Diapers, Hiddenness, Parenting, and Grace

Before giving birth, I read that mothers handle over two thousand diapers in one year alone. I was unfazed by this. In fact, I felt rather smug about the large number; there was a heft to it, an important sounding weight. But when Alice first looked first down the rabbit hole, it didn’t look deep. It didn’t look like a place to fall and fall and fall.

Birth pounced, knocking me off balance. Life narrowed quickly and became a tunnel of questions — Was I feeding the baby right? Would he thrive? Was this the right number of wet diapers? I saw nothing else, thought of nothing else. But after two months, the baby still existed. In this lull, I took a chance to look around myself.

And found I was somewhere new, somewhere dim, unlit and unstable. I was a stay at home mom, spending every moment in the company of a single, simple baby, the whole day spiraling around his elemental needs. To care for him was all I seemed able to do. I worried what people who knew me before motherhood would think if they saw me here. Would they suck their teeth and mutter behind my back that I had plummeted away from my potential?

In most civilizations the underbelly of society handled waste clean-up, clearing animal stalls and working sewage detail. Powerful cities went into neighboring villages to collect servants for this end. A suspicion seeped slowly into my heart as the days rolled by: motherhood stole me for cheap labor and flung me into the mines.

The first year of motherhood felt like tumbling, down and down into the earth, away from sight, with diapers falling all around me.

During night shifts with the baby, the depths were oppressive. I kept twinkle lights on the carpet as a permanent low light. On this night, they glowered dimly next to tools of the trade: wipes, a small pile of diapers, extra onesies, and a changing pad. We didn’t have money for a changing table, so I used the floor. Beyond the circle of light, cool air leaked down from higher passageways and pooled, torpid, at the base of the walls. I was the only one awake in this underground world. Working quickly to get him clean and clothed before he could cry about the discomfort, I stripped the baby of his soiled footie pajamas. By the time he was re-swaddled he had fallen asleep again. I sighed. The baby was clean and dry once again. But in a few hours, he would be wet and soiled again. The thought made the back of my throat tighten and the circle of light shrink in on my head.

I was buried.

I believed — dearly believed, desperately believed — that where I was and the work that brought me down so far was vital. But sometimes that belief was as thin as the air at the bottom of this cave.

***

As he bent forward on the potty, the two-year-old clasped his hand tight around my leg. I was cleaning him up. My focus was on the toilet paper and on what was necessary to hurry through the task, but I became aware of his hand stroking the back of my knee. He caressed it in a slow manner, fingers barely grazing my skin. His little voice came, low and heavy with affection, “I love you, Mommy.” As though he were the one caring for me.

The moment washed over me, a swift and pure subterranean stream.

***

I knew my mother harbored a small dread of overseeing the two toddlers. But she always came to help when I was about to give birth, and now our third child was on the way. “The day seems to stretch forever!” She laughed on the second day of the job, “Like, when will it be over?!” By these words I saw that she was underground with me. She had travelled my worn paths all the way down. But there was no bitterness in her voice, no seed of regret.

After putting the kids to bed one night, we adults were trying to watch a movie in the living room. The toddler’s voice echoed to us down the hallway, “Grannie! Grannie! I need to go potty!” My husband and I assured her that although she had been named, we would handle it. But she said she wanted to.

When she came back, she was smiling. “I want to bond with him,” she said simply.  “And I know the best way to bond with a toddler is to take care of them. They know you love them.”

***

I knew immediately what my mom meant, knew what that toddler-knowledge looked like. When my toddler said “I love you, Mommy” on the potty, it did not feel random. It was not a thought falling out of the blue. Instead, it felt like a thread in a much longer conversation, a wordless conversation that had bubbled spontaneously into words.

And suddenly, all of my wipings of him seethed and frothed up into words, too. I could hear what my hands wrote into his skin again and again all those dark nights. I am here. Every time, I am here.

When I changed his diaper or wiped him on the potty, his little bum was so exposed and so soiled. He was unable to help himself. Is there any position more vulnerable? I care for you. Nothing you can produce will turn me away from you.

Before my baby’s mind could be reached with ideas and words, my hands spoke all over his tender, unwritten body. You are a loved one. Trust is possible. I wrote them so often in his malleable, dimpled skin that the words were permanent, as deep and foundational as the skeletal stones holding up the world.

By the time my toddlers gained language and I cleaned them atop the potty, they spoke back to me the words I had written on their buttery baby thighs. Always atop the potty, as though being exposed and helped was the most natural place to share those words.

***

Another toddler, another daily potty event. This toddler is my spacy kid, his head busy seeing worlds of his own making. He rarely connects with me these days. But in this moment, while I wipe him, he says, “I love you, mommy.”

I recognize this moment. I’ve been here before. The words are welling up, are forming. I match my tone to his and say, “You are special to me.”

“Yes.” A single word, but said with depth, for we are in a deep place, together.

“I love you, too.”

And then comes his little voice again, earnest, “I love you even when I’m bad.”

The time spent subterranean, sub-society, sub-success not only gave me the chance to write love in his skin, but it also hallowed me out as a receptacle, fit for his love and confession.

Motherhood had known. She knew that for my baby’s new soul to learn tenderness and trust, connection and communion, he needed to be touched daily, hourly. Written in the nature of motherhood was a rhythmic need for the cleaning of my baby, a necessity drawing me down and down, staying and staying with the baby in his lowly, vulnerable state. She had not stolen me unjustly or stashed me in a cave to do the work of an undercast. Instead, motherhood wisely tumbled me down and planted me deep where I could put roots into weighted glory.

I had unwittingly descended. I had tumbled down into a servant form next to my baby’s humble estate. Descending roots produce fruit, descending caves yield treasure, descending wells gush with lasting water. And a descending God springs up with everlasting life. Motherhood had opened a path of descent for me, designed after the divine pattern. And it turns out, a descending mother produces yields in deep bonds and spiritual tenderness.

Had I lived up to my potential? Not until I had fallen into someone else’s depths and washed their skin that I became truly human, truly image-bearing, haloed with godlikeness.

What words did Jesus’ hands say to each disciple when he knelt down on the floor next to them, touching feet, wiping dust and fecal matter off their skin? I love you even with dirt on you. Did the hand-words rhyme with the ones they had received from their mother written deep in their skin when they were helpless and vulnerable and stripped down to bare humanity? I am God, but I am descended here in your same skin. Did that tactile memory of being wiped by mother aid in making these incredible words, which struck at an even deeper more spiritual level, seem a little more believable? I receive you covered in debts and imperfections and failures and limitations. You are helpless to clean yourself, but I will clean you.

Now, as I write, my daughter is calling, “I need to go!” She is my last toddler to wipe. I try to focus on being gentle, it takes effort to not wipe distractedly or with a tinge of frustration at being interrupted. But as she runs back to her toys, tulle skirt sparkling, she pipes, “You a good mommy!”

I sigh. She felt the words in my fingers.

I must not forget it is a deep place. I must remember, to the very last wipe.