Parental Discretion Advised

I was sitting at a table of mommies today eating brunch and one of them began sharing the details of her horrible weekend.  She had to cart around all of her kids to way too many activities and school functions and it was wearing her out.  She caught a cold and experienced hearing loss recently and needed to schedule surgery around Christmastime.  And all of that took a back seat to her concern over her son being constipated, as she was sure he had major intestinal blockage.  I lifted a forkful of hash brown casserole to my mouth and nodded my head in agreement at how hard it is to have a little one who hasn’t pooped for days.  I kept right on eating.  I finished my entire plate of food and went back for more.  Four years ago, before I was pregnant, before I had a son who's also experienced constipation every now and then, having a discussion like this was unheard of, much less during brunch.  I was as squeamish as they came.  You couldn’t even say the word “poop” anytime close to mealtime, and if you said anything related to it while I was actually eating I would’ve had to leave the room.  That’s probably why I was so much thinner before I had a baby.  My "ick" tolerance sky rocketed after giving birth.  I think pregnancy prepares you for the big gross out, being so gross in and of it self, what with the crazy bowel movements and the vomiting and the swollen appendages.  Then the actual giving birth part is just so, so gross.  Oh come on, it’s only beautiful once the baby is cleaned off and perfectly swaddled, lying in your arms.  But the actual birthing process…I’ve seen the video and it ain’t pretty.  Even though I had a c-section and couldn’t see anything that was going on, my husband assured me that “Oh my God, it’s so gross” while this supposedly beautiful miracle of life was taking place.

Now look at how far I’ve come.  Just ask my siblings, who used to delight in torturing me at dinner time by making puking sounds.  Now the sound of anyone throwing up, well, to be honest that still makes me want to throw up.  But my son throwing up all over my clothes doesn’t bother me one bit.  It sends those motherly instincts into overdrive and just makes me love him even more.  Because once you’ve had a three month old leak out of his diaper every time he has a bowel movement and actually poop in your cupped hand, you grow a thicker skin, a stronger stomach.  Let this be a warning and a relief to those of you expecting your first child.  When it’s your kid, you really can take just about anything.

One day early on in my stay at home experience, when my son first started crawling, I walked into the living room where he had been playing and where I had left him for just a few brief moments. I stepped in poop barefooted.  I looked around.  It was everywhere.  Poop on the furniture, on him, on the floor, on some of his toys; everywhere I looked.  I picked him up and of course it squished out onto my hands and all over my shirt.  We went straight to his room where I stripped him down and then into the bath.  I rinsed out his clothes before putting them in the wash.  I scrubbed the furniture.  I scrubbed the floors.  I bleached his toys.  I changed my shirt and scrubbed my hands, but no matter what I did or where I cleaned, I just couldn’t get the smell out.  I felt like the Lady Macbeth of poop.  When my husband got home later that evening, I held out my hands in frustration.  “Smell them,” I said.  “I’ve washed them a thousand times.  I can’t get the smell of poop off of me.  It must be in the fibers of my nose.”  He laughed at me.  “Carrie, have you looked in the mirror today?”  No, I thought.  Noooo.  I ran to the bathroom and in the mirror, there it was, a giant smearing of poop right across my neck.  How could I have missed that?  It must have come off my shirt when I changed.  I was disgusted.  Thank God I didn’t leave the house that day.  I began to cry.  This is what my life had been reduced to.  This was the joy of parenting, smeared in its excremental glory across the blind side of my neck.  It was a low point for me.

Ever since that traumatic experience, I haven’t really had any issues when it comes to the great number two.  That kind of thing will pretty much desensitize anyone, which I guess is why I have no reservations about telling you the story.  It only grossed you out if you don’t have kids.  If you do have kids, then you know all about it. 

To me, the funniest part of the story about the woman at brunch was that this woman didn’t even think twice about mentioning constipation while we were all eating.  I don’t know about you, but now that I’m a parent, I think my filter is operating at about fifty percent when it comes to what’s appropriate to talk about in public and what is not.  I find myself bringing up bowel movements in a lot of my conversations, even with people who don’t have kids, even to people I barely know.  I am turning into my mom.  Somehow the “p” word gets worked into every conversation every time she calls me and every single time we sit down to eat.  I’m not exaggerating.  I feel like I'm living one long Pepto Bismol commercial, the soundtrack of my life being “nausea, heartburn, indigestion, upset stomach, diarrhea.” 

Since we're on the subject, I'll let you in on one of the funniest things about my son, a thing we've come to call his “poop face.”  Since he’s still in diapers, he's all to eager to proclaim when he's done the dirty deed.  “Poo poo mama,” he’ll say to announce it.  I don’t need him to tell me, it’s pretty obvious what he’s doing when he's doing it.  He does the same thing every time he goes.  He’ll find a quiet, unassuming corner of the house.  He’ll get a very serious look on his face, concentrating intently on “something over there.”  Then he’ll turn red and begin a very dramatic series of grunts and pushes.  If he’s really into it, he’ll grab onto something and hold on for dear life until he’s done.  And when he’s done, he’ll simply get up and go on playing just as if nothing's happened.  He’ll announce, “Poo-poo mama!” like an exclamation point to his big finish.  And right now he’s going through a phase where he hates to have his diapers changed, so I have to convince him that his butt stinks and that mama needs to clean him up so he won’t be “covered in ca-ca.”  The word “ca-ca” cracks him up long enough for me to change his diaper.  You say it and try not to laugh.

See, if I had any filter at all, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you all of this.  I wouldn’t have mentioned the word poop or poo-poo eleven times, oops, thirteen, in this one single blog entry.  This is all part of being a parent, isn’t it?  The good, the bad, and the downright disgusting parts of the experience.  I like to think of it as “baptism by fire,” or in other words “baptism by ca-ca.”  You can use your own discretion and call my stories inappropriate, or gross, if you want to.  To me, it's just another perfectly normal conversation about poop.

Fourteen…