October 31, 2005

Tales From The Crib

Gee, your toddler smells great!

Jennifer Margulis

I recently took my almost 2-year-old son Etani on a work trip to Ohio. I was giving two presentations at a three-day writing retreat with a group of other writer mamas who are all part of an online invitation-only listserv. “Airplane, vroom, vroom,” Etani, who still nurses at night, started saying a few weeks before we left.

Etani and I both bonded with my formerly cyberspace-only friends. Marjorie read him a book about a mouse who drives a truck over and over again, saying that she missed her little boy (whom she had been delighted to leave at home) and Jody regaled him with a complicated story about a Funky Hippo who leaves his watering hole in search of disco dancing dudes. The elaborate plot — and their subsequent search for the Funky Hippo (“Do you think he’s by those bushes?” Jody would ask. “Yah!” Etani would shriek.) — kept him from fussing during the two-hour car ride back to the airport.

“I miss Etani,” Jody e-mailed the day after she returned to her two children, ages 7 and 11, in South Carolina. “I don’t know how I’m going to survive a whole year without seeing him.”

Being with a small child is tactile and immediate. There is something about having them close to you — their little hands holding yours, their little lips giving you kisses — that is so primal and immediate. I understood exactly what Jody meant, and I could feel that she would really miss Etani in a visceral way.

One of the things that helps us bond to these small creatures who steal our hearts is their smell. When they are small, babies smell like baking bread and sweet milk. Their natural body odors and skin oils make you want to cuddle up to them. I have a picture of my husband opening his mouth to eat up my daughter (whose head was almost small enough to fit between his teeth) when she was three weeks old. Infants and babies naturally smell delicious.

After each baby was born I had a need (perhaps hormonally induced?) to smell them and to have my babies smell like babies. This feeling was so primal that when my oldest daughter was seven days old and some friends came to visit her, I almost cried after they left. My girlfriend’s perfume had rubbed off on Hesperus’s sweet scalp. The smell was noxious to me, sickening. I felt like my friend had done an unspeakable wrong to my newborn.

Which is why I don’t understand why so many parents do everything they can to obliterate the natural skin oils and warm smells of a baby. Even when parents are terrified to bathe their newborn (they seem so floppy and fragile), they often subject their child to the ritual of a bath every night. But babies, especially newborns, don’t need to be bathed daily. The water and soap dry out their skin. Worse, conventional soap often masks their natural smells. The chemicals in soaps and shampoos, even in “baby” products, are harsh for small children. Using them every day is bad for the environment and bad for your pocketbook. Your baby’s cleanliness becomes chemical.

My friend Michelle (who changes her sheets every other day, keeps her house spotless, and showers obsessively) submitted her infant to the same vigorous cleaning that she maintained for herself. The result was a baby who smelled like synthetic baby products, and who had skin that was dry and flaky.

It’s not that I like dirty children. I am the washcloth police poised and ready to wipe Etani’s face when it gets messy or wash his sticky fingers. But I’d rather be around a child who smells like earth and applesauce than one whose smell has been overridden by sodium laurel sulfate.

When my children were newborns, we bathed them only when they really needed baths — about once every week and a half. The rest of the time we spot cleaned their small little selves. Even as they morphed into messy eaters and dirt-loving toddlers, we have refrained from overwashing our kids.

A letter for Etani came in the mail today from South Carolina, from the Funky Hippo. He found the disco dancing dudes. And left his conventional soap back at the old watering hole.

Read all about toddlers and bath time in Jennifer Margulis’ award-winning anthology, “Toddler: Real-Life Stories of Those Fickle, Irrational, Urgent, Tiny People We Love” (Seal Press).