I present:

Scenario: I've noticed lately that the door to the kitchen in my office closes at about 3 or 3:30 each afternoon, stays that way for about half an hour. After trying for several days to come up with a reason for this on my own, I finally asked a co-worker about it, and she reported that another of our co-workers, who recently had her first baby, goes in there to pump. As in breast milk. In the kitchen. Where my food is.

Question: Am I wrong to be grossed out by this?

Caveat: My grossed-out-ness aside, I recognize that she has every right to do this. I am not disputing her right to be there and to pump. I ask only if my gut reaction of ... eeewwwwww ... is justified, whether I should be ashamed of myself for ewwing.

Addendum: There is a bathroom near our office. Two, in fact -- both large. I wonder if perhaps she shouldn't be using a bathroom instead, maybe get someone to put a chair in there for her, certainly I'm not suggesting she sit on the toilet and do this, no. But there is ample counterspace! Room for a chair! Another bathroom folks can use when she is ... pumping. And no food of mine or anyone else's possibly being exposed to residue or molecules of breast milk.

Acknowledgements and concessions:

[1] All right, so I realize the above molecules thing is going a little far. But! There is, now that I think about all this, a suspicious container, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag, in the community refrigerator that may, in fact, be the container for the breast milk produced by the pumping. And yesterday my water bottle was right next to it! Touching the plastic bag even! The possibility for contamination is there, no?

[2] But Stacy, you may well be saying, breast feeding -- and the required (I guess?) pumping -- is a natural and beautiful thing. Yes, I suppose you are right. But! Also natural and, as long as we're stretching the word "beautiful," beautiful is peeing. So. If I enter the kitchen, close the normally-open door behind me, and piss in a container that I then store, carefully wrapped, in the refrigerator, is that not gross?

Conclusion: Of course this woman has every right to do this -- as I've said, that's not the issue, not what I'm struggling with -- and I think no less of her for doing it. Is it a breach of ettiquette? Perhaps. That probably goes along with the question of whether it is proper to breast-feed your baby in public, say, in a restaurant. Again, not really the issue. Simple fact is I'm totally icked out, and I wonder how bad I should feel about that.

I open the floor.