Babykins

Today, barreling down the freeway in my old Thunderbird, I asked my passenger, my younger, quite pregnant daughter, if she ever considered using cloth diapers. Her head cocked as it does when she’s heard of something for the first time.

“How does that work?”

And so I told her about when her older sister was a baby, the diaper service truck would roll up once a week with a hundred diapers. I think we left the previous week’s dirty diapers in a garbage bag on the front porch but now I’m wondering whether we had plastic garbage bags back then or did I put them in a tall metal garbage can or a bushel basket. It’s hard keeping track of what kinds of things we had when.

And then I told her how, when her older brother was a baby, we rinsed out his cloth diapers in the toilet and put them in a tall white plastic diaper pail full of water and bleach which we, somehow, hauled down to the basement to dump into the washer to wash at the super hot, super clean setting with another big dose of bleach and then rinsed out the diaper pail in a hundred year old concrete tub in the basement.

So far, I was making a great argument for cloth diapers. Reminiscing is risky business.

So I segued into modern cloth diapers, about which I know very little except that there is a new nonprofit group in town that is all about cloth diapers. I’ve seen their promos. Cloth diapers aren’t white anymore and you don’t have to use those giant, ‘Captain Ahab Let’s Fix the Mainsail’ diaper pins. I think they have little wee snaps or velcro so eventually a baby could end up diapering herself which they all do anyway so cloth diapers wouldn’t put a kid at a disadvantage, if you ask me.

When I said the new cloth diapers were cute, my daughter’s ears perked up. She is big on cute. We are all big on cute. It’s why people have babies in the first place, because they are impossibly cute and we think we can’t live without that cuteness in our lives although we learn, over the very many years of being a parent, that cuteness morphs into something else that is often very messy and frustrating – something ropelike and frayed and double-knotted, no longer so cute but more enduring.

We go together to her doctor appointments. She is a single mom so she needs a buddy. I sit in the exam room and various doctors and technicians come in – she has many medical issues so appointments are a cavalcade of stars – and each one wonders who I am because it isn’t evident that I’m her mom, since she is an adopted person, and often I push back the mad desire to say “I’m the social worker” and just say “I’m her mom.” We have had this “What’s my line?” scenario for a very long time so the joke is old, even for us.

We don’t have the perfect relationship. We never did. But we go to her appointments together and we make our dumb jokes and we laugh too loud and we confound the people coming through the door and we talk about cloth diapers and we wrap the rope around our fingers and we press on.

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Photo by Valeria Zoncoll on Unsplash