Inoculate

The downside: sad screams for a few minutes, bandaids that reach halfway down her thighs, swollen legs, feeling lousy, and of course trepidation at the possibility of "a bad outcome." Daddy cried too, and mama tried not to.

The upside: a really snuggly baby for a day. Oh, and immunity from some of childhood's most devastating diseases.

You always hear about "the mommy wars" in all their varieties, but I never thought I would ever feel involved to any degree. Really, what business is it of mine how you decide to parent, I mean, within reason? (And why should anyone care how I do it? And yet, it doesn't take but a few days of parenthood to realise that wherever you stand on whatever subject pertaining to parenthood, it is a battlefield of opinion and practice. Breast or bottle; cloth, disposable or biodegradable; pacifier or not; co-sleep or not, vaccinate or not--and when. So there's the discussions you might have with your spouse about this, and then there's the surprise challenger you don't see coming.

The other day I listened for 30 minutes while the washing machine repairman gave me a lecture about how we young moms are overly protective of our babies. He was there helping to solve the mystery of the major bad smell that comes from our washer. We went through a very detailed exploration of the various factors that could affect it. I was already airing it out by keeping the door open all the time. This, so far, had only served to stink up the entire mudroom, where the washer and dryer are. We drained the pump filter hose and pulled out the pump filter to look for any debris (just a bit of thread from some jeans and a twig). We talked about detergent. What kind do we use, he wondered. I showed him: unscented, hypoallergenic liquid. Do you have something against scented detergents, he asked? Because that could possibly solve our smell problem. Well, we don't like scented detergent, I told him, but I felt silly, as though it was weak to factor personal preference into choosing your laundry detergent.

We also explored the temperature of our water. A week after we'd moved in we had had to replace the water heater, and bought a new 50-gallon tank. True, we had noticed for the past year that total morning shower time could not exceed 20 minutes, and no matter what faucet you were at lukewarm was somewhere left of center, and hot was never too hot to wash your hands in, but I thought that was just how our plumbing was, and besides, wasn't there something about keeping your water temperature below scalding temperature when there was a baby in the house?

Case in point, he explained: His sons, they were wild and they learned about hot water. You know, kids are just going to learn that lesson sometime.

In addition, my concern that I would need to do an extra rinse cycle before I washed any baby anything if I were to take his suggestion and run the washer with higher-phosphate, more-effective dishwashing powder every week or so.

Does she have a rash now? (no) .

Is she really sensitive to that sort of thing? (no--I don't know).

In 1990 they passed a law that you couldn't put phosphates above a certain percentage in laundry detergent, partly because of the effect on the environment, partly because of the effect on humans. I guess that's reason enough for me not to try it out on my infant.

Why am I retelling this? It was just eye-opening that this (pretty nice, actually) man who didn't know me at all felt he needed to teach me how I should change my 8-week-old parenting.

So anyways, it seems inevitable that if you parent, you're part of the fight. There should be somekind of innoculation against the devastating diseases of self-doubt and competitive parenting.