Ayala had her three kids with her on the day of the incident: her two sons, Sean, 8, and Michael, 7, and her 2-year-old daughter, Daisy, who came over to her mom and asked to nurse.
It was only when Ayala brought her daughter to her chest that the day suddenly took a sharp turn for the worst.
“And before she finished, I said ‘I’m allowed to nurse wherever I am,” Ayala told News 4. Ayala tells CafeMom that she has been nursing her children “for almost 10 years,” so she is familiar with her legal rights, including the recent law that passed allowing moms to be able to nurse in public in all 50 states. But that didn’t stop Vreeland from reportedly getting aggressively more angry with Ayala as she stood her ground.
“She then kind of got gruff and then said, ‘Well then cover up because there’s people and children on the beach who would be offended by it,” Ayala told NJ.com. Ayala also assures us that there was “no way of [Vreeland] seeing anything.” Baffled at Vreeland’s response, Ayala told Vreeland that she understood her point, but that her daughter was trying to take a nap so she said, “I’m going to stay here and nurse.”
Seeing that Ayala was not going to comply with her request, Vreeland then allegedly raised her voice and shouted, “I’m going to call the cops on you!” Ayala compared the moment to “a mom being mad at you. Like she asked you to make your bed, and then you didn’t, and then she asked you again, and then she’s like ‘I’m losing my mind because you didn’t hear me the first two times!’”
Ayala said that Vreeland returned to the lifeguard’s tent and called 911, but when police arrived on the scene, it was anything but the call to justice that the official had thought she was making.
The officer then left the beach, and Vreeland reportedly came back down to apologize and told Ayala “I did not mean to upset you,” in a calm voice. She handed Ayala her phone where town administrator, Alison McHose, was waiting. Ayala tells CafeMom she is familiar with McHose through community events, and McHose spoke with the mom and told her that she had to cover up “as a friend.”
But Ayala told her it wasn’t practical for her to nurse with a cover because her daughter would just pull it off. “I can’t imagine me trying to cover my 2-year-old in the 90-degree heat,” she says.
Ayala says that McHose told her that she “understands,” the two hung up the phone, and the mom then went to go play with her kids in the water.
About 15 minutes later, McHose appeared on the beach and allegedly confronted Ayala as she nursed her daughter for a second time. She again told Ayala that she was there “as a friend” and reminded Ayala that she signed a contract to use the private beach. And threatened that she would remove Ayala if she didn’t cover up.
Ayala says that her friend began to argue with McHose, telling the administrator that the way she was talking about Ayala was offensive to them. McHose eventually backed off from the moms, but Ayala says that the fallout since the story went public has been swift and harsh.
Although the mom says that she isn’t 100 percent sure how the story first got to the press, she believes that one of her friends who was with her on the beach that day posted about the experience on her Facebook page and that a prominent lactation consultant saw the post and contacted The New Jersey Herald.
“There’s a rumor going around that my boobs were out for 30 minute,” Ayala tells us. “But they weren’t. They were in my suit (after she finished nursing) — [that rumor] doesn’t make sense in any way, shape, or form.”
She also says that she had asked one of her friends to meet her at the beach so they could talk about a shared experience that had greatly impacted their lives. “The real reason we were there together was to kind of sit and be like, ‘I can’t believe our kids have lyme,’ (Ayala tells us that her oldest son Sean was diagnosed with lyme disease in 2017) but we didn’t get to sit and talk about it because of boobs.”
“My idea was to make it an olive branch to the town,” she says. “But they didn’t take it. They didn’t support it. The olive branch is out there for them.”
According to a statement given to The New Jersey Herald in the days following the incident, however, McHose wrote that:
But Ayala tells CafeMom that no one from Franklin Pond has reached out to her personally.
Ultimately though, Ayala says she chose to share her story so that new moms wouldn’t have to go through the same shame that she did. “If somebody that important came up in a suit, nice wedges and confronted [a new nursing] mom, she would never nurse again. Or she would just stay in the house with the kids,” Ayala said.
“I just think it’s a normal and natural thing — nursing a child,” the mom told NJ.com, “and I don’t think it’s offensive. We need to educate [others]. It’s 2018.”
