Carol Hall

I learned about Hamishs service, “Terries To You,” in my North London birth class. I rang him for information and he suggested an in-person diaper consultation before the blessed event. I liked that: Hed taken on board the fact that the baby would be fully operational as soon as it came home and that he, Hamish, needed to be ready for action.

He pulled up in a smartly painted minivan that discreetly announced the arrival of “Terries To You” in the neighborhood. He was quite the picture himself, in his starched white, double-breasted “uniform,” which I suspected was a chefs outfit. He was young and handsome in that nonthreatening way preferred by new mothers. He was lithe and bouncy, friendly and chatty; it was soothing to be around him. And he arrived with sample (reusable) diapers and sample (reusable) diaper pants, ready to give me a confidence-inspiring demonstration.

I wanted him to move in with us.

Shortly before our son was born, Hamish returned to drop off a stack of neatly folded cloth nappies, as they are known in the UK. Hed added a supply of Velcro-closing diaper pants and a diaper pail. He was earnest, excited even. It turned out that I was one of his first, and only, customers. We were both about to give birth and were clearly in danger of being overwhelmed by the experience.

After a few final words of encouragement and a wee buss on my cheek for luck, Hamish was off. (He promised to establish a neat schedule of drop-offs and pick-ups after the baby was born.)

Of course, when you give birth in a modern maternity hospital, disposables are de rigueur. Right off the bat, youre spoiled by the tidy convenience of those well-tailored waste catchers. It was a rude shock when I bade farewell to my army of eager English midwives and faced changing all those diapers by myself. I felt so alone.

Once home, I looked at the baby, looked at those diapers, smelled the baby and knew the moment of truth had arrived. My husband was there, strictly in his capacity as observer. The spirit of Hamish hovered near.

I tried to hide my uncertainty behind a barrage of “this is how its done” bluster. While the baby reeked on the changing mat, I demonstrated the various cloth-diaper folding techniques Hamish had showed me, accompanied by a sort of breezy “knit one, pearl two” patter. I cleaned my little so-and-so with a (nonreusable) baby wipe and placed him onto a perfectly folded diaper. Then I plopped the whole package into an unfolded diaper pant.

“Now, you just — ooph — whip this up quickly and — errph — get these Velcro tabs fastened and — phew — hes ready to roll.”

“Dont you think youve cinched his saddle a little too tight?” my husband asked, his face a study in concern. Well, I was worried about the thing falling off. The baby had been born very long and lean, and there wasnt a lot to hang a diaper on.

But even in my inexperience, I could see there were still some dangerous gaps. I loosened the waist tabs, but pulled down some diaper to plug up those holes around the thighs. Of course, this meant that while I was gaining credit in the leg area I was, unbeknownst to me, accruing serious deficits elsewhere. This became appallingly apparent when the next diaper change rolled around.

Each time I moaned about “spillage,” Hamish was there, by my side, offering solace. I was his test mum; my success would ensure his somehow. One night, I heard Erik, my husband, trundle into the babys room. I heard him coo as he lifted our little parcel out of bed and onto the changing table. I heard the baby gurgle as his dad undid his diapers. Erik, dear man, did not know I was listening.

“Oh … my … god,” he groaned, faced with leakage the likes of which I could well imagine. “Its a diaper blow out!” Hamish was consulted and suggested “nappy liners,” a thin layer of (oops, disposable) tissue that would capture most of the poop. They helped; Hamish and I bonded further.

It went on like this. Some days — precious few — were better than others. Mostly there were days like the one where I put Gus, all clean and fresh, in his little bouncy-seat on the kitchen table. A friend was there, along with her neatly (disposable) diapered baby. “Carol, did you spill juice or something on the table?” You know whats coming: Gus had leaked onto the surface where Id planned to serve our lunch.

And there was the time we took my cousin to Hatfield House, an Elizabethan palace on the outskirts of London. Why do people even attempt historic-home tours with infants? My husband and I looked down on Gus in his buggy, just checking, as we strolled past an impressive suit of armor. He was happily sitting in about three inches of urine. Hed leaked again. Tour over.

I tried; I really tried to do what I thought was the right thing by the environment. I didnt mind carrying the dry diapers with me, or the spare pairs of washable Velcro-pants. I didnt mind, after diaper changes, packing the dirty ones into my knapsack, knowing that when strangers smelled something bad, they suspected it was me.

And I wanted to do right by Hamish; he’d been a sympathetic listener when I wasnt producing enough milk, and cut me slack on the days when I greeted him at 3 p.m., still in my nightgown. Crikey, we were kindred spirits for a time. He, with his struggling business and truck full of dirty diapers. Me, with a new baby, also surrounded by dirty diapers.

But the strain of the incessant sogginess of my sons pants (and, hence, quite often my own shirt front or lap) was beginning to bring me down. Hamish could see it and administered numerous handholdings. “I just wish all my mums were like you,” hed gush. He scoured the diaper suppliers for newer, better products. He ordered nappies that were cut differently, and we tried out several different brands of nappy covers. Same story: Wed have hits and then, whoa, wed have misses.

Then one day, he rang to say he was coming over. I opened the door to a “Eureka! Ive found it!” look on his face. “Just read about these and sent for them straight away,” he bubbled, out of breath. “Nappy clips, from South Africa!” When I asked shouldnt we be boycotting them, he squared his jaw and said with determination, “Lets get the baby.”

Move over, Thomas Edison. As far as I was concerned, you could keep the incandescent bulb, compared to the wonder of these diaper clips. They worked a miracle. They were gizmos in the shape of a big Y, with little teeth at each end. They stuck into the cloth so I could fasten the diaper according to the shape of the baby before I closed up the Velcro pants. Snug as a sodden little bug, he was.

That little clip literally turned our lives around. Now, I dared go distances. We even did public transportation without worry! We were suddenly like diaper celebrities, with everyone marveling at how we made it all look so easy. “Mind if I watch you change him?” friends asked. We were even asked for demonstrations by complete strangers.

And then, almost too soon, given the length of our exploratory period, my son outgrew his nappies. By that time, Hamishs company had grown, and hed stopped doing the deliveries himself. When time came to send our last load back to his washers for good, I enclosed a note to tell him how much I would miss him and his diapers.

But you can bet I still have those diaper clips floating around the house. Souvenirs of a watershed moment, and of Hamish.

When our son was born, I vowed that things would be different. Motherhood would force me to grow up. We all want better lives for our children: Instinct told me my son’s life would be smoother if he did not find bodily functions cripplingly funny. At the very least, thought I, Mom must keep hidden this soiled Achilles heel in her own sense of humor.

But when, my C-section neatly sewed up, I was wheeled back to my hospital room with my beautiful, fresh-born son and he looked at me with a certain smile, I knew. He’d inherited the poop-joke gene. Conventional wisdom would have said my baby smiled this big, gummy smile at me because he had gas. I considered that possibility (and, of course, I found it funny). But my new mother’s instinct told me it wasn’t gas at all. There was just something about that smile that told me soon, very soon, he would crack up at the merest mention of gassers, at the sound of a Richter-rocking belch, or at someone blowing their nose and sounding a mating call. I knew from that goofy grin that he’d just about die at the myriad flatulent sounds one can make via mouth or, yes, armpit, and really savor a good poop joke.

While the baby adjusted to life, I called my parents in Ohio. “Dad, I can tell already, he’s a character,” I said, tossing one of my father’s favorite phrases back at him. Dad knew what I meant: Years of infantile bathroom humor to come.

Things went well for a while, and I stuck to my stony-face plan. This was not easy as Gus spent his first five years in Britain, the potty-humor capital of the Western world. Still, I tried. When Gus would cackle at the mention of his knickers, I would force the lie: “There’s not really anything funny about knickers, sweetie.” When he’d guffaw, “Mummy, I can see your bum!” I’d struggle to be stern: “Our bottoms are not really funny, hon.”

Gus and Theo, his best mate from playgroup, hit the potty-talk stage together. Their anthem, or should I say mantra, became, “Poo-poo, wee-wee, bum-bum,” repeated in the car, at the lunch table and at teatime until the boys were red-faced and gasping from giggling. I’d have to leave the room, do my laughing on the sly, then return to deliver, deadpan, what I felt was a perfectly credible, “All right boys, that’s enough of that.” I noticed Theo’s mother alternately trying to wipe the smile off her face and wondering whether Gus was a bad influence on her son, luring him, as he was, into the bottomless pit of bathroom humor.

My husband could see the strain I was under and, bless him, he sympathized. He, too, struggled at times to ignore our son’s loo-oriented utterances. One day Gus came home from playing with his true loves, Lily and Amy. We asked, “What’d you guys do today?” He answered with a gleeful, “Amy pooped her knicks!” and we both went down. Hysteria all around. Confirmation issued. Pooping, weeing, farting and burping are, indeed, very funny — even Dad thinks so. Gates stormed, citadel fallen.

If I had any hope of rebuilding a sense of decorum in my son, it was lethally gassed by the arrival of my cousins, two women with minds like dirty diapers. Both well-educated professionals, these two have such a highly developed sense of poop humor they leave skid marks on my potty talk.

As soon as they hit London, they caught a nasty flu bug and spent the next four days in our bathroom, voiding their systems of all solids, liquids and gases. In between trips to the WC, they amused Gus with descriptions of the occurrences therein. “I couldn’t tell which end it was going to come out of,” one crowed. “First, it was going up, then it was coming down, then it was going up …” — that sort of thing. I tried, I really tried, with hand signals as I couldn’t speak for laughing, to discourage this. They responded by showing him how to make the house reverberate with faux-farts by putting the heels of his hands together, pressing them to his mouth and blowing. “He’s a natural,” they observed, awe-struck, as if this were an Olympic sport to which he could aspire.

That occurred 1995-ish. Things are now completely out of hand. My son loves to hear how, in infancy, his diaper-filling sounded like someone operating a cappuccino machine. His appreciation of opera is being shaped, or distorted, by my impersonation of Pavarotti singing the chorus from that late ’90s classic, “I Sing the Song of Gas.” Kid mealtimes, featuring Gus’ best friend from next door, are nothing short of gas fests. What often starts with something as simple as one of them muttering the word “gas,” progresses through a rain of belches and gales of laughter. And if they’re really lucky, one of them farts.

How did I come to be this way? Was it nature or nurture that sent me, from an early age, into fits at the sight of the word “toilet,” or had me rolling on the floor at the thought that a girl could be named “Fanny?” Half of my relatives do not think bathroom humor is funny. Period. They are too grown up and genuinely dignified. But that other half, well, you just say “wet ones” around these people (especially at that crucible of all great bathroom humor: the dinner table) and that’s it, meal’s over until everyone stops choking and recovers themselves.

My sweet mother gently tried to convince my brother and me that cracking poop jokes was not acceptable behavior (especially at the dinner table). But my father was incorrigible. He just couldn’t help himself and frequently started it (especially at the dinner table). The result: I am an obvious choice for gifts like coprolite (fossilized dinosaur poop).

But I don’t want to change. Having these bathroom sensibilities has given me more than my fair share of belly laughs. When things are bleak, I know I can always crack myself up by remembering the time I farted in front of my best friend’s entire family. This was no ordinary fluff. I’d fallen asleep on the couch as we all watched TV after dinner. My gasser was so loud and long-winded it woke me up. Thirty years later, the memory of this ripper can still reduce to me tears.

No, I’m not proud of finding this sort of thing funny. And I’m not recommending it. But it’s a quirk that has its advantages. I am not, for instance, the least bit squeamish about the body or its functions, mine or anybody else’s. So, while you may say that I have failed my son, I am inclined to look on the bright side: We could have a budding proctologist in the family.