Bad parenting?

Another of my favorite bloggers posted this week on her "bad mother" day. And that "bad mother" day was absolutely not bad parenting at all, but just real-life parenting, in her case under difficult circumstances and with a great deal of grace --what reminds me from some of my own days parenting as that particular small-child-caretaker grace that comes with bodily fluids and effusions on clothes and a sense of perpetually not being (enough? at all?) in control, of too many things to carry and juggle and remember on not enough sleep. Too many.. not enough... too many... not enough... the yin and yang of parenting.

It left me thinking of one of the first days in the hospital right after Otter was born, when G came by on his way to work (Otter was born back when he got no paid time off), and at 6 or so in the morning G and I changed his diaper, I think for the first time. And amid all the supplies in the drawer below the wooden bassinet Otter was poopily sleeping in, we couldn't find diaper wipes. So we went into the bathroom and found a plastic cylinder with wipes sticking out the top, and wiped off the poop, and put on the diaper. Yay. Mission accomplished.

Then a few minutes later, a bit more awake, I looked at the wipes container, and saw a funny crumpled up sticker on the top. I smoothed it out and saw a big international "no" sign (the circle with the line through it) and a drawing of a crawling baby in the middle of the "no" circle.

No, this did not mean "hey, don't let your baby change himself." It meant "we here at the hospital think it's a darn good idea to stock the bathrooms in maternity with containers of cleaning wipes that are great for disinfecting your hospital sink but far too toxic to use on any chidl's skin, especially that of a delicate newborn."

And futhermore, it meant (to me), "because this has happened before--someone mistakenly using these wipes on a child--we'll design and put this handy sticker on the wipes container because, you know, any sleep-deprived overwhelmed new parent will be deterred by it... and it would be just too much f-ing trouble to put the wipes in the cleaning cart or with the nurses' supplies. We prefer to leave them handy in the bathroom, ready for new parents NOT to use."

But none of that changed that we had just wiped toxic cleaning fluid all over our less-than-a-day-or-two old son's sensitive parts.

You want to feel like a moron? Go out to the nurse's station in tears a day or so after major surgery wearing creepy mesh underpants and a hospital gown and tell them that you and your spouse have disinfected your baby's butt in dire violation of every small print warning on the wipes cleaning container as well as the lovely international NOT-FOR-BABIES-YOU-IDIOT sticker, and that you need immediate medical help to undo whatever (hopefully not irreversible) damage you've done to this child that you are supposedly taking home unsupervised, on your own, that week.

The nurses said that Otter would be fine--and I suspect chuckled at me after I went back to the room.

But that was my first lesson in parenting and ego... that even if it made me and/or my spouse look like incompetent unfit parents--even if it meant we WERE incompetent parents--I could 'fess up to endangering my child to get him help... that even as part of my brain wanted to hide the container and just tell myself Otter'd be fine, I had to make sure. (And if he has infertility problems or prostate cancer years from now, yes, I'll feel guilty for not insisting they DO something to fix our wipes catastrophe--but fingers crossed, my paranoia on that is waning as the years go by.)

I think that is one of my personal lines for parenting. While sometimes I do fib to make us--or me--look like better smoother parents than we are, when it matters (or it might matter--and I so rarely know which is which), I am capable of looking like a total nitwit to make Otter safe. And isn't that what you all were hoping for?

This comes up when I drag him off to the pediatrician yet again, with a lingering stuffy nose that turns out to be a sinus infection and needs antibiotics--or with a possible chicken pox blister that turns out to be a bug bite. I never know if I'll look in-tune with my kid's medical needs or needlessly alarmist and wasting my kid's health insurance dollars and the doctor's time. But, hey, I'd rather look like an idiot than have Otter suffer an undiagnosed problem.

If anyone can figure out a way for me to look good while being a good parent at the same time, let me know. That I haven't mastered yet.