I Am Not Ashamed, But Maybe You Should Be - Part 5

(IANABMYSB: Part One, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four)

I recently read a lovely little story on NPR's website about the prohibitive cost of diapers for low-income families, the resulting health issues for the babies and toddlers, and a nationwide network of diaper banks, where folks in need can get diapers free. To read the article, click here - it's really pretty short. 

(Again, this is why I am not allowed to read comment threads). A couple of folks seemed to really get what I would consider to be the "point" of the article, that this is a need, we all complain about how much diapers cost but for some folks it is huge deal, and it's nice that there are folks out in the world who are trying to address the need. One person in particular said yes, cloth diapers are really ideal but folks may not realize that even in difficult circumstance it is possible to wash them, and perhaps we can more toward educating people. A few took the opportunity to vilify disposable diapers. 

And, this was the first comment to follow the piece, and it had 9 "thumbs up" votes. I have deleted the author's name from this post, but it's right there on the npr.org site for all the world to see. I will hereafter refer to her as "the Lady," because I'm really trying to write this without any profanity. All I can say is, I'm glad I do not know this Lady, I'm glad she is not my mother or my sister or my friend: 

(emphasis near the end: that's mine)

 

• 2 days ago

"As young parents, my spouse and I were quite poor. We were graduate students, lived in the country in a tiny rental house because it's what we could afford. We grew our own food and made our own baby food, etc. etc. Before having our first baby, we accumulated a large enough supply of cloth diapers and received a diaper pail as a gift. We maintained the soiled diapers and diaper pail in accordance with sanitary practices which we took time to learn about and practice. That pail was extremely heavy by the time it was necessary for me to drive the 15 miles each way into town after loading the heavy pail full of wet diapers into the car, the baby and baby equipment, to the Laundromat. I washed the diapers at the laundromat but rarely dried them there. I would load them into a clean receptacle and load the (still heavy but now clean) diapers into the car and drive us back out to our rental spot which had a clothesline outside. There, in all seasons, I would hang the diapers outside to dry. It was all difficult, labor intensive work and required planning ahead and conscientiousness - but those are just a couple of the many important qualities necessary for being a good and responsible parent. My own parents were always very poor. They had five children. My mother would never, ever have re-used a soiled diaper. She would have stayed up at night and hand-washed diapers if need be. There were times when we couldn't afford "feminine hygiene products" and we would use cloth and laundry and labor! This report is just absurd and reflects a kind of helpless, hapless, dependent, irresponsible, whining point of view and probably describes people who should not BE parents at all. Life is not for the lazy and parenting is not for the helpless."

whoo …. …. …. goodness knows I read a lot of crazy stuff online, but I think my mouth was actually hanging open by the end of this. Even a day later I'm at a bit of a loss for words. But here are some. Matt said, "I'm glad her hardscrabble upbringing has led her to be so judgmental." I say:

(Did you also walk 10 miles each way to school and back every day, uphill both ways, in a snowstorm as my Grandpa did? That's kind of what this sounds like)

Since we are talking about mamas and cloth diapers, let me throw my two cents in. When I was about 2 years old, my family was living in a small apartment in a small city. My dad worked his construction job during the day and then went to the plot of land they'd found to build our house in the evening. We ended up moving into the house earlier than planned, before all the indoor plumbing was completed; I believe this is because a super-creepy neighbor in the apartment building was bothering my mom a lot. So when we moved in we had a well with a pump, and an outhouse (suck on that, Lady, we had no indoor plumbing). This meant little to me as I was still in diapers and I have no memory of it, but I'm sure the other members of the family (mom, dad, older brother) were relieved when that was alleviated. It was a long time before we had a washer and even longer for a dryer. My mom, too, schlepped (although this is rural North Carolina, so probably "carried" is better) a stinking pail of diapers to the Laundromat week after week, and we still didn't have a washer long enough that I can remember packing a lunchbox and going with her, so I'm assuming that meant my little sister, who arrived when I was almost 3, was in cloth as well. And, my parents grew a lot of our food, and my mom canned everything she could, and she sewed a lot of our clothing and between her various skills and my dad's, they managed to keep us fed on little money.

And  you know what? My mother would DIE (I mean, she's deceased already, but go with it) - she would absolutely kill herself and die, before she used any of those details to make some other mother feel like crap because they did any of those things differently, much less because they used disposable diapers. She would never ever ever have used any of her life story and choices to imply that the way she did it was better, that everyone should do it that way, or that other choices were somehow "less than." 

Life is not for the lazy and parenting not for the helpless, indeed. Jesus H. Christ - what in the world is that, Lady? We ("we" being "reasonable people") are talking about two pretty specific things here, diapers and how much they cost. I'm glad you have some sort of forum where you can air your superiority, because I can't imagine a person sitting and listening to you actually speaking your point of view for very long, because … it sucks. Sorry, I have a graduate education and a huge vocabulary, but sometimes the simplest phrase is the best. You may be a fine person but you are coming across as a total jerk, and apparently at least a few people agree with you to some extent.

So there are a couple issues here, and because it's me I'll go one by one:

1. Cloth vs. disposable diapers (this is the smokescreen issue here, but it is an issue): I've told you about my mother, Lady, now let me tell you about myself. I am the mother of two small boys, and we used cloth diapers on the older one for the first year. We chose this because we, too, are concerned about the impact of disposables on the environment, and cloth does feel more natural and the boy had hardly any diaper rash whatsoever. But, and, we used a diaper service because we lived in a hippie/yuppie environmentally friendly apartment building and several other families used the same service, and we had the money to do it. Because I worked 45 - 50 hours a week, and my dear husband was working and taking care of the baby 4 days a week, and I was pumping breast milk and there was plenty of laundry anyway, and … yeah. I didn't need the additional hassle.

And my second son? Let me tell you about him; he is the inspiration for this blog. He's now 3 and 1/2 and is doing splendidly, but he was in the NICU for 3 months and had to have open-heart surgery at age 4 months and had a million doctors' appointments and tons of medications and supplemental oxygen and we were exhausted and scared and if some uppity … other mother … had approached me at any point and suggested I "really should be using cloth," I quite possibly would've punched her in the face until she fell down, kicked her until she was unconscious, and perhaps then suffocated her with a Boppy breastfeeding pillow until she was dead. Yes, really. And before someone says, well, that's different, I'm going to go ahead and say, you do not appreciate the crushing stress that chronic, severe poverty can create. And Lady, please don't cite being poor in graduate school because you know everyone's poor in grad school, right? 

Disposable diapers are a modern convenience, one of many. If I were this kind of person, I might ask why you got to use the Laundromat - why weren't you in the creek out back, pounding the little jokers on rocks? That'd be real mothering. There are lots of good things that come with modern parenthood, like cribs your baby won't strangle in and better car seats and carbon monoxide detectors … and diapers that, when they are full of poop, can be folded up and thrown away. 

And, Sister/Lady, we moms and women need to stick together, not turn on one another over something as silly as this. Don't you know that whenever you denigrate one woman "doing it the easy way" and hold up the old-fashioned as the ideal, you're taking us back to when this kind of crap wasn't a choice - it was our duty by virtue of being born XX that we got to spend every waking moment taking care of someone else. 

2. So here's the "But Maybe You Should Be" part:

Lady, you seem to be an absolutely unkind person, and probably not just on this particular subject but on the general subject of what makes someone a good person who deserves to be happy and raise children. At least one other person commented that the solution to not being able to afford diapers is, "maybe don't have children you can't afford." I can't … I can't even really begin to thoroughly address this, I don't know where to start with y'all. There's one idea of, who the hell can afford kids? I mean, really, they are expensive and yes there's the concept of relative poverty and women in lesser-developed countries raise multiple babies and they breastfeed and use cloth diapers because there aren't really any other options for them, but that's not what we're talking about, right? We are talking about judgment and superiority and security/insecurity in the choices you.have.made, not really about the choices any other parent makes. 

Congrats to you, Sister, that you did all this back-breaking work and successfully raised your kid in this particular way. You need to be validated in what you have done, you need to feel it was not just the better choice but obviously the only correct choice, because otherwise … it was all for nothing, right? You coulda gone the easy route with the exact same results, so obviously what you did Has To Matter.  You are obviously A Good Parent.  Congratulations! But you understand that (a) there are approximately 100 million other ways to be a good parent, and (b) even if you are the World's Greatest Mom (you know if you got a coffee mug that said that, it's not real, right? It's not an actual award? :) ), please hear me: that does not make you a better person than someone else. That does not make your life worth more. That does not make God love you any more than Poor Parent with Disposable Diapers X. We are all the same, that's the great thing about living in the United States and/or believing in God, if you do - we are equal in the eyes of the law and God. 

We are all afraid, and a lot of us are afraid all the time. Once you have kids, and you hold a tiny fragile newborn, or an adopted older child with a nightmare history in your arms, it's a long time (if ever) that you feel 100% relaxed again. We make a million decisions about our kids (breastfeeding, immunizations, education, religion and yes, diapering) and ourselves (career, whether to move, how to manage money) and sometimes it turns out horribly and sometimes it turns out awesome and most of the time it's somewhere in between, but really in the end we are just sending the kiddos out into the world every day on a wing and a prayer, hoping like hell they don't get sick or hurt and that they learn how to make good decisions and we do all we can and then realize, shoot, it's not all up to me/them. 

Sometimes the world just does horrible things to you and ultimately, there is sometimes not one single thing you can do about it. Being "a good and responsible parent" is difficult to argue with, but (again) - a - there are lots of different ways to do that and - b -  it is still not a guarantee. God, I wish it were. I wish there were some formula by which you could chose Option A + Option B + Option C and that all equals a kid who is going to complete college and have a career and be a productive American taxpayer, and chances are pretty good that they'll do all that to some measure. But they might not. They might end up with a mental illness or substance abuse problem or do something stupid and go to jail or they might end up getting shot in the face in the first grade a couple of weeks before Christmas - and none of that says anything about anything, other than that "life sucks, sometimes, and terrible things happen." Life is not for the lazy and parenting is not for the helpless. God, what a heartless person you seem to be. 

The reason my Mom was so super-non-judgmental? Something pretty sucky happened to her, when she got pregnant in 1967 at the age of 16. She was treated so poorly and judged so harshly that I think it became sort of her life's work to do the opposite. She was kicked out of high school though she was a straight A student and cheerleader; the father of the baby (my half-brother) was allowed to continue because, well, life in fact is not fair sometimes and though I would contend was as fully responsible as my mom for creating the situation, this was 1967 and he would not be "showing." 

It was only thanks to an understanding school counselor that my mom was allowed to finish high school by correspondence. Her parents eventually kicked her out of the house, they reconciled at some point but in between she was basically all on her own. She eventually worked her way through college and met and married my dad. So she Pulled Herself Up by her Bootstraps, yay! And guess what? Again, she would never hold herself up as some success story, especially if it meant the fact that she ultimately succeeded was used in some way to make some other teen mom (or anyone, for that matter) feel they had to do the same thing. 


My mom and I didn't have many conversations about this experience, but I know the difficulty she encountered was the reason she always immediately called us out for criticizing other people. And I can say with virtually 100% confidence that if you held her and her Pulling Herself Up and her cloth diapers and sewing Halloween costumes and all that up as an example? She would say, "Yes, I did that. But it was so hard, and I was sad and alone and stressed most of the time, and I would've loved some help." She would never use herself as the reason why someone else should be treated, or spoken of, or even thought of, unkindly. So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Lady. I'm tired of talking to you.