Sigma Delta Dirty

My Mom picked my nose. That’s the thought that comes to mind as I’m staring down the face of the enemy: my son’s poo. This is certainly not his first, it’s just the first one I’ve dropped on the floor, in the middle of the night, while bracing my squiggly kid on his changing table, in the dark. So I guess I’m not staring it down, more like sniffing it down while trying to keep my kid semi-sleepy enough so he’ll go back to sleep which means I can go back to sleep and hopefully not have another night where I wake up with a face that looks like Bea Arthur’s ass cheeks.

I’ve got two options, 1: pick the kid up, turn on the light, find a Kleenex or whatever I can find akin to a Has-Mat suit with which I can pick up the errant poo, but maybe arouse my arousable kid into thinking 3 am is playtime, or 2: put one hand on the kid’s belly while bending down and using my other, BARE, hand to pick up his poo. My Mom picked my nose, I tell myself over again. She picked my nose, wiped my butt, cleaned my puke, and lived to tell about it. Hmm. I don’t need sleep, do I? My kid doesn’t need sleep, does he? Just turn on the light, walk down the…No, I need sleep. Okay, you can do it. Your Mom did it. You’ll touch worse. You’ve touched worse; remember college? That date with the guy you called Sigma Delta Dirty? That was gross, this is just…

I don’t like creepy crawly things. I’m not a bug person, I’ll go inside if a bee is within 10 feet of me, and I won’t sleep in a house with a spider unless it’s a dead spider whose demise I’ve witnessed. My sisters and I don’t like anything creepy yet our Mom seems to have no problem. On a family vacation to Hawaii, my sisters, and I spent 5 hours in the middle of the night trying to find a Gecko who’d made his bed on my bed. Lest you’re no Gecko expert, I’ll tell you that Geckos specialize in camouflaging themselves; blending in is their forte. Armed with a tennis racket, my Mom walked over, decapitated said Gecko then scooped up the guts, head, and legglets, flushed them down the toilet, and went to bed without so much as an “Eeeew” or “ Groooooos.”

For whatever reason my childhood house seemed to make a regular, pleasant, home for orphaned spiders looking for company. Maybe it was the Northern California climate or maybe the house was the “Motherland” of spiders, but we’d always have some. Invariably, one of us wasn’t going to sleep because of some creature hanging out in a ceiling corner. Me, I was sure the spider would have a kegger on my face or get cozy in my ear if I were to go to sleep in it’s presence. So, I’d call for Mom, she’d come upstairs and with the swift, graceful, move of Bruce Lee, she’d snuff it out and go about her business. But me, not so much.

Still to this day, I have to brace myself when around anything creepy or crawly. Maybe a spider will suddenly jump up at me, tear my face off, and I’ll live a sad, faceless life. An unaccounted for spider in my house once caused me to consider sleeping in a hotel and a rogue mouse who found his way up my middle of the night leg, caused me to spend the next summer month sleeping with the lights on while wearing a turtle neck, leggings, knee socks, and ski cap. I don’t do gross…of any kind.

And while my Mom was a self appointed Spider Murderess and savant at puke pickup, I am having trouble with my duty of touching my kid’s doody. This kid of mine makes something creepy, crawly, or crappy come out of his body all the time and I’m starting to feel like a sewage worked without the double-time on Sunday’s or sweet Union benefits. Sure, I knew there’d be poop. In the beginning it’s not so bad, it’s like the kid shits the inside of a pumpkin. But put a baby on solid food and suddenly you’re in for a whole different kind of thing.

This would be fine if I didn’t have to touch any of this stuff with my actual skin. And short of wearing gloves and a mask around my kid, I’m in for some touchy feely poop and pee time. In fact just the other night, while changing my kid’s drawers he giggled, so I giggled, only to learn that he was giggling because he was peeing. And my giggling back provided him the perfect opportunity to perform a urinary lay-up and tinkle right in my mouth. That’s creepy and crawly.

And now I’m faced with the dropped poop. I can’t honestly leave it there, not only for the cleanliness/disease issues with comes with crap, but for the fact that I’ll undoubtedly forget about it and step in it in the wee morning hours. That’s even more poop touch then I’d bargained for. I can’t wake my husband and say, “Sorry to wake you but the other shoe has dropped and it’s small and stinky.” And I’m fairly certain that if I call the police, we’ll differ on the definition of emergency. So I’m stuck. Either the kid wakes up or I’m going commando on poop touch time.

And so off I go. One hand on the baby’s belly, the other hand going in for the fecal rescue. Like those Swift Water Teams that rescue kid’s from surfing days gone awry, I smoothly pick up the poo, open the garbage with my nearest foot, drop it in, and close the lid. Mission accomplished. Much to my surprise, it’s not that bad. In fact, it’s really not bad at all. It’s sort of a non-issue. Now I get how Mom could clean up or kill all the creepy crawlies in our lives, she had to. Her kids’ comfort was more important than her own and she didn’t have time to be groused out or scared, she just had a mission she needed to swiftly accomplish.

The hard part about being a Mom is you don’t really ever get any time off. There’s no three-day weekend for Mommies. But the good thing about that is you don’t have time for silly issues and fears that plagued you before. In a world of people who compete for who’s busier, new Moms probably win. Even the President gets time off; in this President’s case, a lot of time off. But Mom, not so much. And so with a lack of time comes higher priorities. How and who am I going to spend my time? A spider becomes just a ten second thing you need to deal with on a list of many. Moms just don’t have time to be scared.

With the poo issue behind us, I clean up my kid’s behind. In the dark of the night my boy looks at me and giggles. I swear he’s laughing at me for making such a big deal of nothing so I giggle back. True to form, he gets me, right in the mouth. I just got a warm shot of kid pee. Oh well, I’ll live. Now let’s just hope there are no spiders in his room. Poop and pee I can handle, but creepy crawly things, now that’s gross.