A Woman's Right To Feed Her Child

So, I'm sat at home, dressed, showered, fed etc. generally ready to go out of the house yet I can't actually bring myself to leave. I feel overwhelmingly anxious & panicky & have done since this morning. All I need to do is go out & get some buttons yet it seems like an impossibility.

I haven't really left the house alone in quite some time, though I haven't expressly thought that I couldn't or didn't want to but I suppose that there must have been some part of me that ws stopping me because usually I'd be out of the house in a flash rather than sat around doing nothing.

I think that there are a lot of contributing factors. Firstly, I have very, very little money & spending any unnecessarily would be careless, so the thought of buses & maybe a coffee at a cafe if the baby becomes hungry is not really what I want to be spending my pennies on. Secondly, there is the thought of getting all the stuff together for the baby etc. is a bit daunting, though I have never found it to be so in the past. Thirdly, navigating a gigantic tank of a pram around shops which contain aisles that are smaller than said pram is just draining. There are all these things which I face every day I go out but then there was what happened this morning too.

I was on Twitter, as usual, & saw a news story about a woman from Scarborough who had been thrown out of a cafe for breastfeeding her four week old baby because of a complaint from another customer. This, frankly, outraged me & I soon got looking into women's right etc. & basically got on my high horse. I then decided to tune into BBC Radio York on which they were discussing this issue & I was astonished by the amount of people (mainly women too) who were against women breastfeeding in public, calling it things like "unsavoury" & saying that there is no need for women to "flaunt" their breasts in public in this day & age when it is "unnecessary" to feed a baby "that way". My view on public breastfeeding is that it is a woman's right to do so, plain & simple. Breasts have been sexualised in our society & that is wrong, or at least we should be equally aware of their real & fantastic purpose which is as a means to feed our children. They are essential for new life & if anyone should have a problem with a woman breastfeeding discretely then they seriously need to reconsider their mindset. But try as I might I couldn't quite shake the voices of these women, especially as there seemed to be quite a lot of them. I imagined myself sat in a cafe & I thought about how many of the other customers may disapprove of me feeding  my baby in the most natural &  healthy way possible & it upset me. A lot. It upset me so much that I am now feeling reluctant to go out unless it is absolutely necessary & I'm anxious about staying out too long in case the baby does need feeding.

This is utterly disgusting that I should be made to feel this way & ridiculous on my part for thinking that these people's opinions should matter, but currently, due to all the other factors causing my anxiety, I am not strong enough to walk out proud & be the kind of woman I would like to be.