Crying Over Diapers

I’m sitting here, two kids way past done with potty training, and I’m crying over diapers.

Why, you ask? Do you really miss that stage of life so much?

Yes. I do.

Come again?

I miss diapers. Because if we were still in diapers, my friend would still be alive.

Let me back up. Several years ago, one of my best friends gave me a stash of the exact type of cloth diapers I drooled over when we were expecting our first because she knew we couldn’t afford them, and she knew how desperately I wanted to try to be safe and gentle for our baby. My friend loved children, although she didn’t have any of her own. She loved my children.

(Fast forward to kid #2 and disposables were my saving grace, since kid #2 exploded out of every single type of diaper we tried. However, I digress.)

Giving was my friend’s love language. She was telling me by showing me that she loved me. She showed it often, whether with a gift of coffee, or time, or a birthday meal and gift of a special picture that she knew would be meaningful to me. She lived with intensity and she loved with intensity.

What I didn’t expect was for the cancer to ravage her body with such intensity, and for her death one year ago tomorrow to hit me with such a ferocity the convulsing sobs literally took my breath away.

I started to understand how in old-fashioned days people were said to have died from grief, because I was sure after that experience it was at least possible.

And I was pretty sure that if I popped up in Heaven soon after and she learned I died from not breathing from crying with grief, she would have said, “Good grief,” and sent me right back down to Earth.

But back to the diapers.

I listed the diapers today on a gifting page I belong to, in the hopes that instead of sitting in the basement wasting away, someone else’s family can be blessed like I was. I have waited to do something with them because in a messed-up sort of way, it was a way I felt like I could hold on to my friend.

My wise husband, when pressed for his perspective on keeping or gifting, said to look at all the treasured photos I have of a cloth-diapered baby bum and remember my friend that way. Not by holding onto something I can’t use anymore that could be helpful to someone else. He’s a keeper. He also loves an uncluttered basement.

I know giving the diapers to a new family is what my friend would want me to do. Honestly, if she could see or hear me now, creating a conundrum over diapers, she would laugh at me, and tell me to get over it and move on. I can hear her now in my mind in that way she always did when she was exasperated, saying “Jessi-ca,” with the slight emphasis on the “ca,” almost as if she was morphing it into “Jessi-come on get over it.”

So I will pass the diapers along to a new family who is expecting their first baby, and wanting so badly to be safe and gentle for their new little one.

And I will look again at the treasured photos of a baby waddling around with a cloth-diapered bum, and I will be thankful and grateful that I had a friend in my life who listened and cared about my heart’s desires, no matter how small, and actively participated in helping them become a reality.

Even though I miss my friend like crazy and will miss the diapers and that link to her, I am so blessed that she was a part of my life and my kids’ lives, and I am grateful to pass my friend and her generosity along in the world in this small way. I think she would love that.

photo generously provided by Unsplash contributor Padmavathi Ashok Kumar