It Stinks
I woke up to poo this morning.
It was barely 6 AM and my 4-year-old decided the warmth of a pee-soaked mattress was more comfortable than the hard coolness of a toilet seat. This happens far too often to appreciate the possibility of an accident. No, this is a worn-in mother’s acceptance of daily strife and predictable catastrophe.
Having a sensitive girl makes overreacting impossible. If I can calmly downplay each step of misery, we’ll get through this much more quickly — and hopefully with less shit on my hands.
There are now underpants in the sink, left to ripen as I have no time to bag them or rinse them out. My husband Tim is downstairs in the car waiting for us. He’s running a trail marathon in Big Basin today, and he’s already pissed off and anxious about being late, or because of some ambiguous, picayune thing I’ve done that he isn’t telling me about.
It’s most likely the latter.
A few smears were inevitable after having rushed a distressed and half-asleep child into the bathroom. I managed to disinfect the toilet seat with a few baby wipes, because I know I won’t get to bleaching anything later this evening.
Later this evening…I can’t even consider the anatomy of that scene yet.
Though changed, my daughter continues to sob, wetting her dry clothes again, and I would like to point out the futility of the exercise, but she seems keen on broadcasting our chaos. Somehow the smell of damp cotton resembles urine anyway, and I wonder if I can get away with not doing anything next time.
Tim honks the horn and it doesn’t sound friendly. But it’s kind of satisfying to potentially wake our neighbors who we’ve grown to dislike for their overuse of leaf-blowers every Saturday morning. I shuffle the kids out of the house and into the car.
Like any well-planning, hot-shot mom, I have a tote bag filled with snacks and a change of clothes ready to go at any moment. I ease myself into the passenger seat with a tender silence, hoping that the kids won’t ask for anything, or fight, or make any annoying sounds like talking, or breathing too hard, or, the worst of all, my son’s strange new tic of compulsively producing imaginary explosions. It sounds the same way it looks: weird.
I’d like to enjoy the quiet rising of the sun and the gradual commencement of day. But I smell poo.
The blossoming symphony of dawn is interrupted by a mild stench that rapidly becomes a striking stink after I put my fingers to my nose and realize I hadn’t washed them in my frenzy to exit the house. Baby wipes can’t even expunge this odor.
My daughter has brown on her fingers too, and now my entire delusional self-concept of “good mommy” has been fully dismantled. I’ve discovered how badly I struggle every day to keep my kids alive. I’m now thinking about E. coli and pink eye, and how I’m crossing my fingers for strong immune systems.
God, that smell…I’m getting used to it now.
