Diaper Dementia

Tallinn, ESTONIA

As if having my first child in a formerly Soviet Occupied country wasn’t difficult enough, I’d decided to cloth diaper. Yep, like the cave-women before me. And, I presumed, practical, Estonian earth-mothers.

I had however, stopped volunteering this information as readily as I’d been upon the exciting implementation of my plan, because I could no longer defend the choice adequately to inquiring minds. More accurately, I could not convince the people with whom I’d shared the information that I wasn’t batsh*t crazy.

While my friends with children were apt to look around nervously to make sure nobody else heard me say “cloth diaper” in any context other than “wouldn’t it be funny if…” the single and childless looked around for an escape route, in case I began foaming at the mouth or – breastfeeding.

The most frightening thing was, however, that I’d started to wonder if I really was crazy. Cloth diapering is like organic food, or ‘natural’ childbirth. You need to take special classes and acquire a whole new vocabulary to make any sense of such “back to basics” lifestyle alternatives. On the other hand it costs 3 hours and $175 to get “back” to my natural hair color, so it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The basics are hard to come by.

It wasn’t out of concern for Mother Earth that cloth diapers appealed to me. She’s been in a bad way and my baby’s butt wasn’t going to tilt the ecological scales. It’s wasn’t an economic decision either, although this may initially have fueled my interest. Nor, if I’m honest, was it the condition of my baby’s butt that had me embarking on this odyssey of hassle, this quest for aggravation. Technology had long ago elevated the disposable diaper to nearly cloth-like quality and they’re daddy-friendly.

So, I couldn’t claim the simple convictions of a hemp-clad, herb head. A fusion of benefits contributed to my decision.  

Fuck that. It was my propensity to take something straightforward and ensure that I spent ludicrous amounts of time and money to complicate the thing to an unrecognizable state of affairs. (Recall, the natural childbirth scheme.)

Prior to my arrival in Estonia, I’d begun my cloth diaper mission in Chicago and had been appalled to find that cloth diapers were just big pieces of cloth! Really big pieces – like bedspreads – that I would have to somehow manipulate into a poo-holding pocket around a squirming infant.

I guess I’d assumed that today’s cloth diapering would be a bit more refined. Hadn’t these people heard of Velcro? In any case, I was undeterred, they were cheap and I bought a dozen. Everyone assured me that if I changed my mind, they’re great as burp cloths and for polishing furniture, washing cars, wrapping baby gifts, or mopping up tears. Mine, as it would probably turn out.

After arriving back in Estonia, I’d begun looking for diaper services. These are the
companies that if they existed, would come around every other day to pick up dirty diapers and leave you with a supply of fresh, folded clean ones.

Surprise, not in Eastern Europe. Nope, not in a country where people use their coffee grounds at least twice and even eat the core of the apple is there a happy little truck driving around to collect and wash dirty diapers.

Besides, my mom had explained that the best way to clean a cloth diaper was to empty the contents into the toilet bowl, then swish the soiled material around in the water, wring it out, and put it in the diaper bin (until the diaper service comes.)

But she did this in the US in the 60’s. When there was a diaper service. Further, you could swim laps in an American toilet back then. We in the states now have ‘water saver’ models, which means you can still swim laps, but diving is inadvisable. European toilets with their tiny bowls, test-tube sized passageways, and the merest gesture of water moistening the ceramic throat don’t really invite a lot of in-bowl recreation. ‘Swishing’ was out.

So, what was I going to do to keep this process, now just monumentally inconvenient, from escalating into a truly mind-bogglingly irrational endeavor? The answer: toilet-side spray nozzle. With the assistance of our friendly plumber – who really wanted to install the thing at the kitchen sink as it was shown on the package – we now had a critical part of my Acme-like scheme in place. All that remained was to find the diapers.

I had still been holding out on the fantasy that I would soon discover the “cloth diaper of the 21st century” – one that would fit me and my vision of the cloth-diapering mother of the 21st century. What I’d found in Tallinn so far were the same giant pieces of flannel that would require me to master the Japanese art of origami, if I had any hope of poo-management.

An online search delivered my dream. Just as I’d thought, we have advanced the cloth diaper from a cloth diaper. However, while I wouldn’t need to master origami, I’d definitely need a master’s degree in poo-ology before being qualified to purchase, not to mention operate any of this stuff.

In front of me was a web-site whose menu included: Chinese pre-folds, fitted diapers, All-in-Ones (AIOs), microfiber diaper covers, snap-to-fit, soakers, liners and doublers, all of which came in multitudes of materials from flannel to Sherpa wool. I was certain that cave-mothers had not had to contend with all this.

The bad news was that each diaper cost between US $10 and $15. The good news was that they were reusable! The bad news: I needed 36 of them urgently. The good news was they would last for three months. Bad news: until my baby needed another size. The truly good news for this insanely stubborn cloth-diapering mother of the 21st century was that I could buy them in Tallinn! I could buy Snappis, which allowed mommies and daddies to fasten diapers without pins, velcro, super-glue, rubber bands or electrical tape.

Many web-sites offered ‘starter’ kits with everything they thought you’d need for about $500. Well, I’d delivered the whole baby for less than that – was it even ethical to spend more on the first three months of poop?

You’re familiar with the saying ‘no pain no gain,’ and I wondered if my determination on this one element of parenting had something to do with going that extra mile. To some degree all first-time parents get a little spastic with theoretical preparations for baby because we don’t know anything about actual parenting.

Shopping for them with abandon, taking pictures and movies of them with our thousand dollar cameras, naming them after gods and celebrities, diapering them in the finest gossamer silks (or Sherpa wool) – these things we can manage. We hope it makes up for everything else about babies that we have yet to learn, and that our kid won’t notice he’s in the hands of complete amateurs.

My husband would often tell me after I’d cooked a meal, that he could taste the love. Sure, it took me eight hours to prepare and then burn it beyond recognition, but, as a labor of love, it was a success. Our babies probably do realize from day one that we don’t know what we’re doing. But by going above and beyond – toiling over cloth diapers, sweating over home-made baby food, learning baby sign-language, joining baby yoga class – we hope they can overlook the little mishaps that occur as we fine-tune our big, clumsy lives to address the needs of the tiny ones in our care.

We hope, as they sleep in American Academy of Pediatrics-approved comfort, digesting mother’s milk, listening to Baby Einstein’s Baby Mozart compilation, and masterfully wrapped in three meters of brushed cotton and assorted microfibers, above all we hope they can feel the love.