Internet Says She's A Bad Mom For Breastfeeding After Getting Spray Tan
Every mom makes mistakes; this just happened to be a hilarious one.
jvmodel.com / Shutterstock When Gemma Colley posted a picture of her son on Facebook, she certainly didn't think it would go viral, after all, it was just a funny moment meant to be shared between her and all her mom friends. There was no harm to be done.
She also didn't think she'd get horrible comments about how she's the worst mom in the world, or how she shouldn't be allowed to be a parent.
People behind computer screens will say the cruelest things without any expertise at all. It has become so easy to be a coward.
What terrible thing did she do to her child in order to have such venomous rage thrown at her? And did she even deserve it? Was it all trained doctors yelling at her in her comment section?
Oh, yeah. She got a spray tan and some of the tan rubbed off on her son while she was breastfeeding. There's evidence of her epic parenting failure (as she called it) on the internet forever now.
Yep, that's it. Gemma took 20 minutes out of her day to get a spray tan, and because she sometimes has 'mommy brain' (she has a baby and a two-and-a-half-year-old), she breastfed her baby less than five hours after getting the tan, giving him orange five o'clock shadow.
Are there things she could've done to prevent transferring the tan to the baby? Yes. She could've expressed enough milk to last until the tan had set, and/or she could have put a dry washcloth where the baby's cheek would lay.
If she'd been thinking about it, I'm sure she would have. Gemma Colley made a simple mistake which all of us, do on occasion. She wasn't intentionally trying to poison her son.
Parenting is difficult and challenging, as Colley points on on her blog, Colley's Wobbles.
"We're all just trying our very hardest to mold the best human beings we can, although with that great responsibility also comes poo-bombs, puke, pee fountains, crying babies the moment you go into a deep sleep, and toddlers whining about not having their favorite fire engine toy at 6 AM (Thanks, son number 1). And that's only a small percentage of things a parent has to experience."
Why don't we give her a break, haters? She's doing the best job she can without losing it every day. Besides, it looks like her son is doing just fine.
Christine Schoenwald is a writer, performer, and frequent contributor to YourTango. She's had articles featured in The Los Angeles Times, Salon, Bustle, Medium, Huffington Post, Business Insider, and Woman's Day, among many others.