Tuesday, May 15, 2018

Poop City. Population: You

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about motherhood the other day.
She jokingly suggested that we change the title of mother to "fecal manager," because all we do is clean up poop, all the poop, in every form.

Yes.

This is really a post about shit.

So turn away if you are like I used to be, someone who might identify as fecal-phobic.

If you're still here, you were warned.

When you sign on to have a child, you are aware, in the abstract, that you will be forced, as a kind of payment for the amazing wonder of bringing a child into this world, to deal with their poop. You comprehend the idea, but you'd rather not think about it. You buy diapers and marvel at their smallness. You decide you want to do cloth diapers or biodegradable diapers. You've read that diapers make up some horrific percentage of landfills, and you refuse to be part of that problem.
You get up on that pulpit reserved for not-yet-parents and you sway with the conviction of your gospel.
You forget about everything else.

You forget you have a cat and that the cat poops.
You are allowed to forget that the cat poops because the cat poops into a convenient little box that you rake once every couple of days (or weeks if you're lazy). If you're extra lucky, you get to pass that task to your partner while you're pregnant because toxoplasmosis is a thing now.
You forget you have a dog.
In the world before you have a child, bringing yourself to pick up your dog's poop in a little plastic bag is the epitome of filth.
You place two, maybe three bags over your hand and you still shudder with revulsion as your claw closes around the turd. You scamper to the nearest trash barrel and fire it like a missile from your person.
If you're really honest, a lot of the time, you run off with your dog before anyone can notice she did anything.

You hate poop.
A lot.

When you have a baby, your entire view of poop changes.
The first few days you are concerned with the baby doing it at all, what they expel is important, the frequency with which is leaves them is also notable. The amount is comparable to what they pour onto sanitary napkins in commercials, which is to say, not much, and taken care of quickly and easily.

Then you leave the hospital, the changes are still novel, and you're still very concerned with them. You're surprised with how clinically you regard them actually, but there's this weird feeling that the baby is still part of your body, and watching its functions is akin to popping your zits. You're a little grossed out, but more fascinated that you produced something capable of producing other things. It's like a magic trick inside a russian nesting doll.
But it's also poop.
You don't forget that.
It just doesn't bother you as much...yet.

The bothering actually sneaks up on you.

It shivers through you when your partner returns to work, and you change a diaper blowout at 6:30am, which takes a while because there are washings and wipings and outfit swaps that must take place. You come into the kitchen and the dog has peed all over the floor because you didn't get her out early enough and your partner forgot, since you always used to get the dog out before the baby was born.
You feel extra skeeved out by cleaning up the pee because you have to do it while the baby is strapped to you.
What if a microscopic fleck of dog pee gets on your baby?!!! You wash your hands eight times.

You take the dog out and conveniently forget to pick up her poop because you've already had to deal with enough today.

Then a couple of months later, as you're dragging the dog away from her latest deposit, trying to adjust a larger baby in his sling, attempting to juggle the leash and the house key and your phone as well, a woman comes out and yells at you for not picking up your dog's poop. You point at your baby. She says, "I don't care."
You clumsily use your shoe to kick the poop off her lawn into a storm drain while she folds her arms and watches.
You hold the tears back until you are back to your driveway.

A year later, your kid is wearing the horrible landfill diapers like every other kid.
You gave up on biodegradable after the six-blowouts-in-one-day day.

You're a bit more of a poop warrior now.
You've had it in your hair.
You've washed it out of so many shirts, you've stopped buying nice shirts unless you have to go somewhere, and you have three "going out shirts."
You've sieved turds out of your bathtub and tied onesies like shit-filled balloons and lobbed them right into the trash along with the diaper inside them because there isn't bleach enough in the world for that mess.
You've dealt with a stomach bug that ripped through you, your kid, and your husband and left you retching into a toilet, while you held your kid away from your face, and through it all, you thought about the diaper you would have to change when it was all done.

Oh fuck.
Someone has to clean the cat's box now, don't they?

And it's rancid when you get to it, because you genuinely forgot it existed until one June morning it smelled like ammonia and death and you were suddenly acutely aware that you didn't know the last time you bought litter.

You tie a rag over your face like you're in a dystopian movie and you wear gardening gloves, and the curse words you utter while the baby lumbers around his pack n' play in the other room, are the filthiest most offensive things you've ever said.

Another year goes by.
You've begun potty training the kid, but the dog is very old and doesn't make it outside at least once a day and relieves herself with no discrimination on the linoleum.
You're child knows to stop when he enters the kitchen and to point at whatever's desecration the floor. He can identify it by name even while you stoop to wipe the spot with antibacterial wipes, or scoop up the matter and then run a mop across the surface.
You clean your kitchen floor more times than you change your kid's diaper now, and you refuse to go barefoot into the room anymore.

Your potty training child has suddenly decided to lie about when he has to poop so you have to take your chances with diapers versus underwear, swimtrunks versus pull ups, or tarp versus hose.

Sometimes you use all of it, and there's still fucking poop in your hair.

You feel like you have to model good, responsible behavior for your kid, so you scoop up the dog poop every time you take her outside.
You clean the cat's box every thursday, which is trash day, and you haul a bag of landfill diapers and litter to the curb and apologize to the sky for fucking the planet up, and then stand there a minute and wonder what you used to do with your amazingly poop-free youth before your partner sends you a text that says,
Are you coming back?
It almost sends you into an existential crisis that question, and you have no answer for it because you'd be lying if you hadn't just considered running down the street in your pajamas and bare feet, running until you were far away, alongside a highway with your thumb out squinting into backseats to make sure there's no duct tape and chloroform waiting for you, but instead you return. You sniff your fingers, because you are convinced now that you smell of poop, everywhere, all the time.
You wash your hands.
You wipe the kitchen floor. You watch your red-faced son squat over a plastic bucket shaped like a frog and you have a canister of m&ms you shake him encouragingly.

You find yourself saying, "Come on, sweetie! Poop for Mummy!" with the kind of enthusiasm reserved for high school cheerleaders whose boyfriends have just miraculously recovered from cancer in time to be quarterback for the big game.


You sometimes look longingly at a bottle of wine at two in the afternoon, wondering if you have a glass if you'll turn into one of those moms from tv, and instead you lock yourself in the bathroom, ironically, and cry while your child watches some pixar monstrosity in the next room. You hope the emotionally manipulative soundtrack drowns out your heart wrenching sobs.

Then you sigh, and wash your face, and go back out there, and he greets you like you were gone for a thousand years, and you get kisses and hugs, and his little sweaty fists balled up into your armpits and ribcage and everything falls away for a little bit.
You sigh and you stop thinking about the future for a second, and you relax. Maybe you think about the fact that there are parents who would trade limbs to have their babies back with all the shitty diapers they could make.
Maybe you think about that time your parents talk about, when as a baby, you painted the walls of your crib with a booty blast to frighten for centuries.
Maybe you just close your eyes, and sniff your baby's little head and remind yourself someday, someday very soon, he'll be grabbing an apple after school, pecking you on the cheek, and running out the door to some mischief or another, and by then he should be potty trained...probably.

Then a little wistfulness mixes in with the sweet, hay and milk smell of baby hair and you think how odd it is that wistfulness smells so much like ammonia, and goddammit, when did you last buy litter?




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