The Diaper Bucket

When we came back in from branch meetings in East Africa three months ago, we brought a stash of diapers with us. Annabelle was still un-potty-trained and MaryKat was in cloth diapers during the day but paper at night, so Pampers size 3-4 filled up a modest portion of cargo space on our Cessna caravan charter.

When we got settled into the tukul again I started energetically back into the routine of taking wet and soiled cloth diaper inserts and faithfully depositing them into the big blue bucket full of Dettol water sitting outside our front door and faithfully washing them all by hand every few days and hanging them out in the sun to be zapped dry. Bryan had suggested I hire someone to wash the diapers for me but I somehow cringed at the thought of someone else having to handle my kids poop. And though it’s not a chore I love, I’ll admit to a surge or pioneer satisfaction in seeing rows and clean white diapers hanging on the line and feeling my hands mildly chapped from getting them that way. And there is seriously nothing cuter than seeing a fat baby scooting around in hot pink plastic pants over her cloth diaper (her “super pants” as Bryan calls them). Yes, when we got back I was feeling an almost patriotic dedication to the cloth diaper cause.

This feeling evaporated completely after about one week.

First, of all, I realized I needed every ounce of available energy to cling to sanity in those final weeks in the tukul as the rats were trying to recapture the territory they had claimed while we were away. We had a wave of guests from the outside that meant an uptick in cooking and cleaning in general with not a lot time leftover for washing diapers. Then, here recently, Annabelle practically potty-trained herself (the height of my pride as a parent thus far has to be her nonchalant success over a drop-latrine while I held her over a hole that could swallow her alive covered in flies and general malodorous dampness in a refugee camp while 50 kids squawked for her attention just outside the tarp shielding us), leaving more than enough paper diapers to get us through this term without having to go back to cloth at all. And of course, there was also just the sinking realization that hand-washing diapers is actually not fun at all, whether you are pretending to be Laura Ingalls Wilder or not.

So what started as MaryKat in paper diapers for “just a couple of days” became a luxurious habit that lingered on.

At first the diaper bucket (still full of dirty diapers) was left neglected by the front door under the excuse of, “Just until all our guests leave…” But then we moved into our house and it stayed where it was. Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months.

You see where this is going.

Here it is. My name is Elizabeth Harrison and I left a huge blue bucket full of poopy baby diapers half-soaking in rancid water for two months in the blazing sun.

Really.

For a while I think I held out hope that maybe the rats would just magically carry it away one night and I wouldn’t have to think about it anymore, but then I realized even they aren’t that disgusting. I thought about just throwing it all away, burning it maybe, but besides the fact that these diapers were an incredibly generous gift from some very precious friends, the truth is that  that sooner or later I knew I would need the cloth diapers again.

So yesterday, approximately 42 days after I had last peeked inside, I stood armed with three basins of water, a massive bottle of bleach and small tub of detergent and took off the lid to my diaper bucket.

At first glance I thought I was looking at some kind of animal and almost ran to grab a weapon. But then I realized I was just seeing the long fingers of translucent white fungus growing up towards me like amphibious hands reaching up for something to grab on to. Which was both a relief and a disappointment, really.

It. Was. Gross. I won’t go into any more details but let’s just say there were colors and textures and smells in that bucket that were like an entire bayou boiled down and concentrated into about ten liters. I soaked and rinsed and scrubbed and resoaked about a dozen times before I hung them out on the line to let the lovely North African sun do what it does best and kill every last living thing that could have possibly survived.

And you know what? They look good. We lost a couple diapers in the line of duty, true, but the rest are more or less unscathed. I looked at my clothesline full of pastel plastic shells and unbelievably-close-to-white diapers waving in the breeze and felt immensely satisfied. The deep-seeded shame at being the kind of mother that lets her baby’s undergarments rot in water for a month was replaced by the simple happiness of a wrong made right and the redemptive rawness of my hands. Like somehow scrubbing the life out of those diapers (hopefully literally) made up for the neglect and general badness of the situation, for lack of a better word.

As we were crawling in bed last night Bryan said, “You know what? I feel like it’s all starting to lift. We’re in the house, we got the ATV running again, we’re in the swing of language lessons, we finally got a newsletter out, you even got the diaper bucket taken care of today! We are starting to get on top of things again.” And I think he’s right. Life is starting to feel manageable again. Like maybe instead of just running around trying to survive we can start focusing on thriving.

I’m not sure how much the diaper bucket is going to be a part of my practice of thriving, however. In fact, as pleased as I feel about those clean diapers right now, I am pretty sure come Monday morning the sweet lady who washes our clothes is in for a pay raise.