The cult of poo

[Many thanks to all those who tune in to this blog from time to time, and many much more thanks to those who take time to write comments. Sorry I don't respond to them like I should. Nevertheless I enjoy hearing about the associations you have when you read this stuff. And now a warning: Today's entry is gross. As the title suggests, it's about poo and associated bodily phenomena. If you're squeamish, I would direct you to a safer blog, like any of these ones about cute cats and the cute things they do. You have been warned.]

Over the past few weeks we’ve been working with Ben, our oldest, to get him excited about walking to school with his sister, which is kind of like trying to get an eight year-old boy excited about the tax code. Customarily Ben leaves ten minutes early so he can play on the space net with his friends before school starts; asking him to walk with Lydia is asking him to sacrifice space net time. It’s also asking him to endure Lydia’s Tom Bombadil-like dilly-dallying–her frequent pauses to pick up sticks, stand like a statue, or look heavenward and bellow like a lonely cow. She’s a jolly girl most mornings, but these distractions, as you might have guessed, drive Ben to grind his teeth practically to powder.

Actually, he’s been pretty good now that the space net is covered in snow. In fact Ben and Lydia often show signs of actually liking each other, especially when they collude on toilet taboo talk, which happens pretty much every day. Heaven help you if Lydia’s within earshot when you say the words behind, gas, rear, or even butter or brown. Say the common word “brown” and Lydia falls into manic chortling and turns to Ben and says, “Brown! Get it, Ben? BROWN??“

Ben contributes to this taboo talk by inventing ostensibly safe euphemisms so that he and Lydia can sneak past the censors. We already tolerate the silly word toot for all the gastric noise we make around the house; now Ben wants to add doop and treat (as in, “Something smells like doop around here!” and “Bentley the dog left a treat on the lawn”). Lydie and Ben relish in this talk—it really brings them together as sister and brother, providing the laxative, so to speak, that gets their friendship running smoothly. Alas.

I had no idea before I had children how much of my time and conversation would be taken up with scatological phenomena. To provide an exhaustive list of my observations would be tedious and, well, gross, but a few insights might be useful here. Earlier in Spring I remember Lydia coming up the stairs to tell us that Louisa had pooped on the floor in their bedroom, like a puppy, and that Lydia had stepped in it. Being the helpful older sister she was, she ran up the carpeted stairs to tell us all about it, leaving little brown footprints as she went. Since I had chicken to marinate, Amy went down with the bottle of Pet Resolve Carpet Cleaner, a dear friend over the years. We’ve cleaned many a brown-green smudge from carpet, wood floor, car seat, bike seat, playground swing, slide, kitchen counter, tub, bed, and lap. Grace be the day it’s a simple log, a king-size Tootsie Roll, picked up in a wink with a wet wipe and rolled into the toilet. But we’ve had explosions too. Infants make the most dramatic explosions that fly out the back of the diaper and go straight up to whatever hair they have. As much as you want to gag, there’s something sublime in it. You turn the baby and see a Grey Poupon (“Get it?” Lydia would holler) streak soaked through the shirt from bum to neckline.

Alternately infants can do their business with maddening stealth, leading to the revolting, but necessary, practice of pulling out the back of their diapers to look for deposits or lifting them up so their diapered fannies touch your nose and taking a whiff. Watch what happens at church when an unpleasant odor starts to spread: Parents everywhere either look down a child’s pants or smell their rear ends to sniff out the culprit. I guess that’s why they call them pews.

Though Louisa’s getting the hang of this whole potty thing, she cannot yet be fully trusted to go Number 2 in the Number 1 place to do it. Therefore, we are in the midst of the Third Celebration of the Cult of Poo in our ten-year marriage. The Cult of Poo begins with the Buying of the Underwear, bedecked with Disney characters that, within twenty-four hours, will be streaked with excrement, making Ariel, The Little Mermaid, indistinguishable from Jabba the Hut. The next stage in the ritual is the Potty Chair. The Potty Chair becomes the locus of our worship, the nexus where heaven and earth meet, the shrine of hope. When the ritual begins, we all run to the Potty Chair holding our bellies. Oh we have to go so bad! And where do we go? In our pants? No! That’s what babies do! We go on the toilet! That’s what we all do! Where does brother Ben go? The toilet! Where does mother go? The toilet! Where does Lydia go, even though she never uses the flush technology? The toilet! Where does T-Rex go? The toilet! (Then Mother brings T-Rex and puts him on the Potty and makes splashy, squirty noises.) And if you go on the toilet, we’ll give you a gummy worm! And if you go on the floor again, we’ll make you eat it!

That last part’s not true. With Louisa we have never had to force her to eat her own feces. She has done that herself in the tub.

My mom told me once that a doctor assured her he had never sent a kid to kindergarten who didn’t know how to Go. I have every confidence Louisa will learn to be a sanitary human before Child 4 comes and we have to start the whole yucky thing all over again. After all, we have the poo chart. Louisa gets a Scooby-Doo (“DOO??” shouts Lydia) sticker every time she performs her miracle. When she completes one line of stickers, mom pulls from the cupboard a package of big glossy Kung-Fu Panda stickers and Louisa gets to pick one.

Her brother and sister offer moral support by chanting the taboo words over and over, in spite of the stinkeye they get from their parents.

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