Expert Tips on Traveling with Baby

Twitter - @SoniaCrestpac

The Great Toilet Paper Crisis of 2020. How did we get there? We watched in awe, questioning the very most basic operations of our country’s mechanics. We felt the security of our most basic needs fall out from underneath us. Can we live without toilet paper? Will we have no choice but to try? How did we get to the point where access to basic hygiene wasn’t a given? What is this place, anyway? A third-world country? 

Doctors in makeshift PPE. Photo: Criselle Cruz Berma

I’d like to share a story with you. In early 2016, I traveled to Texas with my daughter, Emily- not quite yet 1- down to visit my grandmother in the hospital. Her heart was failing- she was dying- we both knew it. My mother came down to take care of Emily while I went back and forth to the hospital, trying in vain to bring her things that would help her be more comfortable. After a week, it was time to say goodbye. A week of traveling wore thin on Emily’s new immune system- she picked up a virus, which stormed its way into her little body just as we were arriving at the airport to head back to New York. High fever spiked as we waited in the security line. I found myself changing her diaper several more times than I would have ever anticipated in the course of our trip - I hadn’t brought many in our carry-on. My heart sank in the airport bathroom as I used the last diaper before we boarded the plane knowing how uncomfortable she would be on the trip back.

The cab ride home was a disaster. Emily was quietly feverish and in and out of sleep, but she had soaked through her diaper and onto my clothes in the cab. I slunk out of the seat, deeply ashamed and embarrassed. The cab driver surely thought I was some kind of irresponsible wreck. The smell we left in the cab is something I won’t forget- his face was tight and frustrated. I apologized tearfully several times.

I went upstairs to a tower of unopened diaper packages in 8 different thoughtfully designed patterns from which to choose (lest a person ever get bored of the same look day after day). I laid her down on the changing table, fearing the worst: horrible diaper rash. She screamed. I wept again, for a fourth time, in the painful way when you don't allow tears to fall and it makes the backs of your eyeballs hurt. I stood with her in the shower while another round of Motrin kicked in to ease the fever and now also her diaper rash. She slipped into a deep, fierce sleep. I collapsed next to her in the cool dark room, where we were both clean and dry. Only then when Emily was asleep did I allow myself the space to say goodbye to my grandmother. 9 hours of hell. I fell asleep at 630pm that day. Her diaper rash, fever, and stomach woes were gone by morning.

——

Many of the same people who hoarded piles of toilet paper have now given up on the inconvenience of masks, so here we are. As Americans, our relationship to understanding what is necessary and what is urgent is broken. Such understandings require the higher reaches of our cerebral matter- statistics, reasoning, and the like. We are buried deep down in the hollows of our primitive brains. I wonder if we’ll ever use our brains the way they were designed to be used.

Emily, right- Spring 2016- in a total state of forgiveness for our recent travel nightmare a few weeks earlier. That’s me on the left, in the same dress. Both in clean, dry diapers.

By now, you’ve probably figured out that I’m not here to offer expert tips on how to travel comfortably with your baby. This is what I’m here to say: if I can experience an unforgettable memory only by being stranded for precisely 5 hours in need of a diaper for my daughter, then I can say to you that diaper need is real, and it needs to be a thing that never, ever happens to any parent or caregiver- and the acute need I experienced one single afternoon is nothing compared to the chronic need of experiencing that situation again and again, day after day- which is the kind of ‘need’ we refer to when we say ‘diaper need’. If you are a parent, you might have a story similar to mine. 

I’m not here to offer tips. I am here to help us better understand what it might be like for parents to chronically experience diaper need. And I recognize that the story I’ve shared is one of the most inconsequential—frankly silly, by comparison—amid the crushing mass of physical and mental health, occupational, and safety issues that so often come from an inadequate supply of diapers.

We must commit to stepping outside of ourselves. Picture yourself as a parent whose baby is screaming from diaper rash with only two diapers left for the week. Or, as is also often the case: there are no diapers anywhere in sight, and you are thousands of miles from the place you called home, fleeing persecution.

Today, right now- at this moment- families need diapers in the way that Americans once thought they so desperately needed toilet paper. They really need them- in the same way that I once needed just one so urgently in La Guardia Airport one single afternoon in a way that I’ll never forget.

May those of us who experienced hysteria over either what was an imaginary or temporary shortage of toilet paper, use that experience if nothing else as a thought exercise to relate to anyone who experiences diaper insecurity for their young children. COVID may have exposed parts of this broken system to some of us in 2020, but it is- and has been- a daily reality to many for far longer than that. At the beginning of this blog post, I referenced the shocked, collective ‘how did we get here?!’ incredulity that many of us experienced suddenly at the onset of the pandemic. Perhaps you picked up on the ridiculous nature of this question: to many Americans, we have already been in this state for quite some time. Some of us just didn’t see it.

COVID highlighted some of the acute realities of systemic crises that already exist. Diaper need has been under our noses in the way that you know a mouse has died under your kitchen cabinetry and you can’t see it but you know it’s there and it makes you want to take a hammer to it all and rip out the whole place down to its studs just to find the source and then set the whole house on fire because it’s just all wrong.

We know that this project is just a million band-aids, and a million band-aids won’t fix the system that systemically delivers the wounds. The very first two steps: 

We need to commit to having the conversation, and have it-

and then we need to change the terms of the conversation.  

Diapers should be as freely available and as obvious of a commodity as clean drinking water in public fountains or toilet paper in public bathrooms. What?! Zonkers! Zoink! 2020 has brought out the radical in me.

An idea almost as radical as hoarding enough toilet paper to last 16 months.

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