Diapers
There is a reason that our society pushes, if not shoves, little girls into practicing the “mommy role” so early in life. There is dressing the baby, feeding the baby, playing with the baby and yes, changing the baby doll’s diaper. Someone got the bright idea to make a doll that pooped and peed but I suspect it wasn’t much of a hit. Most mothers of young children don’t need a toy that poops and pees.
Somewhere in the growing up of most girl children there is the real experience of learning to change a baby’s diaper. I learned to change diapers in those years just before the arrival of the disposable paper nappy with the self-stick tabs. Not only did I learn the finer points of diaper folding but also the importance of folding diapers differently for boys and for girls. If you most know for boys the heavy padding goes in front, for girls this goes in the back. I also learned to properly attach the sides of the diaper with well,diaper pins. Learning to do this without sticking the baby or yourself and achieving a good tight fit takes some skill and practice.
Inevitably there is the first time the diaper-changer-in-training is confronted with the most odious of challenges: the smelly, messy, leaky diaper where not only is the diaper both soiled and sodden but everything else the baby is wearing and the blankets and even the stroller or car seat are both colorful and odiferous. If you are lucky, an adult with experience will step up and enlist you as an assistant rather than the principal in resolving this situation. If not, you’re in for an experience that you will not soon forget and which also functions quite effectively as a memory-based contraceptive.
The point is this: women in our society learn and are expected to know from an early age how to clean up messes caused by young children who are in need of or who are in the processes of being potty-trained.
While President Trump and company were engaged in their second full weekend in office, Acting United States Attorney General Yates most likely spent her weekend at the office, on her cell phone, reading briefs, editing responses and reviewing judicial orders. In other words, the woman spent her weekend changing dirty diapers or more specifically explaining to other people how they were to change the dirty diapers that took the forms of unclear directives, vague mandates, unspecified exceptions and exhausted travelers stuck in airport holding areas with eager, anxious and understandably angry relatives glaring at TSA staff on the other side of some sort of glass barrier. And then there were the lawyers and the protestors.
Ms. Yates most probably came to work on Monday, January 30, 2017 more than a little put out that the guys in the West Wing had not done the decent thing, if not the courteous thing, of allowing her staff to review the Executive Order before it was signed and issued. All of the federal judges who reviewed the request for emergency orders halting the enforcement of President Trump’s executive orders over the weekend ruled against its immediate enforcement. Even in the private sector, some one in the General Counsel’s office would have pulled the plug on the seemingly bright idea that was anything but.
Ms. Yates may have had her non-enforcement directed drafted by the time she got to work on Monday morning. I would have. I would have spent the day saying good-bye to friends and packing so that when the “You’re Fired” letter arrived, it could be responded to with the comment “ Really? Fine. I was just leaving.”
Back in the day, before Pampers and their ilk were all the rage, like when Trump was really a baby, that pile of dirty diapers would have had to be rinsed out and then laundered. Even now, the disposable stuff has to be put in the garbage and hauled to the curb. Of course that’s now some one else’s job.
