Domestic Affairs (8 page)

What most of us discover, I think (when we reach the stage of life that calls for rising in the night to feed the baby or comfort him out of his nightmares or greet him with the sun, ready to play blocks), is that we have strength and stamina we never before knew about. Inner resources we wouldn’t have guessed at. (Maybe it was childbirth that revealed them to us.) I look back on my old days—when I sometimes sat down just to think, went to bed when I felt like it, and got up when the spirit moved me—and wonder why I didn’t, back then, make it to the Fortune 500 club or at the very least come up with a vaccine against chicken pox. Give a mother of young children seven days in which she is not required to make a single peanut butter sandwich or get out of bed before seven, and she could (I bet) accomplish just about anything.

But this is what we want to be doing. Best, probably, not to calculate so far ahead, but this is most likely what I will be doing for the next five years, at the very least. Fifteen hundred more mornings spent burrowing under the covers while one or another of my children announces, directly into my eardrum, “Time to get up!” Someday, no doubt, the time will come when they fix their own breakfasts (or when they get too busy with their lives to sit down for a morning meal at all), and of course then I will miss the warm, faintly damp presence of a baby in our bed.

Good morning to you.

Good morning to you.

We’re all in our places, with bright shining faces.

Good morning to you. Good morning to you. Good morning to you.

I’ve been buying diapers, nearly without interruption, for eight and a half years now. There was a period of around eighteen months, after Audrey was trained and before Charlie was born, when we lived diaper free, but we made up for it, a couple of years later, when Willy was born and Steve and I found ourselves with two children in diapers. Using the rough figure of 6 a day, 365 days a year, multiplied by 8, I come to somewhere in the neighborhood of 16,000 diapers we’ve gone through. As for what they cost us—I don’t even want to figure that one out. If we’d been using cloth, all these years, I would at least have one terrific collection of cleaning rags to show for it all. As it stands, all I can say is, you won’t find many people who change a diaper faster than I can.

Diapers aren’t that significant, really, but you might notice how often they tend to come up in discussions of babies and the decision to have children. When people try to sum up the experience of parenthood they probably don’t mention watching one’s twelve-month-old discover her toes, or giving a two-year-old a bath, or the look on her face the first time she tastes ice cream. They don’t go into the supreme pleasure of holding a toddler on one’s lap, reading him
Goodnight Moon,
and when he gets to the page with the quiet old lady, hearing him whisper “Hush.” What people talk about, when they attempt to reduce the whole thing to twenty-five words or less, is apt to be: diapers.

What can you say about them? Some brands are a lot better than others, and it’s seldom true economy to buy the cheap ones. Some children are a lot easier to change than others—and I have had both kinds. A daughter who used to lie still on the changing table, peel back the tapes obligingly, and say, as if the two of us were just sitting down with our best china for tea, “Please pass the powder” or “How are you doing today, Mom?” And a son who liked to break dance while I changed him, and one who, the moment I had his diaper off, would bound like a stunt man from the changing table (three feet off the ground) and race out the door—naked from the waist down, no matter what the season. “Don’t say
ick
and don’t say
ugh,”
he would instruct me as I carried him off again to clean him up.

It hasn’t just been my children I’ve tussled with over the issue of diapers, either. I couldn’t begin to count the number of arguments Steve and I have had over who’d attend to the diaper this time. Same arguments, really, same words—all that changed were the children. Foolish fights, that would sometimes reduce me to tears or him to stony silence. And what they were about, of course, was never really changing diapers at all. (I know there are people who can’t stand the job, but it has never really bothered me.) I argued with my husband over who got up to change the baby, mostly out of principle. “You never ask me to change the diaper. Why is it I have to ask you?” I would say. “When did you last change the oil in our car?” he’d reply. Round and round we went—ending up nowhere. With about as much to show for all our battles on the subject as I have to show for all those sixteen thousand disposable diapers now lying somewhere at the bottom of our town dump.

During our daughter’s babyhood, when we were at our most broke, I harbored the fantasy (shared by half the mothers in America, I’ll bet) that she might make diaper commercials. Where was there a cuter, more adorable baby? Who could resist her—or whatever brand of diaper she’d wear? If she would just do—in front of a camera—what she did for me in our living room (putting the diaper on her head, kissing the baby on the diaper box), she might earn herself a college education. But we lived in the country—no ad agencies, no talent scouts within a hundred-mile radius. So her antics in diapers went unrecorded by everyone but her father and me. And I’m sure it was all for the best.

Then one by one our children left diapers behind them. I am a sentimentalist about every aspect of our children’s lives, and a historian of their days, whose tendency it is to save physical artifacts (a baby tooth, the first scrawl that could be said to resemble a human face, even the plastic clip from Audrey’s umbilical cord), and if I could have known, when I was putting it on, that this particular diaper would be the last one this child ever wore, I might even have shed a tear over its absorbent quilted layers. But of course that’s never how it is when a child is giving up diapers. One day he stays dry. Then another. And suddenly it occurs to you, it’s been three days since you’ve bothered to put a diaper on him, even when you go out. And the next thing you know, you’ve got marigold seedlings on what used to be the changing table and you’re buying a six-pack of Alvin and the Chipmunks briefs, size 2.

A few months ago that moment arrived at our house with our youngest son Willy. And though I never go so far as to say he is our last child, and I always harbor the hope that sometime there will again be energy and space in our lives for one more, this particular round of toilet training certainly feels like a particularly momentous one. The end of an era. A graduation, not just for Willy, but for Steve and me too. It seems totally appropriate, then, that the moment should be marked by a rather extraordinary event, and it was. Here is the story:

I am a believer in the idea of rewarding children, during the early stages of toilet training, with prizes for peeing in the pot. In the past, I have used goldfish crackers, balloons, plastic farm animals, and once—when I was really desperate—M&M’s. This time around, Willy’s prizes were tiny pink plastic figures currently much coveted by little boys across the nation, called Muscle Men. Every time he made it to the toilet on time, he got one; and though Muscle Men carry the fairly hefty price of around a quarter apiece, until one particular day when he was two years and a few months old, Willy’s performance in the bathroom wasn’t putting much of a strain on our budget. All day long I was mopping up puddles on the floor, while Willy smiled sorrowfully, commenting, “That’s life.”

Then in a single day everything changed. He woke up announcing that he wanted to go to the bathroom, and all morning long he kept his pants dry. That afternoon I took him shopping—wearing briefs, not diapers—and there were no accidents. On the ride home, a trip of about thirty miles, Willy suddenly piped up, “I need to pee.” So naturally I slammed on the brakes and pulled over into the breakdown lane of Interstate 93. “I’m going to get another Muscle Man,” Willy sang happily as I unbuckled his seat belt and led him down the embankment in some tall grass by the side of the highway. And my heart sank, because I had left home without my supply of Muscle Men. I had no reward.

He pulled down his pants. And just as he was finishing, and we were both studying the ground, we spotted it. Nearly buried in the dirt, in the precise spot along Route 93 where my son had chosen to pee, was a pink plastic figure who looked as if he could give Arnold Schwarzenegger a run for his money. “Oh, there’s my Muscle Man,” he said with total casualness, bending to pick it up. He put the figure in his pocket. I put my son back in the car. That was six months ago, and he’s been dry ever since.

I
WORK.
I
RAISE CHILDREN
. I think about large subjects like how to raise a moral child, how to stay married, how to prevent nuclear war. These things are deeply important to me—and if I sound flip, I surely don’t mean to.

But what occupies my mind, as I set out the cereal bowls, as I pull on my sweat pants, as I tromp out to the car to drive Audrey, who has just missed the bus, to school—a dozen other moments of my day and as the sixty seconds before sleep comes—is very often how, how, how, how to keep this house neat.

Not spotless, mind you, or even clean. Just how to avoid being totally buried in Matchbox cars, GI Joe figures, half-eaten fruit roll-ups, and glitter.

I never used to care so much about tidiness. Before I was married, I used to keep a whole room (with the door securely latched) filled with nothing but boxed-up junk. I didn’t even own a mop. I had taken my vacuum cleaner to be repaired and six months later still hadn’t picked it up. I had enough changes of clothes that I could go two weeks—sometimes as long as a month—between trips to the laundromat. If I was having a friend over for dinner, I’d sometimes put a few dirty dishes in the closet.

Then I got married. Steve isn’t one of those compulsively tidy types. He just had so few belongings it would’ve been impossible to mess them up. He came into my life with five cartons of possessions—three of which were paints and brushes. About those, especially, he was and is inordinately fastidious. You would never know, to look at his hands or his work pants, what colors he was working with that day. It takes him a good half hour, every night, to clean his brushes to his satisfaction. Always take good care of your tools, he has been teaching our children ever since they could talk.

When I cook, he says, our kitchen looks like the site of an explosion. Good food never came out of a tidy kitchen, I tell him. Clean the counter, overcook the rice. Wash the pans, burn the onions. You need only look at my kitchen to know I’m a good cook.

And then—this is what breaks us—there are our children. Who, like their mother, do not travel light through life. I think Audrey still owns, and keeps tabs on, all but maybe twelve of the toys she’s been given in her nearly seven years of life. Now and then I wade through the stuff and eliminate something, burying it deep at the bottom of the trash. A few hours later she confronts me suspiciously: “Have you seen the purple brush that goes to My Little Pony? I can’t figure out what happened to that pillow I had in my Barbie Townhouse.” (Now the tea bag on the doll bed makes sense. And all those little tea leaves leaking out onto her floor).

Audrey believes, and tells me regularly, that toys have feelings. Not just toys, either, but also three-year-old Happy Meal boxes (collectibles of the future?), barrettes, broken china. A pair of red patent-leather pointy-toed shoes her godmother Kate gave her—that she can’t fit, but likes to use as cars for Barbie and Skipper to drive around in. Many large, interesting sculptures made out of cigar boxes, cardboard wrapping-paper tubes, pipe cleaners, and Styrofoam trays. None of these things can be thrown out, as long as she lives within state lines.

Willy goes less for details, more for broad strokes. He likes to take every pillow from the couch and all the beds, dump out the contents of every large box I have just filled with toys, sorted by category. And then stretch our eight-foot-long expandable tunnel across the living room to make a spaceship. He heads directly for the nucleus of whatever activity is going on at the moment and scatters whatever has been assembled there (the marbles from Chinese checkers, the tracks of our new train, two cups full of chocolate chips) in all directions.

All of this makes it sound as if I make no effort to exercise control or discipline, but I do. I post signs, aimed at both the literate and preliterate members of our household, listing both tasks and reminders. (“STOP! Have you put your bowl in the dishwasher?” Or simply a picture of me, looking mad, standing over a pile of blocks.) I confiscate un-picked-up toys. I buy brightly colored plastic boxes, tubs, and bins; I label them “Legos,” “Smurfs,” and “Superheroes.” We start a new leaf at least once a month.

The truth is, I suppose, that whatever rules and threats I lay down for my children, my own ambivalence about mess and cleanup must somehow have communicated itself to them. Partly, I love and am proud of their crazy, impossible pillow constructions. How—walking into the kitchen and finding yarn and ribbon strung from the refrigerator door to the knobs on the stove to the rungs on all five chairs, hung with dandelions and toilet paper roses and signs that say “I love you xoxoxo”—how can a person look at that and say anything besides “Isn’t that beautiful”?

If my children are accumulators, well, I don’t have to think very hard to know where they got it from. One reason Audrey owns twelve Barbies is because nine of them were mine when I was little, and of those, probably seven still have their original bathing suits and heels. The stuffed animals Charlie lines up in a parade across the living-room rug were mine too. I was never any good at throwing things out either.

But every once in a while I do sweep through the house, tossing into a couple of garbage bags every doll with less than half its hair, every car with no more than one wheel. I load the children in the car, and we drive solemnly to the dump. We stand at the edge, and I give each of them a bag to throw in. Audrey might shed a tear. “Bye-bye, broken squirt gun,” says Charlie.