On Shit

Parenting has taught me so much shit about shit.

Back in the wilderness years of parenthood, when my oldest was still in nappies, my wife made a discovery that’s lived rent free in my head ever since. She was changing a nappy, before stumbling upon a sight that would haunt her for the rest of her days.

In amongst the sloppy turds, undigested…

A dead cockroach.

Yep, that’s right. Legitimately, my wife found the fermenting corpse of a cockroach nestling in the soft poop between my child’s buttcheeks and his nappy. An encounter made worse by the fact my wife suffers from a very real and intense phobia of cockroaches. As you might imagine, she freaked out. Big time.

I’m still not sure how the cockroach got in there. Best case scenario it crawled in there, got ensnared in a turd nest, and choked to death. Worst case scenario my child ate the cockroach, had the whole thing pass through his digestive tract, and then shat it out. 

In the words of Kanye West, “I guess we’ll never know.”

I use this horrific anecdote to express one of the most brutal core experiences of parenthood – the inevitable way parents can become completely desensitised to shit. Literal shit.

Buried knee deep in poop trauma, we thousand-yard-stare their way through a life packed full of daily encounters with shit that would make normal human beings violently dry heave.

Before kids I couldn’t even smell someone else’s shit without wanting to vomit. My mum would gleefully regale me with tales of the endless butt wiping she had to do when she was a junior nurse. Back then I couldn’t comprehend the mental fortitude required to do something like that on a daily basis. 

Now, post kids, I truly believe – if required – I could wipe any ass on this planet without blinking. No ass is safe. I could do it. I will do it.

Ask a parent. Any parent. I guarantee you they’ve got a story about shit that would make non-parents gag. 

We’ve scooped droopy, waterlogged shits out of baths more times than we care to count. We’ve changed nappies. We’ve been peed on, barfed on. Some have literally been shit on by their own children and it was just another day at the office.

Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash

I remember one dark night, home alone, dealing with an accidental bath poop. There I was, scooping shit out of the bathtub, only to find my 16 month old had been wandering around our apartment, stealthily dropping more turd bombs, somehow getting his feet in it, and then tramping crap into the deep crevices of every carpet in the flat. 

I remember following his shitty little footprints around the house, like a warped, poopy Sherlock Holmes, magnifying glass in hand, trying to make sure I got it all, while my toddler ran around butt naked, cackling like a cacodemon.

Folks, I’ve seen some shit.

You don’t get to that fugue state by accident. It’s a slow process, anchored by a commitment all parents make when they bring a child into the world. If there is shit on your child, or a pile of shit created by your child, no-one else is going to clean it. Not your mum, not your dad or your teacher or your boss – you. This shit is your responsibility and if you don’t do it, no-one will.

It’s a special realisation that applies to multiple facets of parenthood, but especially shit. No-one can get you out of this bind, no use calling your buddies. At the end of the day, this shit is yours and yours alone and you must bear that burden.

In a weird way it’s made me more responsible in all facets of life. For want of a better term, it’s made me more of an “adult”. In times when figurative shit hits the figurative fan, I’m more prepared for it, far less likely to buckle under the pressure, far more likely to work through challenges that, once upon a time, would have felt insurmountable.

Because once you’ve picked a fermenting cockroach corpse from a poop-drenched nappy, there’s nothing — I repeat nothing — you cannot do.