Disposable diapers

And just like that, I’ve lost the hardcore zero-waste crowd. 
 

Yes, we use disposable diapers.  I wanted to use cloth diapers when my first son was born, I really did.  The information I found seemed to show that the environmental costs of disposables were roughly the same as those involved in a diaper service (trucks for delivery, heat, water and chemicals for washing). So it seemed that the only reasonable way to use disposables was to wash them myself and dry them on the clothesline whenever possible.

There were several drawbacks here.  All of them centered on the ick factor.  For one thing,  I wasn’t all that keen on getting the poop off of the baby.  It really seemed to be asking too much to then scrape it off the diaper.  And then soak the still-poopy diaper in a bucket of water.  But the dealbreaker was that with a front-loading washer, I couldn’t later dump the whole disgusting bucket into the wash.  No, I would be required to pull one dripping, gunky diaper after another out of the crapola bucket and  put them individually into the washer, and then wipe the drips off of the floor.

Since parenting a newborn baby stretched my adult functionality to its breaking point both times, it’s probably for the best that I didn’t try to add a time-consuming and repulsive chore to my roster.   Still, I continue to have guilt about this failure. 

Those of you who are better people and who cloth diapered can take heart.  I continue to be punished daily for my environmental transgressions:  Disposables are so efficient at absorbing and wicking moisture nowadays that boys who wear disposables take forever to potty train.  I won’t reveal any details that would later embarrass my kids, but let’s just say that I have worried that we might have to permanently shelve that old joke about no kids going to college in pull-ups.  

My big fat cancer failure

You’re dying to know about the cancer thing, right?

I failed to make it to forty without a cancer diagnosis.  It was a whopper too, not your little case of the cancer sniffles.  No stage-one this or that, no basal cell carcinoma.  I had to go and come down with fancy cancer.  When I was 39 and my kids were not quite 2 and 5, I was diagnosed with an ocular melanoma.  That’s right, eye cancer.  Ocular melanoma is not given a “stage” like other cancers, with stage one being pretty hopeful.  It doesn’t spread out through the lymph nodes, so instead it is simply labeled as small, medium or large.  Mine was medium, which according to the obligatory food reference is the size of a dried chickpea (I just measured this.) A dried chickpea is not very big, but then again, neither is your eyeball.   There had not been an obvious problem seven months prior to diagnosis, at my last eye exam when I had retinal photos taken.

 Now, there was some good news.  The treatment is very low key.  The surgeon attaches a radioactive plaque to the outside of your eye, and you go home and stay six feet away from other people for about seven days.  My folks came, it was great to have them here.  It’s not much in the way of pain (though I’m sure I was whiny), and after a day or two you get used to the pirate look (I had to wear a patch covered by a lead shield.  The kids put dinosaur stickers on it, when it wasn’t on me.)  After a week or so they took the plaque off and I kept the patch on for another week.  After a couple of months I even went back to wearing contacts.

 Twenty years ago the state of the art treatment was to just yank the whole eye out (enucleation, if you prefer something less graphic), so this was a big improvement as far as I was concerned.  My vision has so far been great, only about 10 to 20% worse than usual, though I can expect radiation effects to diminish that for the next couple of years.  Any vision deterioration is not correctable since it affects the retina, not the lens.

The catch is that there are really two genetic forms of ocular melanoma.  One form has a 90% survival rate over 15 years.  The other form has a 30% survival rate over 15 years.  Until a couple of years ago, there was no way to tell which kind a person had.  Then, just at the time I had my surgery, a company called Castle Biosciences started offering a genetic test.  So right before Christmas of ’09, I learned that I had failed that particular test.  My unoriginal response to the retinal surgeon upon hearing this news was "shit".  Officially, I have a 50% chance of being alive by the time my younger child goes to kindergarten in a couple of years.  I have a 30% chance of being alive by the time my older child graduates from high school. (Pause for magical thinking moment…40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 100%!)

This is a very weird diagnosis for a bunch of reasons.  One is that there is nothing wrong with me.  The primary tumor was killed with radiation.  Quite a lot of CT and MRI scans have shown that I have nothing nasty going on in my liver and brain.  I’m told that while metastases tend to occur in the liver, they can actually show up virtually anywhere at all, at any time. Soothing, huh?  Another weird thing about this diagnosis is that there is no protocol for treatment.  This is a pretty rare cancer, and until lately they couldn’t even tell which people had the bad kind.  So me and my oncological posse are making it up as we go along. 

Despite being a rare cancer, one of my favorite authors, Oliver Sacks, has also had ocular melanoma.  He’s alive, too.  Go Oliver!

Now I have what one friend refers to as my little medical hobby.  Every three months or so I have bloodwork done, then get an abdominal MRI, then see my eye surgeon for a major checkup, then see my oncologist.  Every other two weeks I do daily injections of a drug called Leukine.  Theoretically the Leukine should boost my immune system to eat up any cancer cells.  There is no evidence that the Leukine will help me, there is no evidence that it will not (it improves life expectancy, marginally, in people with metastasized melanoma).  There is a small chance that it could later give me leukemia.  The injections are not as bad as you might think (I’m the queen of ice packs as anesthesia.) Every time I'm waiting for MRI results I spend several days as a basket case.  It is very much like what I imagine a falsely accused defendant feels like in a death penalty case while the jury is out.  With each MRI and CT so far, the jury has instead opted for something more like a long sentence.  I hope it’s a very long sentence.

There’s not much else to do in the land of treatment.  I try to eat a healthy diet with a lot of colorful organic produce and whole grains and less in the way of sugar, animal products and processed food.  I try to exercise. I’m a good sleeper, I avoid stress.   I do a lot of magical thinking and denial and a certain amount of meditation and visualization. I keep strong connections to many friends and my family.  Mainly I fail to do all these things as well or often as I think I should.  I work very hard to think about it as positively as possible.   I work very hard to think about it as little as possible.

 Some people with this diagnosis, many people with this diagnosis, live.

I take comfort in the successes of others.  Another science writer I really like, Stephen Jay Gould, was diagnosed with peritoneal mesothelioma in 1982.  This was a cancer with a median survival of eight months after diagnosis.   As a scientist, he immediately wanted to know everything he could about his grim diagnosis.  One thing he noted when looking at the distribution charts of mortality for his disease, was that the tail of the distribution never dropped to zero.  What this means to a layperson is that some people with his diagnosis were continuing to live far past their life expectancies, years and decades past their life expectancies.   As it happened, Stephen Jay Gould was completely cured of his disease and died twenty years later of an unrelated cancer.   David Servan-Schreiber tells his own similar story in the excellent food book, Anticancer. (David is still alive and well.  Go David!)

Look, if the signup form comes across your desk, don’t check the box for “ocular melanoma”.  But I’m aware every day of worse possibilities.  Also, nothing focuses your mind in quite the same way as a potentially fatal diagnosis.  There is no way to know how you would react unless it happens to you.  In my case it has made me acutely grateful for my very mundane life, which I now see as amazing.  It has me sure that I have the exact life I want to be living, perhaps with a few more hugs for my kids.  Mainly, I want to follow Stephen Jay Gould’s example and end up in the long tail of the distribution.

Success: Things I do make homemade

Yogurt.  This is stupid easy if you have a thermometer.  It’s not any cheaper than store bought if you use good organic milk though.  I got my recipe from a column Harold McGee did a couple of years ago in the Dining section of the New York Times and it’s never failed.  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/15/dining/15curi.html

Bread.  My mom has always made homemade bread and while I don’t quite live up to that standard, I make at least some of the sandwich bread we eat.  Recently I’ve been making the whole wheat bread from Cook’s Illustrated, which manages to use about 50% whole wheat without turning into a brick.  The recipe is a really, really big pain.  On the other hand, the comparable store bought Vital Vittles brand is $5 a loaf, and homemade bread costs maybe eighty percent less.  [Update:  The CI recipe has now failed for me three times in a row, so I have banished it from my repertoire.]

mmm... squashy

Jam.  I make freezer jam, which is so, so, so much easier than you would ever think.  It also makes you aware of what a shocking amount of sugar is in jam, even if you use the low-sugar pectin.  Freezer jam is roughly ten times better than anything you can buy in a store, and a lot cheaper.  I can make about twelve jars in an hour and a half. 

Dill pickles.  I make four or five jars a year and just pop them in the fridge.  Last year I had to buy the cucumbers for them because my first try at growing cucumbers was less than spectacular.  

Hummus.  The good quality hummus available in our local grocery stores runs about $4 a cup.  Once I’ve cooked the garbanzos while doing other things on my cooking day, I can make it in about ten minutes for a pretty small fraction of this price. 

Croutons and seasoned bread crumbs.  I learned from Deborah Madison’s book Vegetarian Cooking the genius of putting garlic breadcrumbs on pasta.  Every so often I throw the ends of the bread into the freezer.   When I get around to it, cube it or put it in the food processor, dry it, and then sauté it with oil and herbs and garlic.  It lasts a surprising amount of time in the fridge.  You can pop it into the toaster oven briefly and have warm croutons on your salad or fragrant, crispy breadcrumbs on your mac and cheese.

Chili powder:  Toast, grind, done.

Vanilla.  Buy vanilla beans, slit open, mash up the insides, put into vodka.  As far as I can tell, you just reuse the jar and keep adding new beans and vodka until it gets too crowded in there.

Roasted tomatoes.  Each tomato season for about ten weeks I buy 15-20 pounds of tomatoes a week, slice them thick, spray with good olive oil and sprinkle them with salt and a pinch of brown sugar.  Then I roast them in a low oven until they’re somewhere between squishy and leathery.  Total ambrosia.  No matter how many Ziploc freezer bags of these I make, I run out six or eight months later.  This year I wanted to make a couple of solar cookers so that I didn’t have to have my oven running all day once a week in the summer.  Maybe next year.  I fantasize about growing enough tomatoes for this purpose.

Granola.  This is marginally useful, since I’m the only one in the family who will eat it.

Pizza.  If I had more time, I’d put up thirty jars of sauce for the year and freeze lots of batches of dough.  As it is, I make the crust and the dough each time we want to eat it.  Yes we do get takeout pizza too, but I consider that to be a different type of food.

Pesto.  Still dreaming of growing enough basil for this, but no, I buy it.  Like the tomatoes, I make a big batch each week all summer long for the freezer, and it still runs out by April.  Pesto isn’t cheap to make, but it’s still cheaper than what they have at the store and it’s easy to make.

Whole grain pancakes.  When I’m really on top of things I make a big batch of dry mix with a simplified version of the Cook’s Illustrated recipe.  Then we can have healthy but yummy pancakes in about 20 minutes on a weekend morning.  The leftovers can be saved to reheat in the microwave.  Then we run out of mix and don’t have them for five or six months.  I used to simply cook a triple batch every few weeks and freeze them for later use.

Cranberry sauce.  Now I can buy berries grown by a family I know near my hometown in Wisconsin.  (Never mind that they’re imported several thousand miles to California.)  When they’re available during the winter holidays I pop about five bags in the freezer.  I also put small handfuls of plain frozen cranberries into smoothies.

Applesauce.  We inherited a large and unruly Gravenstein apple tree with our house.  Every other year* it produces about 300 apples, which I pick by standing on our carport roof with my fruit picker.  Some go to friends and neighbors and some get eaten fresh.  Gravensteins don’t store well, so mostly they get turned into applesauce. Friends tell me that I make very good applesauce, so of course only one of my kids will eat it.

*Every other other year it produces almost nothing.  The tree is about 25 feet tall and cannot reasonably be thinned in a high yield year, so it productivity seesaws up and down.

Foods I fail to make homemade

I do a lot of cooking, and yet there are quite a few things I fail to make myself.  Just a few:

Cooked and frozen beans.  No reason I can’t cook and freeze dry beans, but mostly I don’t get around to it.

Chicken broth.  I buy the boxes at Trader Joe’s, but wish I had enough time to buy chicken at my organic butcher and make enough to can each year.  Maybe next winter?  I make stock out of chicken or turkey carcasses when I have them, but we only eat a whole chicken or turkey a few times a year. (We are not big fans of poultry though we use the broth.)

Some cheeses:  My sister learned to make cheese a couple of years ago and now makes mozzarella routinely and also some others.  You can even use the whey from mozzarella to make ricotta.  I will never, ever do this on my own though it seems like a lovely idea. 

Vinegar:  Colin Bevan, the No Impact Man, mentions making this from fruit scraps.  I haven’t tried it yet.  Have you done this?  How did it turn out?

Baguette bread, pita, tortillas.  I’m never making these, although I could.  The available choices where I live are really tasty, locally made from good ingredients, reasonably priced and not overpackaged. 

Power bars.  My kids love Z Bars.  I hate the packaging, the expense and the amount of sugar.  I wish I had a decent recipe for something similar that my kids might actually eat.  All alternatives I've tried have been soundly rejected.

Home canned salsa.  Amy’s brand is the only store brand I think tastes good.  It is also insanely expensive.  If my kids had been in child care a few extra days this summer I could have made a year’s supply.

Frozen peas, frozen corn.  The little plastic bags of organic are pricey.  Peas would be way too much work, but I bet I could cook and freeze a year’s worth of corn in a few hours.  You know, with all that spare time I have.

Condiments.  It turns out that ketchup is my line in the sand. Ketchup is a junk food, and unusual or homemade ketchup just misses the point.  So while I will not waver in my devotion to the yummy red sugar in a plastic bottle, I would consider making mustard.  I’m capable of making mayo, but we don’t eat enough to bother.  Ditto for pickle relish.  Hot sauce might be worthwhile.

Beer.  Somehow, though we live in California, Dave and I are beer drinkers (I like to think it’s my Wisconsin upbringing.)  While it would be technically possible for me to brew and bottle beer at home, I think this would be contrary to the spirit of beer consumption, i.e. a wish to be lazy and relaxed.

Refried beans.  I really should make and freeze these.  We eat a lot of quesadillas, and refried beans are one of the only things we still buy in cans. 

Canned tomatoes:  Whoops, I went and made these this summer.  We'll see how they turn out.

This leads to a bonus failure within a failure:  in the first batch of canned tomatoes I accidentally added pectin instead of citric acid (similar-looking powder in a simila-looking jar.)  So that batch will get used first and be extra gelatinous.

Sauerkraut.  Yes, I like sauerkraut, and cabbage is really good for you and lacto-fermented foods are great and it’s never happening.  Sheesh. 

The shocking tale of the stay-at-home mother who paid for childcare

Forgive me,  Amy Dacyszyn*, for I have sinned.  I chose to have two children, I love my children, and in order to preserve my sanity, I must spend productive time away from my children. It is with great shame that I reveal to you that they go to….gasp!....daycare.  

You see, if I were an adequate, truly frugal, real mother, I would never even consider daycare.  My freshly scrubbed, television-free homeschooled children would play with great concentration for hours with their charming wooden toys out in the fresh air of our organic garden.  We would laugh and play together as we made jam.  I would find it deeply satisfying to watch their little minds develop as they slowly counted the change at the grocery store or marveled at the bubble reaction between vinegar and baking soda as we cleaned the bathroom sink together.  Sadly, I was not issued these children.  I was issued actual children -the sort who whine for crappy plastic toys in the grocery store.  They were issued the kind of mother who hurries them up when we are taking a walk for fun.

This is a touchy subject, I understand.  Most parents work for money that they need, and they wish their children spent less time in daycare.  The failure here is not that my children are harmed by going to daycare (please believe me when I tell you that they benefit from spending time with people who enjoy and are competent with children).  The failure is that I become a crazy, cranky nightmare of a mother when I don’t get a break to run the household without being interrupted every 17 seconds. This defect in my personality causes me to spend a giant amount of money that I could, theoretically, be saving.  Ever since the kids were each about four months old they have spent two days a week in the care first of the amazing Linda, then of the wonderful family who runs our preschool.  When my older son started school I got one extra day of childcare.

I pay for daycare because this time feels like oxygen to me.  It allows me to run errands, pay bills, exercise,  cook, clean the house, use power tools and do all the other things that I find I can’t reasonably do with three- and six-year olds around.  Apparently many people don’t have problems doing these activities with children.  If you are one of these people,  I hope this post gives you a sustaining  little shot of moral superiority.  All I know is that when there are two-week long winter vacations, or a kid is barfing, or the school really, really wants me to volunteer, it feels a lot like they are saying to me “look, you can’t have any oxygen today but you can always breathe again next Thursday.”

This will change in time.  Kindergarten has changed to first grade.  Eventually, in several years, they will both be in public school for a full school day five days a week.  I am painfully aware how much I will miss having adorable toddlers around in ten years when they are rolling their eyes and their bedrooms smell like armpits. Still, right now their childcare time is directly proportional to my happiness.

*Amy Dacyszyn wrote the Tightwad Gazette newsletter that turned into a fabulous and utterly unique series of books in the 1990’s.  She is the high priestess of all that is frugal. Needless to say, none of her six kids went to daycare.

About Allison and TGFL

About Allison

Life goals, age six:  Become a fairy princess, live in Florida.  Also, become a famous ballerina.

Life goals, age 20:  Move to San Francisco’s Castro district with my girlfriend, wear Doc Martens every day, go to graduate school in something, figure out some sort of job I didn’t hate.  Do anything except get married, have children and buy a house.

Life goals, age 41:  Live simply and frugally in a thoroughly green, zero-waste, beautifully decorated home.  Provide my husband and kids with local, sustainable food.    Be a relaxed and competent parent.  Be thin and well dressed.  Sustain wonderful connections with my friends and community.  Get some chickens.

Overall success rate:  About 20%.  Overall happiness rate, about 90%.

About TGFL

The name is courtesy of the incomparable Richard Berman of the Verb Factory. 
The banner is courtesy of the excellent graphic designer, Teresa Chan.