Free Domestic Affairs by Joyce Maynard

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