Chrissy Teigen’s Breast Pump Selfie Is as Real as It Gets—I Know Firsthand

Yesterday, John Legend shared a photo of himself and his wife, Chrissy Teigen, in a car on their way to date night. “She’s taking me to dinner but still on Mommy duty,” the singer wrote as a caption to the image, which showed the model with her dress unfastened, breast pumps prominently in place, flashing a peace sign.

Teigen isn’t exactly a stranger to oversharing on social media. This is, after all, the woman who posted a photo of herself wearing post-birth mesh underwear three days after having her second child, Miles. But her recent pump picture is one of the few out there that shows this oft-hidden part of child-rearing. While we’ve grown accustomed to seeing gorgeously posed photos of women breastfeeding on Instagram, pumping photos, especially by famous women, remain rare.

I am as guilty as the next person of not wanting to showcase this practice. During the birth of my daughter, Paloma, a few years back, I didn’t flinch when my husband almost fainted after catching a peek of the pushing action below my waist. When visitors came to the hospital to meet her, I didn’t button up my pajamas if I happened to be breastfeeding when they arrived. But the first time I strapped on a breast pump at home? I asked my husband to please leave the room, shut the door, and swear he would never witness me doing it again.

Maybe it was the indignity of the tubes and funnels attached to my chest; the fact that my nipples were being aggressively pinched and pulled. Maybe it was the droplets of milk shooting into bottles attached to a hands-free bra that was easily the most unflattering piece of underwear ever invented. But mostly, I hated that awful, inescapable suction sound that came with every new burst of milk.

My private pumping mandate only lasted about a day or so before I realized I had to get comfortable quick around the house and in front of my husband unless I wanted to spend hours locked up in a room alone. The fact is, any breastfeeding woman who has to spend more than a few hours away from her child needs to pump. It is as essential to motherhood as breathing, as normal as changing a diaper. It is done by both working and stay-at-home mothers. Its use is so widespread, most major insurance companies in the U.S. now cover the entire cost of a breast pump. So then why does the topic of pumping remain so under-discussed and at the margins?

For instance, Stephanie, 31, a mother of a 3-month-old girl, only found out about the insurance-mandated coverage of her breast pump through a friend. “My doctor didn’t mention anything about it, and when I went to a lactation class, it was all about breastfeeding,” she explains. “They didn’t discuss how to sterilize or even use a pump. They just said it was one of the options when feeding your baby. Nobody got into how time-consuming it was going to be either.”

While breastfeeding can be a simple hop-on, hop-off feeding process, pumping requires moms to find an electrical outlet, set up the parts, plug in the machine, pump, sterilize the parts, store the milk in a refrigerator, and get redressed before going back to whatever it is they were doing. This routine can sometimes take place up to four or five times a day.

“When I first came back to work, whenever I finished a pumping session, my boss would always ask me where I had disappeared to,” says Mercedes, a 32-year-old lawyer working at a tech company. She was still breastfeeding her son when she returned to her job after a four-month leave and needed to pump at least twice a day for 30 minutes. “I would say that I was in the ‘mother’s room,’ and my boss didn’t even know what that was,” she adds.

While Mercedes had no qualms talking about pumping with her boss, she never felt comfortable cutting a meeting short to get up and pump. Eventually she started blocking off two half-hour periods in her calendar every day, so no calls or meetings would interfere with her pumping schedule. “It’s hard for someone who hasn’t gone through it, both men and women, to understand how much of your day is taken up by it,” she adds.

While we’ve grown accustomed to seeing new moms breastfeeding their babies in restaurants and parks, as well as Congress—thanks in part to Sen. Tammy Duckworth, who recently changed the rules to allow them to do so—we have yet to offer mothers who are pumping that same sense of comfort and support. Even though in 2010, federal law gave working women the legal right to pump at work, and required companies with more than 50 employees to have a lactation room on the premises, at many workplaces, pumping rooms remain no more than a refurnished supply closet.

When I went back to work, I learned my company’s lactation room was located several floors below mine—making the trek time-consuming and unrealistic for my frenetic job. Instead of rushing off every four hours to the elevator, I started using a private bathroom located inside a conference room as a makeshift pumping room. The day I walked out, with breast pump bag in hand, into a meeting with at least 20 people was the day I decided to stop pumping entirely. Knowing that they had listened to that suctioned soundtrack throughout their group session, I just couldn't fathom going back.

But the truth is I shouldn’t have been ashamed at all. If, as a culture, we can get comfortable with allowing women to breastfeed wherever and whenever they need to, we should welcome the kind of necessary infrastructure that would allow them to feel that same sense of ease while pumping.

A quick look around reveals that there are, in fact, some progressive steps being made toward reaching that goal. For one, a number of innovative new breast pumps, like those known as the Willow and the Moxxly, are radically rethinking the mechanics of pumping: Both fit discreetly, almost undetectably, inside a nursing bra or under a T-shirt (no tubes or attachments required), making it possible to pump on the way to the market or, say, at one’s desk—and the former is even supposed to be silent! And slowly but surely, better lactation rooms, those with sinks, electrical outlets, and armchairs, are popping up in airports, offices, and mainstream megastores like Buy Buy Baby.

As for the hard work of destigmatizing pumping, thankfully Teigen isn’t alone. In her recent documentary series, Serena Williams is seen pumping around the clock at home, in front of her trainer, and even before a competitive match. Behati Prinsloo recently shared a photo of herself at Coachella, sporting a bucket hat, Vans sneakers, and holding what looks like a Medela automatic breast pump, with the caption “#PumpAndDump.” If more women and men (shout-out to Legend) continue to celebrate pumping as part of motherhood, perhaps it will finally come out of the shadows and find a place where it belongs: before a date night, after a conference call, smack in the middle of real life.