What triggered this post was that today on Facebook, I saw a friend who is a mom-to-be discuss the benefits of cloth diapers in an excruciating wall post that at least three moms responded to enthusiastically. And seeing people on the Metro with their trendy non-bag shopping totes. And watching people walk to work with a glow of pride.
Here’s what makes me angry. My mom and pretty much all the women of her generation going back to Cyrill and Methodius’s moms also used cloth wash-diapers. Except they were called pelyonki and essentially made out of sheets, because there were no real disposable diapers in the Soviet Union. I know this because every week or so I am regaled with tales of how my mom washed the pelyonki in the bathtub (no washing machine until 1989, also due to the Miracle of Communism) and, as soon as she had, she had to wash them again, because, well, duh, I was a baby with as much bladder control as Fergie. Now that’s environmentally friendly.
Thousands of hours of her life spent washing and boiling these cursed peloynki when she could have been doing other valuable things with her time, like watching Real Housewives of Sevastopol. And now these environmentalist moms are all like, “Oh, I want to wash the diapers! It’s so cool! It’s friendly for the baby!” No. There is a reason God invented Pampers, and it is not having to hear stories about how I had no bladder control at 8 months and my mother cursing the day I was born.
Another thing. The recyclable shopping bags. Yes, yes, the Earth is dying with a slow wheeze and you personally can save it by buying a trendy grocery store bag from Whole Foods for $17.99. Look how cool and earth-conscious you look with your cool graphic design bag on the Metro. We had even cooler ones back in the day, and they looked like this:
The even cooler part was when you had to drag about nine of ten of these bad boys back to your house from 2 miles away after a day of standing in line for products that didn’t exist because…
you didn’t have a car! Just like the dream of all Americans, most Soviet citizens (with the exception of Mr. B’s suspiciously bougeoisie family) did NOT have cars. The waiting line to get one was about 10 years. I remember when I was four, it was about a seven year wait for our family and I discussed excitedly with my dad what color car we would have when I was 10. Hence walking everywhere. It was ridiculously clean and environmentally friendly, but also felt like the Death March of Bataan, probably even more so to my mom who had to lug around not only all of the shopping, but fatty me. (That bow alone probably weighed 2 kilo.)
People of America and the United People’s Repulic of Bethesda: stop the environmentalist hipsterism. It can only lead us right back to communism. And if you want to know what that was like, ask my mom and Mr. B’s mom, ten times a week.
And next thing you know, this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Karachay
Not to mention the Aral Sea http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=1396
I have to say, that you’re a bit off on the pelenki thing … pelenki are actually the things that you swaddle the baby into. Podguzniki are the diapers. I remember my mom sewing podguzniki on her sewing machine for my brother (who’s 9 years younger than I am). She bought yards of cheesecloth and would make these multi-layered rectangles to use as diapers. We had a portable washing machine in our kitchen, but no drier, so these things would just hang everywhere. This was 1992.
My bad. I don’t remember podguzniki at all, but for some reason distinctly remember pelyenki. And yes, that is insane. 20th century, 18th century technology.
You are so right. Also, you realize all the shit is cool now because cool people made it so. When it was done by regular people who couldn’t have done anything else because that was their life, or, heavens forbid, because they thought for themselves it was a good thing (recyclable bags, not cloth (ptooi) diapers) then they were just strange uncool cheap people.
Like wearing corduroys.
Yes! All of a sudden, being cheap is now cool again because of the global recession. What about the people who were cheap all along?
I’ll admit it: I only bought the reusable bags because they were Pittsburgh-themed. And I’ll have you know I walk a whole three blocks to the grocery store! Hmmm.
Knowing The Individual, picturing her as a mother just cracks me up, frankly.
The Individual cracks me up, too. And I know you’ll collect everything Pirate gear related so the bag makes sense
There are certain things where being born in the right place at the right time matters.
People in the UK are discussing nowadays how plastic bottles for milk are a waste and how glass bottles and plastic bags (disposable but biodegradable too) are wiser. I laugh and think back to my childhood in India in the 1980s when milk came to the doorsteo, with a milkman delivering it in his steel pail; and when we ran out, we bought some in glass bottles and you guessed it, plastic bags (disposable, not necessarily biodegradable but the recycling man came and collected it by weight and paid you for it, so we didn’t care).
Same with fashions. When the Rayban (TM) Wayfarer got back in fashion, I still my “vintage” piece from mid-1990s when it was fashionable.
I think this is what I was trying to say all along-that some people can see through the trends to the other side and not get caught up in fads.
Cool post. Brings back sweet memories. And, yes, you were a bit on a round side, very cute baby. And you thought back then that everything I was saying was absolutely correct and had be taken as LAW. And there was podgusniki and pelenki to be boiled, washed, dried and ironed from both sides…This and Breznev. Good life !
That’s funny…I don’t remember you calling me as much “a bit on the round side” as much as “blobula”
Polina: It may amuse you to know that Brezhnev was quite popular in India at the time. May be because the cult of personality was alive and kicking (Indira Gandhi was the PM). I even had a baby cousin who was a round kid with bushy brows and light brown, darting eyes and we affectionately called him Brezhnev. :-/