Mother's Day, observed

Last Monday was Mother’s Day in Poland, and I received my first tribute of the occasion.

As I was walking to the train station, a man came up alongside me on the sidewalk and started flagging me down with “Hello! Hello! Excuse me!” Now, as he was a man of the toothless, unwashed, sketchy-looking variety, and I have an often-proved talent for picking up undesirable stalkers, I’m afraid I employed my usual mode of action in such situations and kept walking as though I had not heard him, aided by a very loud passing truck. To which, in a demonstration of admirable persistence, he responded by suddenly leaping into a bush. As I continued on my way, he tore out the nearest wildflower and hurried once again after me, wagging the flower in my direction.

“I only wanted to give you this,” he said, “for Mother’s Day. I gave the very same to my own mother,” he solemnly promised me.

So I took the flower, and thanked him profusely, and he took this as an invitation to join me in my rather hurried walk (I didn’t want to miss the train.) “You know you’re supposed to eat them as soon as they’re born?” he said. I shook my head in a show of surprise. “Yes, you are, and if you don’t, then twenty years later you’ll regret it!” He laughed at his joke, then said, no, of course he was only joking, having children is a beautiful, beautiful thing. He himself has two sons, and they help him in every possible way. “And you will have a girl, I think,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said, “how did do you know?”

 “I have two sons, and there has to be some balance in the world.” On which he reached the post office, and waved goodbye, and I continued on my way, realising about halfway to the station that I was still holding the flower out in front of me, like a banner.

 

My first Mother's Day present, after a long train ride

As to the actual Being a Mother bit, it’s gradually moving out of the theoretical zone into the realm of anxious practice. Piotrek and I have recently begun Baby School, among other things. We’ve been to one weekend session so far, where we were presented with dolls and baskets of clothes, and invited to practice dressing and undressing, lifting and lowering, taping and untaping the ends of diapers, and running brushes over imaginary heads of hair.

The school is in an old building in the city centre, with large, high-ceilinged rooms, parquet floors, and bits and pieces of décor in deep, solid, calming colours, such as dark pink bean bags, and dark blue exercise mats, and forest-green mugs, and a shiny purple tea pot on a little striped rug. All the couples sit in a circle on the bean bags, smiling at each other and at the young, relaxed, encouraging midwife who reassures us that we all know what we’re doing, and as we shall soon see, our children will be happy as little burbling clams.

We learned the art of bathing, and various techniques for cleaning parts of the face and body, and how to put on a disposable diaper, and which type of hair brush to buy, and how to use it, and when best to cut fingernails, and the easiest way to lift little legs and haunches to ease them in and out of onesies.

We did not, however, receive instruction on the mysteries of the reusable diaper. I have, of course, watched a YouTube tutorial on this subject, taking notes on the various models, recommended brands, and tried and tested uses of all the complex parts of the new-fangled reusable diapering systems currently available on the market. But the inserts, covers, pins, pads and other bits look far more formidable in real life than they did on the screen.

In the midst of sorting piles of baby clothes into “more white” and “more pink”, with the intention of trying out our sample packet of baby laundry powder from our Baby School welcome pack, and having recently received a miraculous package of fun and joy from Mom including beautifully hand-made diapers, I decided to put my diapering instincts to the test, and try out all the different materials. I practiced stuffing pockets, and covering pre-folds, and double-padding with ordinary flannel squares, and lining up elastic leg holes. I will just say – it’s trickier than it looks. But if we’re being generous with our definition of success, then I succeeded in getting the inner bits of diaper into the outer bits of diaper, and in pinning pre-folds and tetra squares without puncturing either myself or the stuffed-animal models that were eventually drawn into the experiment.

 

Victims of Diaper Practice

 
As we held fluffy pink plush breasts up to ourselves and practiced positioning our dolls against them in the various breast-feeding holding positions, our friendly instructor at Baby School reminded us again and again to ignore the markets, doctors, hospital midwives, family members and various random old ladies who will, under guise of kind encouragement, appeal to our natural feminine sense of guilt and try to convince us that we are doing something wrong.

The baby-product market will have you believe that you are inflicting slow, residual damage on your child’s bottom if you don’t prophylactically apply their creams and oils three times a day, while in fact most babies require nothing more than water to keep them clean. Your grannies and your paediatricians will blame your child’s sub-par weight gain on your “weak milk”, while in fact there is no such thing. Your friends and relations will thoughtfully attribute your baby’s crying to a wet diaper, while in fact, babies are very unlikely to notice that their bottoms are wet at all.  In fact, your baby’s crying, our instructor assures us, will almost never result from something you have done wrong.

Which, as I struggle to make the legs of my last pre-fold stay up over the feet of my blue stuffed elephant without cutting off his imaginary circulation, seems to me to be the best advice so far.