If you wear sunglasses, wear black, and walk down the street with a gang of other sleek people behind you wearing sunglasses and wearing black – you’re cool, you’re in. I’m so out, I feel like I need to come out of the closet: Hello world, it’s me! I’m uncool, and I’m proud of it!

I got in the car the other day and put on my $5.00 sunglasses and they snapped, spontaneously. It was my last chance at any ounce of cool. I was going grocery shopping with two kids; green avocado was smeared all over my shirt and something white, that I couldn’t identify, was spotted on my jeans.

I swore I would run in the store and get just a few things. About ¾ of the way through the store, my son needed to breastfeed. There are two places to sit in this store: the wooden bench in front of all the cashiers or the toilet. My son won’t eat with dinging cash registers and rustling bags passing in front of him. I’d fed him in the bathroom before, and I don’t like it. Who wants to eat on the toilet? I’ve sat on the floor before, but I just wasn’t up for the cold ceramic.

I’ve worn both my kids in a sling that goes around my shoulder. If the child and the breast are positioned just so, it is possible to nurse; throw packages of raw chicken into the cart and open a bag of potato chips for the other, non-nursing child.

We continued to the checkout. I turned Addison around so he could face the people and see what’s going on. I dug into the cart for each item and tossed it on the conveyer belt. I reached for the blueberries and looked down at my shirt. My breast was hanging out. I tucked it back into the tank top/bra and flipped the blueberries up by the chicken.

I handed the cashier my credit card. “The system is down,” he said. He and all the other cashiers stood around the manager’s desk while she called each purchase in for approval. The young man who’d bagged my items stood patiently next to my bags of groceries. Had I exposed myself to him? The cashier? After awhile it doesn’t matter who’s seen my “this that or the other thing ” - birth did that to me. Childrearing keeps cementing it in.

I left the market and passed the video store on the left. There they were – the posters with the cool people. Funny thing….I didn’t look anything like them. Now that I’m out of the closet, maybe I could start a whole new kind of cool.