Wipes Dispenser
in which I have plastic-shaped regrets, and wipe down two generations
When what you really need on your baby registry is your mom.
“What do you need?” my mom won’t be asking again. “We want to get you something.” Pregnant for the third time, I was aiming to be even more liberated from commodities– though all the targeted ads sensed it. Maybe one always imagines one’s future self will be better.
I admit, when I first saw wipes dispensers pitched as a baby registry MUST, I scoffed at this item as just another dispensable contribution to the plastic avalanche under which our civilization will go down.
Is the theory that 10,000 hours logged makes you a master, or just repetitive? I clocked at least that many changing the newborn’s serial breastmilk diapers. Her ink blot eyes scanned my character, and I realized the Truth.
Wipes are deeply social creatures that refuse to leave their shelter without their friend and their friend’s friend.
Try to pull out just one, and with it comes the next and the next, until your money is just in a wad on the floor, and no one’s hiney is very shiny. These are the important insights of the new-again, registry-less depressingly anti-capitalist-ish parent.
“Don’t you want one of those dispensers?” my mom asked. I shrugged, meaning NoYes.
For this delicious newborn had a (familiar) costly habit of soiling her fresh diaper the moment it was put on. My children plugged their noses at its alluring butter popcorn smell.
“You’re doing it wrong,” the 9 year-old told me, as I struggled like the hardcore academic olympic swimmer educator facilitator CEO that I am, to get out the one wipe I needed. Postpartum brings you to a level of need the culture labels embarrassing.
But my mom laughed with delight. Babies put you in the spirit of squandering it all, I suppose (especially that generous paid family leave no one gave you, because Jeff Bezos is on his hyper-paid indefinite one!). And the job of grandparents is to be tickled at what drives parents slightly insane.
Insanity, though, is the step-mother of invention. What I invented was Registry Regret Syndrome, where you think your past self was misguided, but don’t do anything about it.
We did not know, in those dog days of last summer, the DNC blaring its undashed party vibes, that my mom already had metastatic cancer. Which, like the wipes, travels in packs. Which, like the wipes, would refuse to come out when called.
Sitting on the deck with my dad, she held the newborn close like a loaf of fresh-swaddled bread she’d devour later. They watched the sun drop towards the mottled sea behind spectacularly pink and yellow furrows of clouds. FYI:There’s plastic under there too.
There are rare moments we are at ease in an animal level of simplicity, before restlessness returns. That sweet period was transient, but who really grasps transience when it is here?
Soon the Big Dipper would rub its sharp eyes, and began its long muscly arc to scoop her up.
In my mom’s arms, the baby, like a prodigy, inevitably pooped up her own back (really, who defines PRODUCTIVE?). Then the wipes came out en masse in a useless, prodigious clump. “You’re doing it wrong,” my 9 year-old told me, his favourite tag line.
So I frequently actively regretted, but never pressed “order” on, that plastic dispenser. I sat there pinned between rejecting consumerism and being Sisyphus’s office assistant.
Time passed, and I made do, like I do.
Now 9 months old, the baby has learned to pull her own wipes out for herself, with pincer-grip excellence, and lick them. The dispenser was moot.
When my mom grew very ill, the baby wiped her emaciated face free of crumbs, practicing what is apparently an important developmental skill. Those skills sprouted as my mom’s evaporated. They giggled in delight together.
We used the last of a water wipes package to clean my mom’s bruised skin in her sleep coma, pulling them out in advance of the effort so that she would not have to wait, moaning on her side, while we struggled.
They say you should narrate what you are doing for your baby as you care for their health and safety. To give them the respect owed anyone not in total control of their body and to teach them language. “HERE COMES 12 FUCKING WIPES FOR YOUR ONE SMALL SHART,” I’d croon.
So too, my sister and I told our mom, mellowed by hospice Lorazepam, what we were doing to her, peppered with a whole bunch of “SORRY THIS IS TAKING US SO LONG.” Our frustration at feeling relatively inept, as two experienced diaper-changers and birth doulas, foamed.
Was she confused why she had regressed to the care level infants require? We hoped not, closing her undergarment tabs carefully while the plastic sheen crinkled.
The baby, supervising, pulled herself up to stand on the hospital bed frame, anticipating bipedalism as my mom succumbed to horizontalism and could no longer hold her. What, really, is dependence?
Between babies and elders, special things are known. I have to believe the baby could intuit the presence of the gigantic dispenser from which my mom’s spirit was pulled, and towards which she was being hoovered.
My mom always asked our ETA, and then asked it three more times; so too, taking care to keep her clean, we silently queried the Grim Reaper’s ETA. How many more times would we do this process? My 9 year-old watched us, equal to our silence.
I should have told her what I really needed when she’d asked. Maybe I didn’t know. I’ve read a ton of myths, so fuck the props of diapering, how about this:
Mom, please grant me the power— just once— to cross that distance between here and the chaperoning, head-shaking constellations (your new pals: Corvus, Crater and Hydra). No matter how high the mound of landfill plastics I climb, it remains unbridgeable.
After all, they say, parents develop new heroic abilities (even if we can’t quite divest from Amazon’s Wishlists). But even heroes cannot cross Lethe prematurely, no matter their FICO score, for a quick visit on borrowed minutes with a departed beloved.
How many times do we have to learn something before we get it? 10,000 plus? How many times will I need my mother, grown up that I am, before I really understand she’s not here?
Moral of the story: don’t be too hastily anti-capitalist about your wipe dispenser! Get it vs. regret it!
And tell your mom you love her, whether she’s living or not. We’re all reduced to interdependence.
Let’s work together! On a story that evokes longing…
I believe when we tell the true story of what happened to us in those most vulnerable and intense moments of our lives, one sentence pulls the next sentence pulls the next, until we are more free. And I work with parents on this.
If your story of pregnancy and giving birth is fraught or stuck inside, consider a Tell Your Birth Story session with me. You’ll be witnessed, and have dedicated space, support and prompts to narrate your profound experiences while being deeply listened to. Afterwards, you receive a written keepsake, your lightly edited story to cherish.
Clients report feeling relieved, and that a catharsis has taken place. Read more about the process here, or schedule a 15 minute call with me to see if it’s right for you.