The Opening Salvo in the Parenting Wars

I have thought for some time that with the amount of miscellaneous work necessary to prepare for the upcoming arrival of a child, first time parents-to-be would be too busy to start oneupmanship contests with other gestating couples.

I was most unfortunately incorrect in this perception. With fourteen weeks still to go, I have already had to extricate myself from a conversation that was less about the care and feeding of aliens and more about establishing some kind of moral authority over the question of which is superior – cloth or disposable diapers?

Or rather, I stated that we intended to use disposable diapers and was treated to a lecture by the non-childbearing member of the couple on how the decision was wrong, wrong, wrong. Evidential proofs were tossed (“Babies with cloth diapers don't get diaper rash! It is less expensive in the long term! Hire a diaper service if you don't have the time to wash them! My mom used them on me when I was a child!)

Silently I cursed the gods for ruining a perfectly good evening out, imbibing garlic parmesan wings, eyeing mixed drinks lustfully and feeling overall like a normal, non pregnant, female being for a couple of hours to the service to making him feel smug and pretentious over using cloth diapers (1). I tried, twice, to explain in very simple clear terms that we had neither the money to pay a diaper service nor the time to clean them ourselves (2). He continued lecturing.

So I changed the topic by asking him if his wife was planning breastfeeding, playing the odds that any couple that committed to using cloth diapers was probably also going to be breastfeeding instead of using formula. The gambit paid off, we found a topic of common agreement and the conversation turned to other things as agreeing about breastfeeding is not as interesting as probing for other proto- parenting decisions to criticize.

(1) I suspect if they find out that their budget can not stretch to paying a diaper service they will revert to disposables after a few weeks of trying to clean them.

(2) Massive digression that probably needs a separate entry. In our house this would translate to me cleaning them, as the laundry has evolved into my primary duty. Most of the time I am actually OK with this, as J handles all the outdoor yard work, including mowing our little patches of lawn, caring for the five rose bushes we have lining the driveway and up the steps to our house and tending to the flowerbeds. This actually consumes as much time weekly as doing the laundry, so it is a fair division of labor. And prevents me from killing the plants, as my power to keep living things alive does not extend to things green and leafy.

To be fair, I should say “did” the laundry as J has stepped up laundry duty in the past months as a natural consequence of me first being too overwhelmed with all-day morning sickness and fatigue to keep up with it, then becoming too unbalanced on my feet to properly navigate the narrow basement steps with a full basket in my hands.

However, as good as J is at remember to start the laundry, he is not very good at remembering to finish it, leading me to ask him at least twice every weekend and once during the week to bring the clean clothes upstairs for me to fold. As there is an unspoken expectation that I will be taking over laundry again once the alien has arrived, my desire to spend additional time soaking and cleaning nappies on top of the addition of onesies, pajamas, layettes, burp clothes, crib sheets, blankets, and towels to our regular weekly loads, is nil. In our conversations about disposable versus cloth I got the sense that J would prefer to use cloth, but since I will end up as the party responsible for cleaning the things, I elected to veto for the sake of my sanity.