It’s not unusual to experience overwhelming amounts of unease and uncertainty when you have your first child; there’s a societal pressure to be the perfect parent, and anxiety, sleep loss, and depression are all natural reactions to childbirth. What isn’t natural is the embarrassment new mothers feel when society vilifies them for breastfeeding their children in public. This fear that “a small piece of flesh might offend” is what pushes mothers like poet Hollie McNish into dirty bathrooms, and she is justifiably angered by this. In Embarrassed, a spoken word poem produced for C4’s Random Acts series, McNish dismantles the status quo, with the help of filmmaker Jake Dypka.
