Prettying up the Poop

When J and I were preparing to get married a few years ago, I spent an ungodly amount of time and energy thinking about the way that everything looked. I committed that common sin of thinking about the wedding instead of preparing for the marriage. Fortunately, it turned out mostly fine on the marriage front. I mean, I have every day to think about that. I probably spend too much time thinking about that. In any case, I spent all this time—as people in my cohort tend to do—thinking about table settings and escort-cards. I believed that if I chose the perfectly representative escort-cards, they would signify “Anneness” so much so that I’d hardly have to be physically present. I remember earnestly wanting to strike this balance between outdoor ease, casual refinement, and crafty, DIY elegance. You can imagine why I spent the week of the wedding popping Xanax and why J and I still have never looked at all our wedding photos. My aesthetic desires collided with pressures of time, budget, practicality, and reason. But at the time it felt so important...

And so as I approach all of the preparations for the birth of our first baby, I’m trying to force myself to remember this lesson: that there needs to be some sort balance between aesthetic desire and pragmatic need. But it’s more complicated than that. At this point I’ve spent far, far more time thinking about the baby—reading about the baby, journaling about the baby, talking to the baby—than I have spent thinking about the way child preparation and childrearing appear. Maybe I’m maturing...

But still, I backslide. Take, for example, my project of the last couple evenings: sewing cloth diaper wipes. [I suppose I should preface this whole discussion by noting that we plan to cloth diaper the wee one. If you’re grossed out by the idea of poop in our washing machine, best to skip to the next paragraph]. I decided that if we were going to devote time to cloth diapering, we might as well cloth wipe as well. So I went to the fabric store on Monday and bought a few yards of cheap flannel, cut it up, and began stitching around the perimeter of each wipe to prevent fraying in the wash. This was supposed to be a grossly utilitarian product. These wipes will become, of course, poop-stained before too long. And yet...well, I couldn’t just leave it at that. So I found myself changing the thread and bobbin every few wipes. I told myself that I was doing this to stave off the boredom of sewing squares of fabric, but as my pile began to resemble a rainbow, I knew I had deceived myself. This was intentional. I knew what I was doing. I wanted my damned diaper wipes to look just right. How nuts is that?

And then there was the matter of the crib bumper. Bumpers are no longer, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics in 2011, recommended. They have been potentially, loosely linked to SIDS and suffocation. I found this out in the middle of my bumper-sewing weekend a couple months ago. Any reasonable, sane person would have received this news with glee and thought to herself, “great, one thing off my list.” But not I. Instead, I almost mourned the news and then decided that as I was nearly finished with them, I might as well complete the job. I used the same logic when I put them in the crib last week: I might as well see what they look like. Frankly, I’m worried what this logic might turn into: I might as well see what they look like during the day and remove them each night for sleeping. [I have to admit, by the way, that I’m a little confused about the suffocation threat for a baby who cannot even roll over, but why go there?]. In any case, here again aesthetic desire trumped practicality...and maybe even medical science.

There’s also the list of 22 more things that I want to make or finish before he arrives. Instead of getting shorter, the list keeps growing and growing. Sometimes I think about just breaking down and buying some of the things instead of running a continuous one-woman-sweat-shop in my off-hours. But somehow each time I search etsy or amazon, I get this queasy sensation in my stomach and feel like I’m doing wrong by my child, that lump of flesh and bones who will, in all likelihood, never notice my efforts, at least not for half a dozen years. And so I’m left to reason that I’m doing all of this inane stuff not for the baby, but for myself, in order to continue to tell myself a particular story about myself, one that is just now translated into the setting of childrearing. It’s the wedding all over again.

But that explanation feels somehow insufficient. I think it feels so because on some core level, I believe in the therapeutic benefits of carefully constructed environs. Our home, of course, is truly modest. Our decor is, to say the least, humble. Our rooms are not the spaces of design magazines or interior blogs. I often look at them and fantasize about what I would do with $5000 or even $500. As simple as they are, though, they convey a certain feeling of comfort to me each evening when I get home and each morning when I wake up. I see their flaws, of course, but I also take pleasure in their small triumphs. This is, I know, one of the most elementary facts of homemaking. I’m not breaking any new ground here. But nonetheless, this simple lesson feels urgent in the context of child preparation. I neither want to abandon the commitment I’ve made to my own aesthetic environment nor do I want my child to inhabit a space that feels wrong or haphazard.

I don’t kid myself that what’s happening here is anything but a kind of bourgeois rejection of the accoutrements of mainstream child-rearing in favor of a different, but no less culturally-constructed, aesthetic.** I don’t want plastic in my house. I don’t want battery-operated flashing lights in my living room. I don’t wants chemicals and crap littering my spaces. I don’t want that stuff because somehow it feels like a violation of the environment that I’ve spent so much time cultivating. It may be wasted time, but it’s time nonetheless. The question is why don't I balk at wooden dollhouses, felted balls, rough-hewn play kitchens, homemade mobiles.

Everyone seems to suggest that once the baby arrives, I’ll no longer have the luxury of having these boxing matches in my brain. That may be so. But it doesn’t seem totally wrong to try to establish some sort of organizing principle for myself in terms of the aesthetics of child rearing here in the middle of Kentucky. Any advice?

**This starts to get at a much larger question/problem that’s been kicking around in my head for the last half dozen years about embedded class and cultural implications and assumptions of aestheticized childrearing on mommy blogs. A problem that I’ll surely inhabit in coming months and years...