View from the Lactataion Room at the White House

We make fast friends—we’re both lost in front of our destination, but it’s so giant we don’t know how or where to enter. The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, housing the executive offices of the White House, takes up four city blocks. It looks like a cross between a castle and a spaceship, a style called Second Empire architecture.

“Women’s Energy Summit?” I ask, taking a guess.

We fall into step together, both anxious not to be late.

In DC, I talk to strangers everywhere: to find out why the train is delayed, because I like their scarf, without reason. This is a city of transients and compulsive networkers; people are as open to meeting as if we were all on a study abroad program. A colleague told me that every conversation should be treated as a job interview, but for me it’s curiosity—I talk to strangers because I can.

My new friend, Jessie, is ten years older than me, and far more elegant. She is shy; smiles flicker across her face and disappear. Her suit has a metallic sheen; it fits perfectly over her thin frame. Runner’s legs float inches off the ground on snakeskin heels. Her perfection is made human only by wild red curly hair moving in all directions.

My hair is similarly wild, but in contrast to her feminine sleekness, I still look pregnant. My suit is too tight on the bottom and too big on top—my breasts are oversized canteens of milk. I wear black flats, and my shoulders tilt with the unequal weight of the purse with notebook and business cards on one side and on the other a weekend travel bag with breast pump and all its paraphernalia smashed in.

I treat every conference like the apocalypse has happened and I’m forging a new life. Whether it’s a day or a week long, I build a social network as if this event will last forever and I need a posse to survive. It’s as if I can’t conceive of the ephemeral nature of the folding chairs and scheduled keynote.

Like Dorothy, I have three key characters in my post-apocalyptic conference world. First, a confidant, the person to sneak out with and go sit in the sun. Second, a Madonna/mother figure, someone who will save me a seat and look out for me (and vice versa). Third, a homeland connection, someone with a tie to the outside world who offers a reality check.

For this one-day event, my confidant will be Joe, a twenty-four-year old man interning at the White House who I was told would have the key to the lactation room. My Madonna, Jessie with the red hair, will be the one to bring me into conversations with her large smile. My homeland connection will be another female scientist, new to DC, who like me has no idea how we were invited to this. While I’ll never see the first two again, I will stay in touch with the last; we’ll share a Passover Seder and swap emails over the next several years as we navigate ourselves out of DC and into more permanent lives.

The invitation to the White House is a needed beacon of hope. A signal that I’m going in the right direction. Up until eight months ago I was on a different path. For the last decade I’ve been a field scientist. I’m now a staffer in the US Senate. This was the third way, not going into oil in the face of climate change and not crossing my fingers for the next academic gig that wouldn’t pay enough to bridge any future gap in funding. The parting words of congratulations from my postdoctoral mentor were “You know if you leave, you can never come back.”

In field science, dressing up was wearing yoga clothes, or outdoor clothes—pretty much anything from REI. I never owned a purse and felt like a child who’d stolen...