cry rooms

The Good Shepherd at the Catacomb of Priscilla

Continuing on from where I left off with my story of nursing my firstborn in church: It so happened that our church at the time, remodeling their building, completed a nursing/mothers’/cry room about the same time as my first was born. It also happened that, in addition to a complicated recovery from childbirth, I had a very challenging time establishing a nursing relationship with my baby. Far from cozily nursing a cherubic baby in the pew as I’d expected, my early weeks and months back to church meant skipping a needed pumping session and worrying about supply as we were triple feeding; struggling with fiddly layers of nursing tops that gave me clogged ducts; and generally spending the better part of the service alone with my baby in the cry room.

Partly as a result of the conversation mentioned in a previous post, I had the sense that honesty in the main part of the church about these difficulties would be unacceptable. My experience of the cry room was therefore profoundly isolating. It was I, mostly, who cried in there, not my baby. I remember singing or trying to sing the songs and hymns, half a second behind the congregation outside because the sound system in the cry room was out of sync, while my too-tiny baby dozed or struggled to nurse. Most weeks I was unable to take communion, because at that point in the service, he was semi-latched and I was uncovered.

And then, one Sunday, Jesus met me in that cry room. As I paced and rocked my restless baby, I had the overwhelming sense that my body, even if it was unwelcome in the congregation, was not a threat to my Lord. The One who healed the bleeding woman, who blessed the little children in His arms, was present with me. Even if my baby needed to nurse nonstop.

What do cry rooms signify? What do they accomplish? Ostensibly they reduce “distraction” for the congregation and provide a comfortable space for moms and babies. But they also literally wall off the congregation from the parrhesia cries of the baby as well as the prophetic act of maternal care. Without this separation, the nursing dyad could image to the rest of the congregation both God’s tender care and our infant spiritual need and trust. Additionally, I would guess that cry rooms effectively elevate the intellection, auditory content of the sermon over the embodied, participatory responses of the congregation. One isn’t necessarily better or more important than the other, but I believe that both are vital.

I probably sound very anti-cry-room by this point. I don’t normally take a firm stance on issues like this because I want to leave room for a diversity of experiences, priorities, and options. If I’m drawing a harder line than usual, it’s because of my own isolating, alienating, dehumanizing experience. There are definitely cases to be made for the use of cry rooms. But even if my experience of the cry room was one of being driven away, alone, while the ninety-eight contentedly sang and sat in the sanctuary—Jesus came after me and my baby, found us, met us in our need, and bound up our wounds. May we be as eager to do the same.