In a hundred years or maybe less they'll all say Can you believe people used to walk around with cellular telephones RIGHT NEXT TO THEIR BRAINS?!!?

The mortal peril of such behaviour will be as evident to them as it is to today's us to dig out a grapeshot wound with a rusty blade (and then use said blade to trim beard, spread butter, impale enemy, and pierce desired chicken leg from serving tray of buxom wench).

We click our tongues and shake our heads back and forth, marvelling at the blatantly obvious dim-wittedness of generations past. Then we clean up after PB&J assembly with an electric blue liquid that comes with a skull and crossbones and a small print warning that says DANGER: THIS STUFF IS, UHHH, POISON.

They say the average woman absorbs five pounds of unregulated chemicals through her skin every year thanks to lotions, makeup, shampoo, deodorant. Just like the ordinary guy who gets bitten by the radioactive spider and his DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts and he can suddenly scale tall buildings. Except when our DNA goes all crackly like lightening bolts all we suddenly get is chemotherapy.

Burt, take me away.

You know that it's-just-gotta-be-bad miracle gel inside disposable diapers that makes it able to absorb 300 times its weight in pee? Listed as an irritant that requires protective gear for handling, this is the same stuff that was banned for use in tampons thanks to toxic shock syndrome. Not to mention the other nastiness hidden behind the Tigger on your kid's crotch — dioxin, one of the most poisonous and carcinogenic substances produced on earth, tributyltin (a hormone disruptor) and bleach.

Until now, I'd spent my child-rearing days thinking Us? Cloth diapers? HA! Not going to happen, seeing as I DO NOT PLAY THE BONGOS.

Thinking if disposables were really, truly harmful, they wouldn't let us continue to use them.

Right?

(silence)

Uhh… RIGHT?

(silence)

Kinda like if the war wasn't really, truly necessary, we wouldn't be there.

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'Until now' means 'until we became unoblivious'. The event that splits the before and the after, that rendered us into who we were meant to become through pain.

Now, I'm what Justin would call a frantic hippie. Overcome with a need for action, an unfamiliar state for the oblivious me, the lazy me who would prefer to obediently gulp down whatever The Man offers (and whatever Wal-Mart sells) because being obedient requires less effort than being contrary.

A frantic selfish hippie, struck with wanting to purify our most immediate life. Selfish only because I'm not yet occupied with Darfur or melting icecaps, because those problems are too worldly compared to the individual turmoil caused by an instantly actionable, offending bottle of Windex.

I used to roast chickens purely for the aesthetic pleasure of being wrist deep in raw poultry butt. Always bubbling just underneath the skin a discomfort for the slug trail meat leaves in the body, for the heinous tactics of commercial meat production.

The fleeting thought: imagine how that would feel, to eat less meat. That would be nice.

Then the carcass wrangling would always resume, the cold slappy juiciness, because it always has, and conviction is for other more passionate people.

Then Liam was taken from us.

And I found myself sitting on the couch of the most lovely mama, patient and smiling as she walked me through the hemp and the bamboo and the prefolds and the stuffers and I said okay, show me the diapers that are for people who don't play the bongos.

And she did. And they're not only righteous, and totally effective, and easy to clean, and kind to his skin. They're ADORABLE.

I just feel so damn good putting these on Ben's bum. I hang around after the mini-load of laundry starts, inhaling a steamy cloud of good, clean baby poop and tea tree oil. When the buzzer goes I race to the dryer for the sniff 'n stuff 'n stack, giggling like an anarchistic schoolgirl with a system-bucking buzz-on.

Then I made my own cleaning spray with balsam fir and rosemary essential oils, and vinegar to disinfect, and was about to never shave my armpits EVER AGAIN when Justin walked into the kitchen and said it smells like fish and chips in here.

Some kinks to iron out. Don't like tofurky. Still stand there impatiently in front of the microwave with my nose pressed up against the glass, reversing the polarity on the flux capacitor in my brain with every beep. Fighting the urge to use the skincare equivalent of a flame thrower, in a state of shock that the lemon-poppyseed tortise wins the race.

Some starts more profound than others, but all starts nonetheless.

This is the beginning of living vividly, I think. Taking steps to be one of the passionate ones. To not waste any more time, nor blessings, nor health.

Thank you, sweet lili, wherever you are.

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A proactive addendum: I'm far from enlightened, and I'd never want to make someone feel any lesser for not using cloth diapers or loving steak or relying on the fabulous lather of Sodium Laureth Sulfate. All these chemicals and toxicity in our personal worlds... it just quite suddenly and unexpectedly pisses me off.

I wish we could devote the same energy to coming up with safer alternatives as we do, oh, I don't know... inventing new kinds of rectal seepage-causing diet twinkie sweeteners.

Don't you?