Update: The Thing I Thought I Could Not Do is Really No Big Deal
The diapers are great. I will refrain from saying much more because I promised myself I wouldn’t get all evangelical about them, but I will say that they are easy to use and easy to wash and now when June wears a sundress she looks like an Eastern European peasant.
Thanks so much for all your comments and emails in support of my lifestyle change. I was struck by how many of you love cloth dipes– especially the sight of them drying on the line. And while it has been raining here for approximately nine million years and I have yet to hang a single diaper, I do get some idea of what you are talking about when I fold them and stack them neatly on the shelf.
I think the particular kind of satisfaction that cloth diapers bring is in part due to the fact that the vast majority of decisions we make about our children and their bodies and their minds are so riddled with ambiguity. How we feed, clothe, soothe, entertain, calm, medicate, educate and try to enjoy our children is perennially up for debate. The dawning of each day greets us with an infinite number of new opportunities to doubt ourselves and our decisions and our authority and our desires. It’s not hard to think that being conflicted is the baseline parenting experience. Why wouldn’t the sight of cloth diapers on the line or on the shelf or on the tushie gives us some moment of peace, some confirmation that we are doing right by the planet and our babies? Cloth diapers provide a little respite from all that noise.
This is all to say that while I have enjoyed the satisfaction I’ve felt about the diapers these past two weeks, I have also been angered by it, and the way that it has reminded me of how much of parenting is a set-up for self-doubt and guilt and inadequacy. The truth is that cloth diapers are no big deal for me because I have the money to buy enough so that they don’t have to be washed every day and because my child only poops once or twice a day, and most importantly, because I am not sleep or exercise or work deprived and so an extra load of laundry every three days does not fill me with despair the way it might have a year or even six months ago.
I am also angered by the alarmist attitude of the cloth diaper industry. I ordered these diapers from a cloth diaper website (you can’t buy them directly from Apple Cheeks) and when they arrived they came with an information sheet about the travesty which is disposable diapers. I don’t remember all the stats, but the sheet said something along the lines of “With all the money people spend on disposable diapers every year we could feed 2.5 million children,” OK. We could probably also feed 2.5 million children with the money we spend on wooden toys or slings or jogging strollers or Dora the Explorer DVDs or Elmo yogurt. More importantly, we could feed a lot more than 2.5 million children if we pulled the troops out of Iraq about 15 minutes earlier than we plan to. I understand (but do not condone) guilting moms about the damage disposable diapers do to the planet, but now we should feel bad about buying disposable diapers instead of food for hungry children? Just how much blame can we heap on each other?
Cloth diapers are great. But I was doing an amazing job of taking care of my children before I started using them and I’ll still be doing an amazing job if I stop tomorrow.
And so will you.
Father’s Day
And so I break my rule, just one last time, to send Father’s Day wishes to my Dad. He’s in Cuba right now, hopefully having a great time listening to Cuban jazz and drinking mojitos. (Just kidding. My dad would never drink a mojito.)
This picture was taken nearly two years ago just a few minutes before my Dad got on the ferry leaving Provincetown for Boston. He leaves the Cape a few days early every summer so that he can go to the Telluride Film Festival with my brother. This year will be their 19th year at the Festival. In the beginning they slept in a tent in the town park and took coin operated showers and waited in line for hours and hours to get into the movies. Now they sleep in a condo that the Festival pays for because my brother is the director of the student symposium. My dad still waits in line for hours and hours to see movies, even though my brother could most likely get him into anything he might want to see. They watch movies all day and night, and eat dinner at midnight and sleep late and ride chair lifts with famous people. And sometimes they bring home the most amazing schwag.
They have never missed a year. Not one year. Ten years ago my parents rode their bike across the US and they planned the trip so that they would be in Colorado for the Festival. Telluride is a religion in our house.
And so is believing in your children’s dreams. And figuring out new ways of loving those children as they grow and their lives become more distant and more complicated. This summer we will go to that same dock and greet my father. And we will spend a few glorious days with him on the beach. And then–too soon–we will bid him farewell as he travels over oceans and time zones and mountain passes so that he can watch movies with his son.
You Must Do The Thing You Think You Cannot Do
No, I didn’t join Facebook.
I bought cloth diapers. Cloth Diapers. As is diapers that you put in your very own washing machine after you rinse the poo off of them in your very own toilet.
Cloth diapers have always been my stay-at-home-mother line in the sand. I will be completely financially dependent on my partner, spend entire afternoons blenderizing cooked kale and freezing it in ice cube trays while intermittently blind-sweeping Polly Pocket stilettos out of my baby’s mouth, but I will not wash shitty diapers. Rural life has enough challenges, what with the wood stove and the weekly trips to the dump and the 30 minute commute to the children’s pain relief aisle at CVS. There’s no ordering out for pizza up here; there’s no running out to Target. There’s enough work for twenty lifetimes in these hills, even if you never wash a single diaper.
So then, why in the world did I order them? I’m a little embarrassed to say I don’t entirely know. Maybe it’s because these diapers are so damn cute. Really. You should go and see for yourself how cute they are. I can’t wait to see June’s biscuits in them. And maybe I ordered them because I see my life as a Baby Mama drawing to its natural close and I just want to see what it’s like to use cloth diapers. Maybe I ordered them because if the girls ask me someday what I did to save the planet I want to be able to tell them I did something more than use lots of those grocery bags Sheryl Crowe designed for Whole Foods.
Whatever the reason, those diapers will be here in 7-10 business days.
Wish me luck.
Broken
When my sister was in nursing school she worked as a phone counselor for The Women’s Medical Fund. The Fund, as she called it, provides low-income women and girls with the money they need to get abortions.
Sometimes she would tell me the women’s stories. They were women who had other children they were trying to support and women with abusive husbands they were trying to leave and young girls who had hid their pregnancies well into their first (and sometimes second) trimesters. I remember one story about a young girl (14 maybe?) who had been raped by an adult in her family and was in her second trimester. I don’t remember all the details of her grim story, but I do remember that by the time she came to The Fund the only thing left to do was to sent her, on a bus, to Kansas.
The people in this country who, through both violent and peaceful acts, seek to bring an end to abortions believe that God does not want women to have abortions. I think that they are not entirely wrong about this. I also think that God does not want women to be raped, especially by men in their families. I think that God doesn’t want women’s lives and bodies to be so devalued that they are continually and systematically denied access to reliable birth control. I think God doesn’t want babies with profound disabilities to suffer, especially in this world that so deeply fears illness and disease and disfigurement. I think God doesn’t want humans to turn their backs, again and again, on the poverty and abuse and violence that millions of children experience before they even learn to walk.
We live in a broken world, and abortion is but a part of that brokenness.
But because we live in a world where people like to keep things simple, abortion is the part of the brokenness that tends to get the most attention. When you are trying to save a pregnancy, all you have to do is wedge yourself between a woman and her body, and we’ve been doing that since the beginning of time. It is not hard to convince people of a fetus’ innocence (and therefore its right to life) but it becomes harder to convince people of much of anything about a child once it has been born. Once a child is born there are so very many people and beliefs and systems and offices to blame for its struggles and eventual demise. Once a child is born it’s not hard to forget about her. We’ve been doing that since the beginning of time, too.
The pro-pregnancy people have made a movement out of dwelling in the promise. But I don’t think God really wants us to dwell in the promise, at least not for too long. God wants us to dwell in the here and now. God wants us to roll up our sleeves and fix the lives of children who can draw breath and speak and who –if they could speak loud enough, and if we would listen– would tell us that they need clean air and food and somewhere safe to go while their mother is at work.
Dr. George Tiller wasn’t wearing his bullet proof vest on Sunday because he was in church, and I suppose he thought he was safe there. But as it turns out, he wasn’t safe anywhere. When I heard about his murder I thought of that young girl on the bus from Philly. And I thought about Grace and June. What if they need a late-term abortion someday? Who will help my daughters then?
Who will help yours?
To find out more about the National Network of Abortion Funds and to find a fund near you, go here.
Blogging for LGBT Families Day. . .
. . .was yesterday.
I drafted a post last week, but instead of finishing it over the weekend I worked in the garden. (You remember the garden, don’t you? I swear it’s going to be different this year. )
Anyway, be sure to visit Mombian’s list of participating bloggers. The list just grows and grows.
Deciding to Run
Lately I have been running at Chesterfield Gorge. A few weeks ago I started to grow weary of my normal running route, up and back on that same river road where I have been walking and wogging and running for nearly 6 years now. I’ve been going to the Gorge for just as long, but only to hike and snowshoe and to see the mountain laurels in bloom, not to run. The people I saw running at the Gorge were always wearing digital watches and teeny tiny shorts and those sunglasses that curve around your eyes like welding goggles. Those people are not my people.
But I run there now. Now, I am in love with running there. I can’t really explain how beautiful it is. Everything is somehow both ancient and completely new. The old dirt road takes you into the woods but keeps you next to the river, so that on one side everything is green and smells of old leaves and moss while everything on the other side smells of water and warm rocks. Right now the river is fast and loud and the fly-fishermen can hardly scramble over the boulders and into the current fast enough. It is a pleasure to watch them cast, to watch their rods whip back and their lines spiral over the water. It is a pleasure to watch them because you can tell, even from a distance, that they are having the time of their lives.
This morning I went straight to the Gorge after I dropped off the girls. The parking lot was empty. It was early, not yet 9 o’clock, and raining. The car thermometer said 47 degrees. I put my hair in a ponytail and fumbled with my ipod and tried to remember if they ever found the body of that woman who went missing on a mountain running path out west a few years ago.
I usually don’t worry about such things. I don’t even worry about meeting up with bears, although it’s fairly likely to happen this time of year. I just run with my car keys around one finger and let them jangle against my open palm to let the bears know I’m coming. So far, so good. But there was something about the emptiness of the Gorge today that frightened me. I thought about what could happen to me down on that quiet road, what terrible violence could be done to me in those glorious and empty woods. I thought about what that violence would do to the girls, and to Chris, but mostly I thought about what it would do to me. I sat until the windshield was glazed over with rain, and then I decided to run.
I decided to run. I decided that the Gorge was safe, and that I was safe. I didn’t think in terms of risk; I did not hold the joy I feel when my heart and legs move me up those steep hills in one hand and the possibility of danger in the other, because no joy is worth that sort of danger. I simply decided that I was not in danger. I decided that I was safe.
While I ran I remembered that Andre Dubus story, “Out of the Snow,” and how in it, the protagonist LuAnn is attacked in her own kitchen by two men who have followed her home from the grocery store. She fights back with a steel skillet and her fierce desire to live, and Dubus’s rendering of the scene is, as always, magnificent. While I ran I remembered the last scene of the story, when LuAnn is sitting by the fire talking to her husband about what has just happened to her. She tells him:
“I have to know this, and remember this, and tell it to the children: I didn’t hit those men so I could be alive for the children, or for you. I hit them so my blood would stay in my body; so I could keep breathing.”
I have loved this LuAnn character (who appears in several of Dubus’s stories) for many years, and I have carried her and her stories with me (both literally and figuratively) for more than a decade now. Ostensibly she came to mind because of what I feared this morning, but as I ran and ran I realized that actually she came to me because of what she tells her husband (and here I paraphrase): I did not do this thing so I could be alive for you or the children. I did this thing so that my blood would stay in my body; so that I could keep breathing.
And that, I realized, is why I decided to run.
Disequilibrium
I should say, first of all, that it was beautiful.
Water, sky, trees: all of them the color of jewels.
And I should say that I am so very grateful to my dear friend for offering to watch the girls on the beach and in the shallows so that I could swim across the lake. Which I did, even though at first I could only do the breaststroke because the water was so cold it took my breath away. But I swam until my breath came back to me and until I could no longer hear June squawking on the beach. I swam until I got my rhythm back, until my breath slowed and my arms began to turn in and out of the water like mill blades. Every year it comes back to me a little sooner.
OK. There. I said all those things. Now can I say how hard it was?
Grace wanting me in the water, June wanting me on the shore. The exploding beach bag. Sand everywhere. Burning in the sun. Shivering in the shade. Sand in her eyelashes. Sand between her fingers. Sand in her mouth. When will she get up on those feet and walk? Crying to be picked up, crying to be put down. Crying because she is tired. Crying because she is hungry and wet and has sand in her diaper and sand on her graham cracker.
Back to the car where wet bathing suits must be peeled off only to reveal more sandy orifices. Everyone is hungry now. I put everything including the baby in the trunk. It looks like we are living out of our car. I change June, Grace changes Grace, my friend rinses our sand toys. I thank her and tell her to Go, Be Free. She does.
I put the girls in their car seats and they eat and eat and eat from their lunch boxes. They smell like sunscreen and bug spray and pesto.
June cries most of the way home.
Louise Bates-Ames refers to the months in the middle of each year as a period of disequilibrium. Fifteen to 22 months; two-and-a-half to nearly three. June is nearly 15 months old. She needs more than one nap, but not quite two. She can walk, but doesn’t. She cries out in the middle of the night, waking us from a deep sleep, but is quiet again by the time I get to her room. She talks constantly, but we can only understand a few of her words.
Like the water and the sky and the trees, June is the color of jewels. But we’ve lost some of our rhythm, and I’m having trouble getting it back.
Calling All (Local) Writers
I am teaching a nonfiction/memoir writing workshop this summer for the Valley Writers School in Florence, MA. The class starts the week of July 6th and runs for 6 weeks. We’ll do some exercises and read the work of a few published authors, but most of our time will be spent discussing students’ work.
Valley Writers School is also offering a summer poetry workshop taught by Lesley Yalen, a wonderful poet and altogether lovely person.
VWS workshops are serious, but fun. They are open to writers with varying levels of experience as long as they are serious about engaging with the class.
You can email valleywritersschoolATgmailDOTcom for more information.
