My Baby Daddy Is A Bed Bug: A Custody Exchange Survival Guide

Dear Priya from last October. You're currently staring at a navy blue canvas duffel bag in the entryway of your Chicago apartment, wondering if you can legally set it on fire. Your baby daddy just pulled away in his Honda. He sent you a text five minutes ago that said, "hey fyi found a bug at my place think it might be bed bugs idk lol."

You thought "my baby daddy is a bed bug" was just a stupid audio trending on your feed. You didn't think it was a prophecy. Now you're standing here, realizing your baby d just handed you a biological weapon wrapped in a toddler.

This is a letter to you. A letter to me. What I wish I knew before I spent a weekend hyperventilating with a flashlight and a bottle of rubbing alcohol. Because nobody tells you how to co-parent with a parasite.

The text message that ruins your weekend

I'm going to talk about the audacity of this man for a minute. We did the whole modern blended family thing. We sat in the mediator's office and talked about communication and boundaries. We agreed to share medical updates and school calendars. Nobody wrote a clause about blood-sucking hitchhikers in the custody agreement.

The text is always casual. They drop it on you right after the exchange, never before. If they tell you before, they know you'll cancel the weekend, and then they've to pay for the babysitter. So they wait until my baby is safely inside my apartment, chewing on a rice cracker, before casually mentioning that their mattress is crawling with insects.

I called my sister and just breathed heavily into the phone. She told me to take a breath and wrap the kid in plastic. I hung up. I've dealt with a thousand infectious diseases in the pediatric ward. I've seen RSV, hand-foot-and-mouth, and things that would make you skip lunch. But this felt like a violation of my sanctuary.

The actual bug is just a bug. It bites, it hides, it dies when you boil it. The psychological warfare of knowing your ex's domestic negligence is literally seeping into your nursery is the part that breaks you.

Listen, treat your front door like the decontamination bay at Rush General the minute they get dropped off.

Doorstep hazmat procedures

The first mistake I made was letting the bag touch the rug. Don't do this. Leave the bag in the hallway while you strip the kid down to their diaper and throw every scrap of fabric they own into a boiling washing machine.

You have to establish a hard border. Custody exchanges are already emotionally exhausting without acting as a customs agent for insects. Here's the reality of how these things travel.

• Backpacks and diaper bags: These are Trojan horses. They sit on the floor at his dad's house for three days.
• Stuffed animals: The beloved bear is now a luxury condo for pests.
• Shoes: They hide in the velcro. I know it sounds paranoid, but I'm right.

I took all the clothes and immediately put them in the washer on the hottest setting. The EPA website says you need thirty minutes of high heat to kill them, but I just let the dryer run until the clothes felt like they were forged in a furnace.

What the pediatrician actually told me

I hauled my son to Dr. Sharma the next morning because he had three red dots on his shoulder. I was fully prepared for her to call the CDC.

She looked at my baby's arm, sighed, and basically guessed. She muttered something about how they don't carry diseases like mosquitoes do, so we didn't need to worry about malaria or whatever I was spiraling about.

The bugs march in a straight line down their arm like they're at a parade, and if your kid scratches the bites with dirty fingernails, you buy yourself a nasty little staph infection. That's the whole medical crisis right there. Just an itchy kid and a tired mother.

She told me to clip his nails down to the quick. She suggested hydrocortisone cream, which is fine, but mostly it just makes the kid slippery and ruins their pajamas. We did oatmeal baths. He cried because the water was lukewarm. I cried because I was exhausted. We both survived.

Boiling your belongings

When you're heat-treating every item your child owns, you quickly figure out what's garbage and what's actually made well. Most baby clothes disintegrate when you put them through a paranoid mother's laundry cycle.

I threw his Short Sleeve Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit into the boiling cauldron. It's fine. It fits, it snaps, it covered the bite marks on his shoulder so I didn't have to look at them. It's just a shirt, but it held up to my frantic laundering.

The real surprise was the Bamboo Baby Blanket in the Universe Pattern. My ex sent him home wrapped in it. I was furious. I threw this blanket into the washer on the highest heat setting my building's tragic washer could reach, fully expecting it to melt into a puddle of sad fibers. It lived. Actually, it got softer. It's bamboo and organic cotton, so apparently it can withstand my trauma responses. The kid likes the planets on it. I like that it didn't harbor fugitives.

For toys, anything fabric got bagged in heavy-duty trash bags and put in the trunk of my car for a month. I only let him play with hard stuff that I could sanitize. When he came back from his dad's, I threw these Gentle Baby Building Block Sets straight into the bathtub with hot soapy water. They're rubber. They survive. I don't love the macaron colors, yaar, but whatever, they're mathematically impossible for a bug to live inside.

If you're currently burning all your child's belongings in a fit of rage and need to start over, you can browse our organic baby clothes. Just make sure you wash them first. Trust no one.

Non-toxic nursery warfare

Your first instinct is going to be buying a can of Raid and emptying it into the crib. Put the can down.

I'm not spraying neurotoxins where my baby sleeps. I read the back of those cans and the chemical names read like a list of things that cause nervous system damage. My nursing brain short-circuited.

1. Vacuuming is your only weapon. I vacuumed the crib slats, the baseboards, and the mattress seams. Then I took the vacuum bag outside and threw it in the alley dumpster like it was a murder weapon.
2. Mattress armor. I bought a zip-up waterproof encasement. If there was anything on that mattress, it's trapped in there forever. Problem solved.

I sent my ex a bill for the mattress cover. He left me on read.

Before you completely lose your mind

Co-parenting is mostly just managing your own reactions to someone else's chaos. You can control your front door. You can control your washing machine. You can't control what happens at their house, and if you dwell on it, you'll get an ulcer.

Set a protocol. The kid comes in, the clothes come off, the bags stay out. Do it every single time until his dad finally pays for an exterminator. It took my ex three months to handle it. Three months of doorstep hazmat drops.

Before you read the messy answers to the questions you're definitely Googling at 2 AM, go check your mattress seams and breathe. You can handle this. Browse our organic blankets if you need to replace the ones you threw away in a panic.

Questions you're typing into Google right now

Can my baby get sick from these bites?

Dr. Sharma basically laughed when I asked if my son was going to get a blood disease. They don't transmit pathogens. The only way your kid gets sick is if they dig at the bites with dirty fingernails and give themselves a skin infection. Keep their nails filed down. Wash the bites with soap. Stop staring at them.

Do I've to throw away the car seat?

God, no. Do you know how expensive those are? I vacuumed every crevice of our car seat and left it in my car parked in the direct Chicago summer sun for two days. Heat is your friend. If it's winter, take the fabric cover off and wash it on hot. Vacuum the plastic base.

How do I talk to my ex about this without screaming?

You probably can't. I sent a very clinical text stating that all items returning to my house would remain in plastic bags until he provided a receipt from a licensed exterminator. Keep it in writing. Don't call them. They will just get defensive and tell you you're overreacting. Let the boundaries do the talking.

What if I accidentally brought one inside?

Then you wash everything, buy an encasement, and call a professional. Don't buy those DIY bug bombs from the hardware store. They just make the bugs scatter into the walls and you'll be breathing in poison for a week while the bugs laugh at you from the electrical outlets.

Will hydrocortisone hurt my baby's skin?

Over-the-counter one percent hydrocortisone is usually fine for a few days, but honestly, I stopped using it because he kept rubbing his arm on his face and getting it in his eyes. A cold washcloth works just as well to stop the itching, and it doesn't cost nine dollars a tube.