responsibilities outside of the show. But I went through a similar process with the pumping - I spoke to the appropriate people (in this case, my SM, her ASM, and the girl I shared a dressing room with - the crew was in costume for this show) and we came up with a game plan. I was released of any intermission duties so that I could sprint downstairs, rip off the top part of my costume, and pump furiously for about 6 minutes on each side. Looking back, I probably didn't need to pump quite so furiously - it made me rather sore and I think I created more stress than I needed to during those moments.
If I could have done something differently in regards to pumping, I definitely would have invested in an electric pump (or had my insurance company buy one! I had no idea they had to!). Maybe even a double electric. We plan on having more kids, so I guess I'll have more times to practice!
As a final note, since we're talking about babies, I can't help but show off the Halloween costume I made for Jed. He is the old man, Carl, from the movie UP.
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