Category Archive

So this weekend I took part in a discussion on the Brain, Child website about this essay in the Winter 2008 issue, “Relieving Myself,” by Heather Caliri.  Caliri is a writer in San Diego (she also has a blog, which as of this moment I have not yet perused, but here’s the link for your pleasure).  Caliri wrote about her experiences with Elimination Communication (EC), or diaper-free parenting.  The philosophy, in a nutshell, is this:  parents don’t need to depend on diapers, but they can learn to read and respond to their babies’ subtle cues and thus teach their children to have a sense of their own elimination needs and never endure conventional toilet-training hell.

I’ll be honest with you, kids:  the first time I heard about EC, around the time my last baby was born, my reaction was, “You have got to be effing kidding me.”  (Truly spoken like the woman who personally kicked Kimberly-Clark’s stock through the roof.)  My second thought was that it must be awesome for the people who have the patience for such things, but I would never be one of those parents.  And you, dear readers, know from careful study of this blog that I am still not one of those parents (and never will be).  (I once mentioned something to my step-mother about diaper-free parenting; her response was, “And what are you supposed to do with your other 20 minutes a day?”  Haha.  Good one, step-mom.  I thought she was being generous!)  However, I was intrigued by Caliri’s essay because she was clearly not out to persuade anyone else to use EC, merely documenting her own experience, and I thought it was a very insightful, often humorous piece about the nutty stuff we do in the name of good parenting.  (Not that EC is inherently nutty, but one can drive oneself nuts with any aspect of parenting.)

I wasn’t entirely surprised, though, that one of the first comments on the discussion page was a slam on Caliri’s hygiene standards and etiquette.  Not to give anything away (Sugar Daddy, avert your eyes because there’s a plot spoiler ahead!), but in the final scene Caliri is in a restaurant bathroom with her baby, Lucy, who proceeds to pee in the restroom sink.  This has some stylistic resonance, if you’ve invested in the preceding narrative, but some people evidently thought it was just really gross. 

Myself, I would be lying if I claimed not to have my own thoughts along the line of, “That’s not something you expect to see in a public restroom (if you’re lucky).”  However, my reaction was mitigated by the following:

1.  It was a baby.

2.  There was running water, not to mention a nearby soap dispenser.

3.  After nearly ten years of up-close-and-personal interaction with human waste, not to mention the three years I spent in the People’s Republic of Eugene, there is little that actually shocks me anymore.

4.  It’s not like it was my sink.

Just kidding on that last one.  Actually, if Caliri were visiting my home and wanted permission to let her baby relieve herself in my bathroom sink, I could hardly refuse her on grounds that my bathroom sink is a holy shrine to cleanliness.  But seriously, the fact that I was physically removed from the situation certainly allowed me the emotional distance to take the episode in stride.  After all, I’d already survived an earlier scene where Caliri let Lucy do her business by the outside wall of a neighborhood apartment building, sans smelling salts.  I actually thought that lifestyle choice a tad more gauche, maybe because I’ve lived in apartment buildings in neighborhoods where people had issues with personal boundaries.  But also because I couldn’t envision Caliri hosing the stucco off after the fact.  (Certainly not without a handy soap dispenser.)  However, no one else on the discussion board mentioned the wall-peeing, only the sink-peeing and how beyond-the-pale it was.

Ordinarily I don’t enjoy being a de facto defender of public urination–not any more than the ACLU enjoys defending those awful neo-Nazis, I’m sure–but my sympathies were with Caliri because she’d written a really interesting essay about an issue much larger than toileting, and her point was getting lost in the collective condemnation of her bathroom manners.  Sure, maybe a baby peeing in a public sink is uncool.  I won’t try to argue otherwise, because, you know, it’s not a choice I would make.  (Then again, trying to save the world one less diaper at a time is obviously not a choice I’ve ever made either.)  But I didn’t think it was fair to make that one part of the essay the centerpiece of the conversation, when the article was not about the relative merits of EC, but about Caliri’s own parental hangups and how she got over them.  I thought that, as a writer, Caliri would appreciate some feedback on something other than her choice to let the baby pee in the sink. 

Alas, ’twas not to be, because people were really, very put-off by the sink-peeing, and also by BC editor Jennifer Niesslein tsk-tsking them for harping on it and making it personal.  That led to some people wondering if they were supposed to all pretend they agreed with someone instead of giving their honest opinion(s), and whether tolerance only went one way at Brain, Child–also, whether we were all privileged, self-absorbed white women and whether we were going to silence women’s voices for the sake of niceness.  Valid questions, all of them, but in the meantime, poor Caliri’s article was not really being discussed; it was her personal character that was on trial.  It made me very grateful that my essay for Brain, Child never made it into the online content.  (Not that there was any sink-peeing in that one.  Maybe a little nose-picking, but that might not have been in the final edit.) 

I’m pretty much done with that discussion, edifying as it was, but some lingering questions remain (for me), so I will put them to you, gentle readers:

1.  Am I “out of the mainstream” because my objections to public sink-peeing have more to do with decorum than public health?  (I dunno, baby pee + running water + soap = ?)  In other words, am I just gross?

2.  Do women, as one BC commenter said, equate hard-hitting commentary with rudeness?  Do we wish to “make sure everybody ‘feels comfortable’ at the expense of dialogue”?

And for the sake of science,

3.  Do you prefer your dialogue hard-hitting, or comfortable?  Are you by any chance a woman?

Recently I read a post on a Mormon women-themed blog (not Feminist Mormon Housewives, but in the same vein) by a woman who had a crush on a married man not her husband.  Apparently she was prone to such crushes, having had three or four over eight years of marriage, and she was concerned.  She wondered if she was sinning or being unfaithful.  She said the crushes were not sexually driven (I know, but take it at face value, just for giggles) and that she doesn’t have sexual fantasies about these men.  She just thinks they’re really awesome, to the point where she finds herself getting excited over the prospect of being in the same room with them.  Gosh, I’m making it sound weirder than it did in her post, which I would provide a link to, except that I’m experiencing an inexplicable obligation to protect her privacy, one that she apparently does not share.  (Whatever.  It doesn’t feel right, okay?  Am I sinning?  Don’t answer that.)  Anyway, she made it clear that she loves her husband, knows that these other feelings are just infatuations, but she was wondering if this was normal/healthy/okay because she felt really guilty about it, and she asked for advice and shared experiences.

So this woman’s problem was only mildly interesting to me.  I mean, I was interested enough to read it and read the comments because, you know, I’m voyeuristic that way.  (Is that a sin?  Well, same to you, gentle reader.)  But I had no intention of giving her advice because, frankly, I just wasn’t that personally invested.  But then I saw that one woman had suggested that maybe she should talk to her husband about it–you know, since it was concerning her and husbands are supposed to be helpful and supportive and whatnot, and maybe the secrecy was what was making her feel guilty, blah blah–all nice reasons, but I have to say, as soon as I read, “Maybe you could talk to your husband…” my immediate reaction was, What?  No, make that, OMG, What?  No no no no no no no!!!

Now, I realize that my own marriage is unique and I shouldn’t project my or my spouse’s neuroses on the rest of the world.  Of course there are couples out there who tell each other everything, who can tell each other anything and everything without fear of reprisal or other undesirable consequences, but I have a feeling that if this woman were married to one of those men, she would already know it–would, in fact, have already told her husband, like, a year ago that she thought Brother So-and-so in the Sunday School was really dreamy and isn’t that funny, you’re not jealous are you sweeties, because it’s you I love, of course.  And she would not feel guilty, and she would not be soliciting opinions from complete strangers because she was too ashamed to admit it to anyone she knows in real life.

I don’t think this woman’s experience is “normal” or “abnormal.”  Nor do I think she’s sinning (taking her remarks at face value, of course).  I do wonder if she’s exascerbating the situation by dwelling on her guilt and making special efforts to avoid these men she finds herself attracted to, for some neurotic reason I could only guess at but won’t because that’s for her and her therapist to discover, should the opportunity present itself.  However, my instinctive response to the suggestion that she maybe talk it over with her husband was that that would be a really, really bad idea. 

It’s one thing when you have a crush on, say, Brad Pitt or Patrick Dempsey, because those are men you will never meet.  They are almost not real.  (To paraphrase Sam Harris, I don’t believe in Brad Pitt any more than I believe in Zeus or Odin.)  My husband regularly tells me that if something should, God forbid, happen to me, he’s going to start courting Nicole Parker, the Sleep Country spokeslady, most of the female field reporters on the Channel 8 news, and possibly that cute freckled chick on Law & Order: Criminal Intent.  Which is fine.  Number one, I’ll be dead.  Number two, that’s never gonna happen anyway.  Number three, he’s a man and what do I expect? 

It would be something different if he told me that he thought Sister So-and-so from church was kinda hot.  I don’t delude myself that he doesn’t notice attractive women, but when it comes to attractive women we actually know and interact with in real life, I really don’t want to know if he gets crushes on any of them.  Number one, it’s not useful information.  Number two, that’s just gross.  And I can only imagine that if I were to tell him that I got a little thrill out of the prospect of attending a worship service with Brother Whatshisbucket, that initially he would laugh at me and make jokes, but thirty seconds later he would say, “Wait, this knowledge is unpleasant.  Why’d you have to tell me that?” 

Note to Sugar Daddy:  I’m too jaded to have extra-marital crushes on real men, so don’t ask me, okay? 

Back to the blog:

I found it interesting that the commenters who thought telling the husband was a good idea–that secrets were bad, that 100 percent openness was the only path to true marital happiness–were all women.  Most of the commenters who thought it was a horrible idea were men.  More to the point, all the men who commented thought telling the husband was a bad, bad, bad idea and that 100 percent openness was a recipe for marital disaster.  (This was the last time I checked the comments, anyway.)  On the walls of my own marriage hangs a cross-stitch sampler that reads Thank You For Not Sharing (Absolutely Everything).  If you have a crush on somebody not your spouse–a real person, not that phony Brad Pitt or the Sleep Country lady–I say suffering in silence is the best policy.  Honesty, as in Lack of Lying, is great.  And couples should share their hopes and dreams and fears and whatnot, but there’s no need to get carried away.  Is there?

Tell me what you think, and also if you be male or female.  You may also feel free to tell me about any crushes you may have, on people real or imaginary, because I am not married to you.