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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Three strikes
My parents tried and tried and tried, but neither marriage nor divorce could bring them together.
By Patt Blue
[11/19/99]

If at first ...
A marriage dies and is, after 35 years, resurrected.
By Diana O'Hehir
[11/19/99]

Gertrude and Alice
When Alice B. Toklas met Gertrude Stein, she heard bells ring. They went on to have one of the happiest marriages of the 20th century.
By Amy Benfer
[11/18/99]

The case against matrimony
If marriage is risky, doomed and expensive, why bother?
By Larissa Phillips
[11/18/99]

No regrets
I was an unashamed mistress.
By Anna Sorelli
[11/17/99]

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I further discovered that I mustn't refer to a Velcro or snap-closed wrap as a cover, which pulls up, and I shouldn't confuse a disposable-diaper-styled "fitted" cloth diaper with a contour (the latter are figure-eight shaped flat diapers, and virtually useless). Still, some 16 hours into my investigation, I was no closer to a decision on what to buy.

With a deep sigh, I devoted another sleepless night to surfing for diaper covers, which come in myriad designs in both high- and low-tech fabrics. This time, I discovered that, counterintuitively, wool was the coolest material, fleece was easier to wash than cotton (because of the treatment that makes it water-resistant) and Gore-Tex was not the futuristic solution it sounded like.

After another long back and forth on the board, I ordered one each of all the diapers that had caught my eye and settled in to await what the ladies called "doing the Diaper Dance" at the arrival of my first batch of "Fluffy Mail." It was too late to realize that I'd already been indoctrinated. The Clothies had me -- but if you'd asked me, I'd have sworn I could quit at any time.

I was no longer investigating the many modes of diapering to find the most efficient means of transferring my son's excrement away from his skin. Without noticing it, the inquiry itself had become a hobby. I was so intrigued, I couldn't stop. As I made my solo voyages from Snugglebuns.com to sites with other tooth-decay-inducing names, something compelled me to return to the Diapering Board again and again to confirm my findings with the group.

Something made me visit eight or nine times a day to see what "kayleesmommy" and "osotired" had to add, how much vinegar the board's experimenters had determined was optimal for the first rinse cycle and what biologically correct laundry soap everyone preferred (Tide Free). Something was driving me, but I had no idea what it was.

With 20/20 hindsight, it's easy to see that this something was anxiety. The anxiety that comes with cloth-diaper shopping is hard to explain, yet nearly every member of the Diapering Board will tell you that she feels the same. In the effort to calm these nerves, Clothies buy so many new and different diapers that jokes about creating a diapering 12-step program are as commonplace as are suggestions for hiding the purchases from outraged husbands.

Rejecting modern convenience comes only at the price of quixotic second-guessing and reevaluation. Like puritans fearing that someone somewhere is having fun, Clothies worry that some advantage of the diapering experience has been lost in trade-offs (as in, yes, they're nicer on baby's skin, but they're inconvenient; and yes, they're more comfortable, until the second they get wet; and sure, they cost less, but they require more labor; and on and on). This is an anxiety that was notably absent from the Disposable Families I knew.

The fact that I'd started to divide people into Cloth and Disposable Families signalled that I needed a break -- not to me, of course, but to my desperately bored husband. After one particularly long dinnertime sermon on the environmental advantages of cloth, he begged me to avoid the board for a few days, at least until my first delivery of Fluffy Mail.

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