A mother in the US has received a thank you note from a waiter after breastfeeding her 10-month-old baby in a restaurant.
“Thank you for breastfeeding here, much love and respect,” the handwritten note read. It came with a free serving of pancakes and the mother, Isabelle Ames, said the gesture brought her to tears.
“I am still teary-eyed writing this hours later,” she posted to Instagram alongside a photograph of the note.
“While at breakfast this morning I was doing my usual thing- trying to wrangle a very active 10-month-old while trying get at least one sip of my coffee.
She then began breastfeeding daughter Charlotte, who had become hungry.
“When she finished, my server came over and said, ‘This pancake is from me, to you. Here is a little note to explain why.’ Instant tears. I gave this incredibly sweet stranger a hug and cried again,” Ames added.
Usually, it’s not so easy. First of all, there’s the challenge of breastfeeding itself.
“Breastfeeding is one of the hardest things I have done, next to labour. No one prepares you for it, but everyone expects you to be excellent at it. You feel like a complete failure when it doesn’t happen right away,” Ames wrote.
“For the first two weeks after Charlotte was born, I could only pump and cry because I was so broken-hearted that I couldn’t get her to latch.
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“It was not until about six weeks after she was born that she latched for first time and I was able to successfully breastfeed. I cried tears of relief and ecstatic joy.”
There’s the mothering in general.
“Even at 10 months old, it is still hard some days, without even talking about breastfeeding. I haven’t slept in days because she is sick. I am beyond exhausted,” Ames posted.
“Yesterday I got so frustrated I screamed fifty curse words into a pillow. That’s #momlife some days. But for a complete stranger to see me, and say ‘thank you’. I felt like she was there on my journey the whole time, and she knew how many times I wanted to give up but I didn’t.”
Then there's the all-too-common reaction of others to a woman breastfeeding in public.
"Before I feed Charlotte in public I get a twinge of fear. 'Okay, this is the time. Someone is going to harass me. They are going to yell at me. Someone is going to tell me I can't do this here'," Ames wrote.
"But not today. Today I got love, respect and a free pancake. Thank you to my fellow mumma, Erica."
Proof that small moments, sweet gestures of kindness from one woman to another, can go a long, long way.