Kristen Bell’s breast-pump mishap is one all working moms can relate to

Working moms just sometimes have embarrassing moments. Maybe you were working from home when your toddler woke up from a nap and burst in on your conference call (that’s my life) or, halfway through a meeting at the office you realized you put your shirt on inside out after staying up all night with the baby. We’ve all been there.

It’s part of the balancing act, and actress Kristen Bell—mom to daughters 2-year-old Delta and 4-year-old Lincoln—proves that even celebrities aren’t immune.

Appearing on The Ellen DeGeneres Show with Bad Moms co-stars Mila Kunis and Kathryn Hahn, Bell divulged the story of how she once unknowingly broadcasted her breast-pumping session on “a 200-inch screen.”

Actually, it was Kunis who brought up the mishap that apparently happened when the cast was running through a Bad Moms script together. Bell couldn’t be at the meeting in person and Skyped in from home.

“K-Bell’s just on a giant screen Skyped in, and as we’re reading the script, you see her face just getting closer and closer into the screen, and the rest of her body just keeps kind of getting out of the screen,” Kunis recalled, adding that the next thing Bell’s castmates heard was the sound of a breast pump machine.

Apparently, the men in the meeting didn’t actually catch on to what that sound was, but Bell’s cast mates and fellow moms sure did.

“The boys in the room were like, ‘There’s static on that, can we check that call line?'” Bell said. “Mila and Kathryn were like ‘She’s fine, it’s fine! Let’s just keep rehearsing.’ They were covering for me!”

Bell’s not embarrassed about pumping, but might not have done it if she’d known she would be a such a focal point for the meeting. “I didn’t know I was on a movie projector. I would have loved a heads-up!” Bell told the audience. “I thought it was like, ‘We’re gonna Skype’ and it would be on a computer.”

Pumping in meetings and on calls is a fact of life for many moms and luckily, breast pump technology is improving and getting quieter. That’s a good thing, because like Bell says, when you’ve gotta pump, you’ve gotta pump.