Although I finally closed comments on my “Not a Hero” post, likes and feedback continue to roll in. Nothing I’ve ever written has generated such a response before, and I am so thrilled and humbled. Perhaps most of all, the feedback that has meant the most to me is that of adults with disabilities, who without exception, have told me basically, right on, I’m not a hero, just a person living my life.
And while it may sound counter to my “not a hero” message, I find them, the people who have left these comments and messages, incredibly encouraging. Not in a patronizing way, but in a window to the possible future for my daughter sort of way. Just as I want my girls to know and see strong, smart women out in the world as encouragement, as windows to their possible futures, I want Claire to see normal, everyday people with disabilities to let her know that there are all sorts of possibilities for her life. Possibilities that include meaningful work, deep relationships, fun hobbies, athletics and exercise, and anything else she may so desire.
When we got our diagnosis, I knew nothing about spina bifida, and our doctors seemed to know very little about what we could expect for our daughter, because spina bifida includes such a range of disability and experience. This whole journey has been characterized by a deep hunger for knowledge on my part. I remember finding the blogs of parents raising kids with SB, and just putting a face, a beautiful KID face, to what was at first a scary and mysterious disease gave me so much peace. Now, as she grows, I find myself still hungry, not so much for facts, but for glimpses of what her life might be. And the more I read and hear from adults with disabilities, the more I realize that my hopes for her as a person with a disability aren’t that different for my hopes for my girls as future-women. I want freedom, autonomy, and bravery for them both. I want them both to have the courage to stand up to both sexist and ableist oppression that they may encounter in their lives.
It’s why I related so well to this post, which I found via Rachel Held Evans. The writer talks about seeing adults with disabilities in a new way as the parent of a child with a disability, and finding them inspiring, and in the piece she tries to draw a distinction between that and the patronizing, limiting “inspiration” I addressed in the “Not a Hero” post. I think, as Ellen seems to be saying in her post as well, that the difference is largely a problem with the word “inspiration.” We rightly bristle at the idea that our kids are “inspiring” just for navigating the world in the only bodies they have ever known– that’s no more noble than any of us learning to navigate the world in the only bodies we’ve ever had. But we also, like any other parent, are searching for role models for our kids. Not role models as in Batman or even Olympians, but actual people, whose lives look like their lives. We face a future full of unknowns, and we just want to see that there are lots of possible futures, and they’re good. I’ve heard moms of boys talk about finding good male role models for their sons. As a mom to girls, I feel no qualms talking about my desire for good female role models. And as the mom to a daughter with a disability, I look for the same.
I’m thankful my post has connected me to so many perspectives from so many voices I wasn’t reading before. I’m just starting out, and I have much to learn in order to best raise my daughters to be women in the world.
Well, it’s official. My baby girls are now leaving the baby stage behind and headed toward toddlerhood, as they are ONE! I’d be sad about how quickly time has passed, and continues to pass, but they are mostly so much fun right now that who can be sad about that? They’re exploring and learning and growing and really coming into themselves personality wise. They interact with each other more than ever, and their relationship is so cool to watch. Etta will be walking any day now, and we hope Claire will be catching up soon, as she’s getting started with PT and OT (I promise a complete Claire update soon). Basically: having one year old twins is just crazy and busy and cool, and I don’t have time to be too wistful.
We celebrated the first year of their lives, and the fact that we survived it, with a fiesta full of people we love and who love us. My fashionista sister not only came all the way from Nashville with her new FIANCE and two pugs in tow, but she also took lots of pictures with her big fancy camera. So, now you get to share in what was a truly lovely day, despite gray, drizzly skies that forced what was supposed to be a back yard party indoors. Not that location matters much when you have a margarita machine, you know?
I’m in my next to last week of classes for my MA program. I’m in the middle of a bunch of academic writing on books like Beloved, Ceremony, and Salvage the Bones, all of which explores the power and ferocity of woman- and mother-hood.
I’m also quietly in the trenches, dealing with a sick baby who’s been running a high fever and barfing so much she had three baths in one day yesterday. It’s a funny thing, the juxtaposition of all of my intellectual thinking about motherhood as some sort of abstract force against the raw power of literal motherhood as this thing that I do, this person I am as I hold a tiny person and just go ahead and let her finish vomiting all over me, just sit there and let it happen, because I know she’s not done yet and attempting to move, or get out of the path of the flow will just exacerbate the mess.
The last lines of Salvage the Bones (which, I swear, this isn’t a spoiler) are “She will know that I have kept watch, that I have fought…She will know that I am a mother.” In this case, I am the she. I am the one who knows. And I am the one who is. In caring for my sick baby, just as I have already many times before in my 8 month stint, just as I will many times to come, I just become unblinkingly confronted with this new fact of my existence. I am a mother. I am the heart that beats the rhythm of comfort under the skin and bones upon which rests the fevered cheek of the one who is flesh of my flesh. What a strange and wonderful privilege it is to provide that resting place. To encircle that tiny, weary person with my arms. To know that I am her mother.
Reading Salvage the Bones with Claire resting in my lap. Etta was napping in the bouncer that I rocked with my feet. It’s how this mother gets her schoolwork done.
Today, I have 6 month olds. I am still trying to wrap my mind around it, because in my crazy mom way of thinking, it’s like their babyhood is half over.
I’ve also recently come to a new understanding of the babies. I know in the past I’ve said that babies are pandas. And I still stand by that comparison. But I’ve come to a new way of understanding these tiny beings: they’re aliens, sent to learn about our way of life and report back to their people.
They watch us, but they don’t really understand what we’re saying, and we don’t exactly speak their language, either. They find our culture strange and often bewildering, but they’re generally willing to humor us, with our strange rituals and insistence on things like giving them baths and changing their diapers. They’re observing us and compiling data for their report to their leader, usually with a sort of detached wonder, the appropriate posture for a tiny scientist or anthropologist sent to another world, but occasionally their faces betray other emotions, and sometimes, they break down altogether under the strain of their difficult and top-secret mission.
I often wonder about the stories they’re going to take back to their leaders, but sometimes, when they scream in the middle of the night, I’m not so sure they really come in peace.
“Don’t believe our mom. We would *never* scream our faces off for seemingly no reason.”
Last night some friends came over with BBQ for dinner and their one year old son. We all rocked out with our babies out and had a great time. If someone you know has a young baby, I highly recommend you go hang out at their house– they’re probably dying for some grown up time, but getting out to a restaurant can feel like waiting for a ticking time bomb of tears to go off, and going to someone else’s house is daunting, because you’d have to lug so. much. crap. with you, like places for baby to sit, etc. It turns out a 4-3 ratio works out great for adults to children, and I think the key is to always have one more grownup than baby around– not that that’s possible when I’ve got two twins tag-teaming me all day!
Anyway, over dinner, we were talking about a terrible night we had with a screaming baby earlier this week (spoiler alert: that baby was Etta), and how we tried “all the 5 S’s” and nothing worked to soothe her. Our friend asked what the 5 S’s are. They’re from the book The Happiest Baby on the Block, and are swaddling, shushing, sucking, swinging/swaying, and side-lying, and can be used in combo to soothe fussy babies. We’ve found them very useful, and a recent study published in Pediatrics even found them to work very well at relieving infants’ pain related to vaccines.
After this explanation, our friend quipped, “So, is the sixth S nobody talks about ‘swearing’?”
Yes. Yes it is. When all the other S’s fail, all that’s left is swearing. Which could make us a little worried about baby’s first word…
If you asked pretty much anyone who knows me, they will confirm that I am generally not a patient person. I always thought that it was a good thing that I married Jon, because he brought a calm, steady patience to the table, mediating my fly-off-the-handle tendencies to balance me out a bit. While pregnant, I was sure our children would like him better, because he’d be the endlessly patient one, and I’d be the frustrated, snippy one. It’s also a fact that I generally fall apart and begin to freak the eff out when sleep deprived, with deprivation meaning anything less than 8 consecutive, unbroken hours of sleep, possibly less than 10. (Seriously, ask Jon sometime about that incident where I *sobbed* on a red eye flight.)
But, as Jon noted during an epic Etta screamfest yesterday: maybe it’s maternal instinct or something, but somehow I’m the one with more patience with the babies. Now, I am generally opposed to making biological generalizations about things like “maternal instinct” and other forms of gender essentialism, so I have another explanation, one I offered to him: it’s just that, if I freaked out over all of this, I would literally be freaking out every day for the rest of my life. Being patient is just a self-preservation technique for living with two tiny humans who occasionally like to SCREAM THEIR EVERLOVING FACES OFF FOR SEEMINGLY NO REASON.With whom I am often left all alone.
That’s not to say I don’t sometimes *feel* like freaking the freak out. This newfound patience is not without limits. Heck, there was even that one afternoon where I handed screaming Etta to Jon and literally flopped on the floor toddler-tantrum style, in a silent flail that expressed all the frustration and exhaustion I felt. There have been evenings where I swear, if I have to do one more baby-related thing, I will just lose my shiz, so I have to sit and drink wine and read fashion blogs for 30 minutes while he handles the babies, no, do not even ask me to draw up a syringe full of one of their myriad medicines. I have a feeling these moments will keep occurring.
In the meantime, it’s been a strange world to be the patient one. I basically don’t even know how to deal with Jon being frustrated and impatient, because it’s such a complete role-reversal. Not that he (or anyone else in a similar situation) isn’t totally justified in his frustration, but he’s usually the rock and I’m usually the tornado, and we whirlwinds don’t much know what to do when our rocks go flying around. Not that he’s really flying off the handle. My husband is so naturally even-keeled that his impatience and frustration looks like anyone else’s level-headedness, but still, I find myself getting frustrated with his frustration, as if I’m saying in my head, “BUT YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO FREAK OUT! YOU HAVE TO BE THE CALM ONE, ALL THE TIME, EVERY DAY!” Which is, of course irrational. He gets to feel his feelings, just like I do.
All of this is to say, this whole parenting thing is a strange new world. I was afraid of the ways it would change us, but it’s changing us anyway, like it or not.
In closing, here’s a triptych of Etta demonstrating how we freak the freak out around here:
One of the few things I felt very strongly that I wanted to do as a parent was cloth diaper the girls. It’s also one of the things I get asked about most often (seriously, random texts from friends asking “can you tell me about this cloth diapering thing?”), and I figured it might be easy just to write about it and have someplace to point people when they ask me questions. So here’s that post.
Why Cloth Diaper?
Different people cloth diaper for different reasons. For me, there are two biggies. The most important to me was the environment. We recycle, garden, compost, bicycle, eat mostly vegetarian, and try to consume sustainable products. Knowing that the average baby produces at least 1.5 tons of diaper waste, all of which goes to a landfill and never biodegrades (seriously, even if you use “compostable” or “biodegradable” diapers, if you don’t compost them, they don’t get enough air and sunlight in a landfill to ever break down), I really wanted to find a better, more eco-friendly way to deal with diapering. The way I see it, we’re preventing at least 3 tons of landfill waste, and that’s huge.
My second reason is financial. Having two babies in diapers to potty training would cost at least $2k, and knowing I would probably at least be buying pricier eco-friendlier diapers if I were using disposables, that total would likely be closer to $4k.
Etta rocks a newborn Lil Joey diaper.
Now, there are seriously dirt cheap ways to cloth diaper a baby, but I was a little afraid of the cheapest option of prefold diapers and covers. I wanted to go with the easiest options, most like disposables, where you just put on the diaper with either snaps or velcro, it’s all one piece, and all I have to do is toss it in the wash afterward– no folding or pinning or other origami type skills necessary, so I chose All in One (AIO) diapers for the newborn (NB) stage and one size (OS) pocket diapers for the rest of my diapering days. I stalked deals online (Zulily, Babysteals, EcoBabyBuys, Abby’s Lane, Cotton Babies), shopped used (Spot’s Corner, various message boards, Ebay), and received many of my newborn diapers as gifts from our registry. I personally spent $125 on newborn diapers, and did not pay full price for a single diaper.
Overall I had 36 newborn AIO diapers (BumGenius, Kissaluvs, and LilJoeys) for a total cost of $388. Additionally, after the girls outgrew the NB diapers, I sold them online for $245, bringing the actual cost of my newborn diapers to $143, and, considering what I actually personally spent as a result of receiving so many diapers as gifts ($125), essentially got paid to use cloth diapers for the first 9 weeks.
I also built up a stash of 36 OS pocket diapers (BumGenius 4.0, Rumparooz, Fuzzibunz, and Alva), plus 4 Flip covers and 12 Flip inserts, plus 12 fitteds (Rearz and Thirsties) and 6 hemp inserts (Thirsties) to use for overnights. The total cost of this stash, essentially 60 changes of diapers, which I hope will last until the girls potty train, was $545.90.
$545.90 is less than one half of what I would have spent on disposable diapers for just one baby.
In addition, I purchased two large hanging wetbags, for $30 each, and 4 travel size wetbags for various prices, one at $5, one at $18, and two for $14. That adds $51 to my total.
Other folks are convinced that cloth diapers are healthier for their babies because they don’t have chemicals in them. Others swear their kids get fewer diaper rashes (this has been true of our experience). And others claim that cloth diapered kids are potty trained easier. So, maybe some of that interests you.
What are the diapers like?
OS diaper on the left, NB AIO on the right. Both from BumGenius.
For the newborn stage, the diapers are truly not much different than a disposable. The AIOs I chose are all one piece, with waterproof fabric on the outside, soft fleece on the inside, and microfiber “soakers” (the absorbent part) in between. They closed with snaps or velcro. Because the poop of formula- and breast-fed babies is water soluble, there is nothing more required than taking the diaper off the baby, tossing it in a wetbag, and unzipping the wetbag and shaking the diapers into the washer when the wetbag gets full. They can be tumble-dried on low or hung out to dry (the sun does wonders for keeping them white and fresh), and there’s no folding or stuffing required. I really don’t see how this is any more work than tossing the diapers in the trash and taking the trash out when the bag gets full. I did not find changing the diapers to be any more disgusting than the disposables we used in the hospital.
Inside a NB AIO.
The OS pockets for 9 weeks and beyond have one extra step. The absorbent soaker is not sewn into the diapers like with the NB AIOs, and instead must be “stuffed” into the pocket of the diaper after washing, and removed from the pocket of the diaper before washing. This extra step is worth it, though, because pockets can be stuffed with more and different inserts to customize absorbency, for example, by using hemp inserts in addition to or instead of microfiber inserts (that typically come with most pocket diapers) at nighttime for added absorption.
Inside a BumGenius 4.0 OS pocket diaper.
The way OS diapers are in fact one-size is that they are adjustable to fit most babies from about 10 lbs to 35 lbs. Most use snaps to change the “rise” of the diaper, and either have snaps or velcro/aplix to customize the waist. The only diaper I have that doesn’t use snaps to adjust the rise is my Fuzzibunz, which use leg elastic adjustments to change the size.
My girls were born at 6 lbs and wore their NB AIOs for 9 weeks, up to about 12 lbs. At that point, they still physically fit into the NB AIOs, but had outgrown the absorbency, leading to leaks. We switched them to the OS pockets at that point and have not had daytime leaking problems.
Rocking their first “big girl” OS diapers.
Nighttime leaks were another scenario as we began to get stretches of sleep up to 6 hours. This led me to look into fitted diapers. Fitteds look a lot like OS pockets in that they are adjustable in size. However, with a fitted, the entire diaper is absorbent, not just the soaker, so they can hold a lot more fluid. They can also be stuffed with additional inserts to make them even more absorbent. Because the whole diaper is absorbent, fitted diapers must be used with a waterproof cover. Right now we are using Thirsties Fab Fitteds at night with an additional Thirsties hemp insert and our Flip covers and have gone up to 8 hours with no problems. Even after that long, they seem like they could hold more liquid.
But isn’t it so much work?
Even with newborn twins, I haven’t found cloth diapering to be oppressively labor intensive. If you’re one of those people who hate laundry, you might hate this too. I don’t mind laundry, or diaper laundry, because a machine does all the work, and most of the work required of me can be done while sitting on my butt in front of the TV. It’s easy enough to do the cold rinse on the diapers, and then add in all the dirty baby clothes, blankets, bibs, and burp rags for the wash. I do about one extra load of laundry per day. If I had more diapers, I could do laundry less often.
But isn’t it gross?
One of the most common reactions I get is “ewww poop in your washer.” Well, blowouts and leaks happen even with disposables, so unless you’re planning to throw your kid’s clothes out every time s/he has a blowout, leak, or spitup incident, there’s going to be poop, pee, and puke in your washer too.
Other folks are grossed out that I bought some of my diapers used, noting a squick factor similar to used underwear. Once washed in hot water with soap and a little bleach, I saw no problem with it, personally.
Another common question is whether or not I have to touch poop. So far in my experience: not any more than when we have used disposables. When the girls start solids, we will have to “plop” their poop into the toilet and likely spray it off with a sprayer attached to the toilet. But overall, I don’t feel like I’m getting my hands any dirtier than I do when I change disposable diapers.
What about leaving the house?
I don’t do much different when we leave the house, except I take a smaller travel-sized wetbag to hold the dirties until I can deal with them when I get home. If we go on vacation to someplace without access to a washer and dryer, I will either buy the disposable inserts for my Flips or use disposables.
Anything else?
One thing to keep in mind with cloth diapers is not to use anything on them that might coat the fabrics or make them less absorbent. This means using “cloth diaper safe” detergents and diaper creams. Lots of folks use all kinds of specialty detergents, and there are lists that will let you know what’s safe, but I use Tide Ultra because it’s cheap, easy to find at Target, and gets my diapers clean and fresh-smelling. Folks buy all sorts of indie diaper creams too, but we use California Baby, which I can get at Target. Burt’s Bees is also cloth diaper safe, as is the lanolin you might also use on your nipples if breastfeeding, as is coconut oil.
Any questions?
Feel free to ask!
If you liked this post, you might like my later posts about cloth diapering:
I have had an epiphany. Panda bears are like babies. Babies are like pandas. Bear with me. (ha)
The other day I tweeted this picture and had the following exchange with my friend Kyran:
And that’s when I realized: BABIES ARE LIKE PANDAS.
See, I’ve long been convinced that cuteness is pretty much the only thing keeping pandas alive at this point. I once visited a panda exhibit at the Memphis Zoo and learned that pandas, biologically, should be omnivores. They have the teeth and the digestive system necessary to digest both plants and meat, like every other bear. But pandas, they are not so into the meat eating. In fact, they are like the hipster vegans of the animal world. They’re like, listening to Morrisey and munching on roughage instead of hunting some prey, and as a result, they have to literally eat bamboo all day long, just to get enough calories to stay alive. This means that all they do is eat and sleep, because they basically don’t have the energy to do anything else. I mean, do pandas even mate in the wild anymore? I’ve read about zoos basically having to use panda pornography to try and convince their pandas to get it on. And would we even be going to all this trouble to save pandas (who clearly don’t WANT to be saved), if pandas weren’t one of the cutest things in the world? Nope. Cute: it’s keeping pandas alive.
Same thing happens with babies. Nature gives them giant heads and googly eyes and thigh rolls so that we will want to keep them alive, because Lord knows they can’t do it themselves. Claire, for example, seems determined to kill herself with her favorite thing in the world: food. At least once during a feed, she will either try to breathe milk– perhaps she loves it so much, breathing it seems to be the next best thing to eating it–or will suck the nipple so far down her throat that she gags herself. Meanwhile Etta, like many babies, seems determined to fling her giant head around and hurl her body out of our arms on a regular basis. And so we spend all our time trying to keep these very cute and possibly suicidal tiny beings alive. Because they’re adorable.
Babies are the pandas of the human world. Pandas are the babies of the animal kingdom. Cuteness is the only thing ensuring the continued survival of both.
The other night, I had to run to Walgreens to pick up a prescription for Etta. I grabbed some C batteries for the baby swing and headed to the pickup window.
“I’m here to pick up a prescription for my daughter.”
Outwardly, I continued to have a typical interaction with the pharmacist, but the minute the words “my daughter” left my lips, my internal conversation went something like this: “Holy crap, I have a daughter. I have a DAUGHTER. I have TWO DAUGHTERS. Daughter, daughter, daughter daughter.” The word sort of ceased to have any meaning and began to sound sort of foreign in my head.
I mean, somehow, that phrase, “my daughter” just blows my mind. I had already kind of processed that I have babies, but realizing that they’re my daughters? Well, it gives me all kinds of visions of who these little people will grow up to be.
I’m no attachment parent, but I have an attachment child.
The whole internet, or at least, the mom-heavy corner of it that I frequent, is abuzz over a particularly trollish TIME magazine cover and accompanying cover story that asks “Are you mom enough?” The cover depicts a model-pretty 26 year old mom breastfeeding her nearly 4 year old son, and the story it teases is a largely biographical piece about the father of attachment parenting, Dr. Sears.
This is not a post about that piece, so much as it is a post about my experience of reading that piece.
Jon went golfing this morning. I’m glad he got to go, and I’m not mad that he went. But it coincided with a difficult morning for me and the Bufflo Gals. In the 6ish hours he was gone, I swear, there were not 5 minutes during which one or the other of the girls was not crying and/or screaming. There were not 5 minutes in those 6ish hours in which I was not holding one or the other, feeding one or the other, shushing one or the other, or changing one or the other. I’m rather proud that it was not until around hour five that I send Jon a text inquiring when he might be home and suggesting that I may or may not have been losing it.
It was while balancing both of my girls on my body, intermittently shoving a pacifier in one mouth or the other, bouncing Etta on my knees while feeding Claire a bottle (of formula, which Dr. Sears would frown upon), that I read the TIME piece about Dr. Sears.
This was about hour 4 of The Screaming.
And when I read that he thinks allowing kids to cry for more than a moment damages their brains, and that he encourages parents to soothe every single cry, and attend to every single whimper, well, I wanted to punch him in his face. And then I wanted to dare him to spend 6 hours alone with my twins and try to achieve the impossible feat of never letting one or the other cry for more than 5 minutes.
At least once per day, I will be feeding one while the other sits in a Boppy, bouncer, or bassinet, screaming her head off until her little face is beet red, because she too is hungry, or in need of a change, or desiring some snuggle time. And I will have to just leave her there, because if I stop feeding the one I’m feeding, I will then have two screaming babies on my hands and not nearly enough hands to comfort both of them. This means that sometimes, by which I mean at least once a day, one or the other of my babies is crying for 10 minutes, or more. Deal with THAT, Dr. Sears.
The thing about grand theories of parenting is, they’re grand in theory. They almost never work in totality, across the board, for all parents and all children. I find many of the feminist criticisms that attachment parenting asks too much of mothers (and alienate fathers) very valid. I find the scientific criticisms of Sears’ claims that normal amounts of crying damage babies’ brains comforting, because my babies are going to cry unless I grow a second set of arms.
At the same time, I’m thankful that attachment parenting folks have popularized things like babywearing, something that has worked very well with Etta, whom I refer to as my “attachment child” because she likes to be very close to a warm body at all times. We joke that the solution to most Claire problems is to feed her, and the solution to most Etta problems is to hold her.
Bottom line: take what’s useful to you from parenting gurus, but don’t make it your religion. And don’t you dare suggest to a new mom of twins that she’s damaging her kids because they cry sometimes. Because you’ll make her cry, and then she’ll want to make YOU cry, and THAT might cause some damage.
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