Cloth 2

Emily completed her research project on reusable protection She saw the options as

1. A pull-up or snap plastic pant over a pin-on or velcro cloth diaper, as I wore as a teenager.
2. A PUL wrap over a cloth diaper.
3. An all-in-one – a plastic pant with an absorbent lining sewn in.
4. A pocket diaper – a plastic pant with a pocket to hold a cloth diaper.

I steered her somewhat based on my own experience.

She immediately rejected a pin-on or velcro diaper. It didn’t bother her that it was like a baby diaper. But it seemed inferior to the other options.

She initially liked the idea of an all-in-one. I steered her away from that. I had a pair in high school and liked it, but they are hard to dry and the plastic wears out before the sewn-in lining.

I have started wearing a PUL wrap (rather than a stretch pant) over the pad. (More on that in my next post), and I like that option. PUL is excellent – waterproof, but breathable, light and comfortable against the skin. The wrap holds the pad in place even better than the stretch pant, and catches the occasional leak.

However, Emily settled on the  Super Undies pocket diaper, because it was was simpler and held the diaper in place without pins or velcro. They fit well and completely contained her only accident so far.

Cloth

Emily, my oldest (11), wants to try a reusable pant. She is only wet a few times a month, and thinks it’s silly to throw out a dry disposable most mornings. She is also worried about the environmental effect.

She doesn’t have any psychological aversion to cloth. When I was a teenager, I initially had an instinctive revulsion: It’s a diaper, for goodness’ sake! I am not a baby! But I was secure enough in my maturity and practical enough to understand that I wasn’t an infant and that cloth was the only adequate protection. Emily is mature enough not to have that reaction at all.

The main argument for disposables – convenience – isn’t that big a difference. A little more laundry (in a household with plenty of hot water whites to wash) is no more burden than disposing of disposables. There’s no need for the stink of a diaper pail if I launder wet things the same day. That’s what I did when I was a teenager, and I’d do that today.

My main worry is the capacity. The bedwetter pants my siblings had in my childhood wouldn’t be capable of holding Emily’s floods. I’m afraid that an adequate product would be the sort of diaper I had to wear.

So I gave her the project to research it.

Jake, my son, hasn’t wet in a long time. He still wears a pullup to sleepovers, out of his own choice. He’s not so much worried about the likelihood of an accident as he is about the consequences. If Emily goes to a reusable pant, perhaps he could wear one when he goes on a sleepover.

Emily’s project has seemed like such a logical idea that I’ve even thought of trying cloth myself when I get runs of dry nights. I’m not going to tell her to include my size in her research, but availability in my size might be a factor in the ultimate purchase.

My main reason for not wearing cloth is discretion. I don’t want my kids to see a big diaper in the laundry. I don’t want my kids or J to see (or hear) me wearing a diaper. The pads I wear are so thin and quiet that no one would notice. That isn’t true of an adequate cloth diaper and plastic pant.

The disposables are also more comfortable than I remember cloth diapers. Even the hourglass diapers Mom made me were a more uncomfortable bulk between the legs. Also, the quality disposable products keep urine away from the skin. That is not only more comfortable, it also reduces the risk of rash or irritation.

I’m not convinced of any ecological or other advantage to cloth. Cloth advocates do a good job of isolating only some of the benefits and costs without taking into account the entire range. Suffice to say that costs of manufacturing, use and disposal are well enough integrated in all forms of protection that I am skeptical that there is any hidden advantage. However, the equation changes if one is throwing out a dry disposable most mornings, and not having to launder a dry reusable.

Frequency

I’ve always had a few dry nights a month, sometimes two or three in a row.

Lately, I’ve had dry weeks. Last month, I had two dry stretches of over a week each.

When I was in high school, I had a similar pattern. After a few years of chronic wetting, I wet only a few times a year. I thought that I was finally done with it. But it came back. The cause was (and is) still there. There’s no current or likely treatment for it. Even if I stop wetting for a while, it will probably come back.

Still, it’s nice to wake up dry.

The kids are outgrowing their bedwetting. Except for a few isolated accidents, Emily has been dry for months. She’s taken pullups to camp again, but that and sleepovers have been the only times she’s worn them in a long time. Jake hasn’t had an accident or worn a pullup, even to a sleepover, in over a year. Megan is getting some dry nights. Maybe by this time next year, I’ll be the only bedwetter in the family.

Dad

My father died of lung cancer. He started smoking when he was in high school and quit when he was about 60. It caught up with him and killed him.

Dad was remote to me. My siblings loved Dad. They all have fond memories. I don’t. I don’t have bad memories. I just don’t have many memories at all. He was away a lot on business when I was an adolescent and teenager, but even when he was around, he never took much interest in me.

My older sisters – simply by being older – were more interesting. By the time I was age X, my sisters had already put him through the adventures of a girl of age X. My younger siblings had the novelty of being boys. We were all good athletes, but, in the rural Midwest, girls’ athletics are recreation while boys’ athletics are life-and-death. Also, as my sisters and I moved out, the family at home got smaller and more intimate.

More than that, Dad and I never shared any interests. In everything important to either of us, we were opposites.

School and books were everything to me. Dad had been an indifferent student at best, more interested in basketball and girls. He went to two colleges but never finished a semester. I don’t remember him ever reading a book until after he retired.

When Dad was in school, teachers constantly compared him unfavorably to his older brother. My uncle was the most brilliant student ever to graduate from their school. Dad resented the comparison. I imagined, rightly or wrongly, that his resentment transferred to me. I won all the academic medals at school, was valedictorian of my class, graduated with honors from an Ivy university and earned a graduate degree in a highly quantitative discipline. But Dad never gave me a single word of encouragement or praise. He went out of his way to belittle academics and academic achievement. He mocked any perceived lapse in my intelligence. Only after he died did I find out that he held me out to my younger siblings as a model.

He never understood why I left town for the city, why I left the Midwest for the East. As I get older, I start to see some of the charm of my home town, but I could never live there. Conversely, he could never imagine living in a city.

When I was young, I didn’t understand why Mom married Dad. Mom is a lot like me, which is unsurprising: I’ve always tried to be as much like Mom as possible. Love is a funny thing. Dad and Mom loved each other more than any two people I have ever known.

Dad and I grew to appreciate each other over the last few years. I’ll miss him.

What I learned from Mom: Childhood

Mom told me that her relaxed attitude toward our bedwetting was a combination of experience, necessity and bluff. She tried hard to keep her worries from us kids, so that our bedwetting (and dealing with our bedwetting) were much harder on her than it seemed to me.

Mom confirmed the genetic aspect: She wet the bed until she was a teenager. (She didn’t say anything about Dad, and I didn’t ask. But my nieces and nephews on that side are late bedwetters as well.) It had been hard on her – waking (and sleeping) in a puddle, feeling shame and inadequacy, fearing friends’ discovery, hearing the contempt of relatives, avoiding overnight stays, smelling the odor that lingered in a room and on clothes. Her parents did not allow her to wear protection, believing that would remove the incentive to stop wetting. They tried all the available cures: Drugs, alarms, waking, no drinks before bed, …

Because of that, she knew that bedwetting wasn’t something that one could control. She resolved to be relaxed, sympathetic and reassuring to her own children, and provide us protection against a wet bed.

She wasn’t at all concerned that my sisters wet the bed as pre-schoolers.

When my oldest sister was about to start first grade, Mom raised her bedwetting with our doctor. He confirmed that it was likely not something my sister could control, and that Mom and my sister should not be too concerned. Some kids took longer to outgrow it. While there were drugs that sometimes provided relief, he didn’t recommend them for children. They weren’t a permanent solution and they had side effects. He didn’t recommend alarms or waking, either. Sleep is just too important to children. Unless she showed symptoms beyond just wetting the bed, the only thing he would recommend was to manage the consequences.

My Family

My family – Mom, Dad, six kids, six spouses, 17 grandkids – were together last month. I’ve been floundering around trying to organize my thoughts on all that chaos (while distracted by a particularly busy run at my firm and the kids’ activities).

Now that I’ve got a long weekend (with weather that’s supposed to be awful), I’ll break the mess into separate posts over the next few days.

Father-in-Law

My father-in-law, a good, kind, brilliant man, is slipping into dementia.

He calls me to tell me that he is on the street in front of our house, asking me to let him in. But he is in fact 300 miles away, at his own home.

He is a wonderful, good, kind man. He was born into the deepest poverty one can find in America. He served his country with distinction, then put himself through college and graduate school. He became a biology professor at a major research university. He was, insofar as I can tell, universally beloved by his students. Every year, the graduate students in his department put on a musical revue, and every year one of the songs lampooned him – the warmest sign of affection from graduate students.

He taught me to love baseball, and how to score a game. As he lost his sight, he lost the ability to score games on paper. But he has an internal scorecard as accurate as mine on paper. He will say, in the seventh inning of a ballgame, “I don’t believe Andy has gone to three balls on any batter.” I will look at my card, and find that he is right.

It is heartbreaking to watch him leave before his time.