Going Potty
rad, you'd better come up here and take a look at this!" Marsha called
from the baby's nursery.
Rolling his eyes, Bradley Martlin put down his Sports Illustrated. His wife had become such an alarmist about their new daughter since they had brought the infant home, and this made it five times during the past week that Marsha had called downstairs to him with her emergency du jour. The man had no choice. If he did not turn up alongside little Kelsey's crib within the next thirty seconds Marsha would go into her meltdown sequence. That kind of thing was typical for new mothers, or so he had read in one of the several thousand parenting books Marsha had purposely left for him in the bathroom, something with an au rigueur title like Why Your Pig of a Husband Hates You and Your Baby Enough to Kill Both of You.
"Ba-rad!"
His rational self felt no real need to run up the stairs, but he took them two at a time anyway. That twisted logic had been the result of that other self, the one who had gone thumbing through the various books his wife had strategically planted, femalespeak books titled Men Who Hate Women and the Women Who Love Them for Hating Them, or some such twaddle. Their authors existed only to convince every woman on the planet that all men belonged to that exclusive male club, Jerks R Us. Failing to go through the proper motions at a time like this would identify Bradley Martlin as a card carrying member.
He found Marsha inside the nursery standing by the door with little Kelsey clutched close to her breast. She stood clear across the room from the baby's bassinet, holding her daughter's face tightly against her as if she were protecting the infant from something she did not want her to see.
"What have we got this time? Another Picasso inside her Pampers? Or maybe a Rorschach of shit?" Brad asked. Realizing his levity went unappreciated, Brad reached for the infant. "Well, let's have a look--"
Marsha did not release her. Freeing one hand to point, she redirected her husband's attention to the tiny bassinet.
"It's not the baby - - - It's what's inside her crib! Just look!"
Brad knew better than to ask any questions when his wife had slipped into second gear, although he perceived no real emergency situation. Certainly, none that had required him to put down that article on O.J. and Nicole, one of those few couples who might have benefited from reading his wife's books. Marsha remained behind him as he approached the crib. Peeking into it, Brad saw exactly what he had expected to see.
"Your basic Yankee dandy doodle, right? The kid somehow bypassed her diaper completely this time. Neat trick. Well, not so neat, really, seeing as I'm on the poop patrol tonight. How did our little dividend manage--?"
"No, Brad! Look closer! Look at what that thing she left inside the crib is doing!"
Having no idea what he was looking for, Brad leaned forward to study the foul smelling coil of glop. This was not among the more pleasant requirements of a '90's husband and father. But if sticking his nose into his kid's ca-ca was what being liberated was about, then Bradley Martlin was up to the task. Hell, in less enlightened times men had to ride into the jaws of death to prove their manhood to their women, or at least smash beer cans into their forehead to make that point to the other males of the tribe. By comparison, sniffing baby poo was a breeze, although not a very fresh one.
Brad looked closely at the tiny pile inside the crib. His eyes opened wide and his mouth fell open.
"What the---?"
This particular poo - his daughter's poo, for Chrissakes - was moving , squirming like some sort of little brown worm upon the baby's Sesame Street sheets. It curled itself first into the letter 'S' directly under Miss Piggy's snout then uncurled into an 'I,' leaving a thin dark mustache in its wake as it made its way snail-like across the sheet.
Brad heard his wife mutter something, but Marsha's words seemed distant echoes to which he hardly gave notice as he watched the shit-thing squirm around inside his daughter's crib. He did not know whether to grab the Barney table lamp and smash the moving glop right into Kermit's mouth or to snap on the camcorder and call America's Funniest Home Videos.
"This is insane," he said, realizing how ludicrously inadequate his words sounded. But Marsha probably had not even heard them.
"It crawled out of the baby's diaper!" she babbled at him. "I saw it stick its--its head out like it was exploring or something. Then it noticed me and it just--it just uncoiled and stood erect and--and stared!" Marsha's voice was more gasp than speech as if she were trying to talk through scuba gear. "I pulled the baby from her crib before it could do anything to her. Brad? What is that thing in her crib?"
"It's shit," he offered, and immediately felt ridiculous saying it. Like the old joke, it looked like shit, it smelled like shit . . .
Beyond that, Brad had no idea. The 'thing' was no larger than a cheese doodle, yet it had managed to lock on to the baby's Pebbles Flintstone rattle and was struggling with it, dragging it across the crib in what seemed to be its mouth. As it coiled itself again like a snake, Brad looked closer at the stinking worm-thing born of his daughter's most recent deposit into her didee. The little crap-creature had a mouth, all right, and inside that mouth it also had tiny pinhead teeth as if it were an elongated mumpy version of PAC MAN.
When its mouth opened wide the rattle fell from it, and the finger puppet head rose like a periscope, fixing its site straight at Brad. It opened its maw, slowly displaying rows of tiny jagged teeth that Brad had to squint at to see. The squirming fecal creature writhed toward him, leaning forward while lowering its head as if readying itself to strike. The tiny mouth opened wide.
Brad considered going for his .22 even though he had assured Marsha he had gotten rid of it. He would keep that option open if a worst case scenario developed that required a crap shoot. Right now he required a more immediate plan.
"Turn out the light!" Brad shouted to his wife, backing away from the bassinet.
"What? Why would you want to--?"
"Damn it, Marsha! I think it sees me and I have no idea what it is. Turn out the goddamned light and let me think this out!"
Brad realized his faux pax before he completed his sentence. Shouting at your women in the '90's was practically Neanderthal behavior in an age of equal partnership, especially when that woman looked as if she might be about to spill her cookies. But he was too late. His shouts had disturbed the baby while pissing off the mother.
Kelsey let out a loud cry. She wanted back into her crib, but that was not a realistic option at the moment. Marsha rocked the baby gently, whispering her secret mother-to-child babble into the infant's ear until her cries became little gurgles of delight. Marsha did not say a word to Brad, nor had she turned out the light. Her anger would pass, of course, the moment she realized that in the last few minutes Brad had graduated from provider to protector of his family. Some traditions never really changed.
Whatever lunacy was going on, at least Kelsey seemed all right. Brad knew he was going to have one hell of a time explaining to Dr. Ferris what his daughter had excreted from her tiny poop chute.
"Marsha . . . the light, okay?" Brad asked again, his tone noticeably more agreeable.
Holding the infant even tighter than before, Marsha turned out the light and pressed herself against the wall that was farthest from the bassinet. Brad spoke to her from across the darkened room, carefully keeping his tone almost conversational, even with the squirming wad that had frozen in attack position less than three feet from where he stood.
"Okay, good. Now get the flashlight from the top drawer and shine it here when I give you the signal. Maybe if I momentarily blind it--" The idiocy of what was happening almost made him laugh like a mad man. Here he was, a grown man of thirty, trying to outwit a steaming turd.
He slowly approached the crib again and listened to hear if the thing inside it was moving.
"Okay. Shine it now!"
Given the lunatic events of the evening, Brad half expected the fecal thing to take this opportunity in the sudden spotlight to sing "Mammy."
Brad acted quickly. In the thick wash of light he grabbed the tiny sleeping pad from the crib and folded it over on itself, creating a fecal sandwich. He hoped that the sudden high-powered glare had turned the odds to his advantage and that he could dispose of the dazed turd he had caught inside the pad before it realized what was happening. He applied pressure as he squeezed the pad together, hoping that he might crush the creature inside like a little muddy pancake. Not taking any chances, he lifted the pad and its sheets from the bassinet while Burt and Ernie smiled back at him in the glow of the high beam.
"Okay," he said, turning to his wife. "Let's get rid of this thing and hope we don't get any more nasty surprises while I'm transporting it."
"Where are you taking it?" Marsha asked, and Brad could not help sneering at the question.
"It's shit, for Chrissakes! Where do you think I'm taking it? Me and this little fudgicle are going to do some bathroom bowling!"
Brad could feel it struggling from within the folded sleeping pad as he carried it to the bathroom, and for a moment he felt a ridiculous empathy for the wad of waste he had captured. The mind works in ludicrous ways, he thought. For one insane moment he felt as if he were about to carry out some truly awful act, something akin to drowning his daughter's kitten in the toilet bowl. But such maternal thoughts had no place inside the head of a rational man, not even a man who had read those damned books.
He scolded himself. Just do it! Flush the little brown bastard and be done with it!
Hovering over the toilet Brad opened the sleeping pad, and the flattened brown glop slid directly into the blue water below. Marsha had obviously recently had the Tidy Bowl Man over to take a spin inside their sparkling john. Luckily he and his little motorboat had departed the blue waters of Lake Shitty Ca-Ca, because there was a good chance that what Brad had just dumped into the porcelain appliance would rise from the surf like the Loch Ness Monster and eat the little sucker.
It made a weak sound going in, just the faint plink of a baby turd that hardly seemed worth the effort Brad was expending. Still holding Kelsey, Marsha approached the bowl to watch the aquatic drama from over her husband's shoulder.
"Aren't you going to flush it?" she asked.
The question was asinine, but Brad did not answer. Instead he watched the thing struggling inside the bowl, disappearing for a moment beneath the blue water and then rising briefly to the surface.
"It can't swim for shit," he said without smiling at his accidental joke.
A crazy thought suddenly crept into Brad's consciousness, although once he recognized it was there he realized it had been there from the start. He turned to his wife and immediately knew that she had been thinking the same thing. He almost believed they could say the words together, and he dreaded having to say them.
"What if Kelsey does it again? I mean, what if every time our daughter drops a load she creates another one of those things? We should get some medical opinion on this, Marsha. I don't have the slightest idea what to do."
Marsha clutched at the infant as if she suddenly perceived danger. The baby had fallen asleep in her mother's arms, but Marsha had not loosened her grip at all.
"No! They'll only tell us that our little girl is a freak! They'll study her like she's a laboratory rat, and no one will want to come near her. What are we supposed to do, hide her from the entire world because of this?"
Sounding as if she were about to short out with her next sentence, Marsha tried to regain some composure by biting down hard on her lip. When she spoke again Brad knew she had already made her decision.
"We can't tell anyone about this, Brad. If we do, Kelsey will never lead a normal life. We can't tell anyone. Never. Not anyone."
Of course, he knew Marsha was right. He had no desire to see Kelsey become part of a television trailer that announced "Potty animals . . . Next on Geraldo!"
Still, suppose that creature had been a warning that there was something seriously wrong with their daughter, something that demanded immediate medical attention? Suppose that crawling chunk of crap had been living inside her before she had expelled it? What harm might it have done to her internally? Maybe someone who knew about these things - if anyone did - ought to have a look at her before he flushed the turd to its final reward.
There was something else to consider, something that had been rattling around in the basement of his mind like a neglected pit bull since this whole episode started. What about the next time? Little Kelsey could drop another log any minute now. What about tomorrow, and the day after that? The rational male that still resided inside Bradley Martlin's brain could not remain silent about that.
"Marsha, you know we can't let our daughter keep dropping these things for the rest of her life. We should at least let Dr. Ferris examine Kelsey and take a look at what she did, even if the man has both of us committed. We have to consider what could happen to Kelsey when she's older and those wads are large enough to tap dance right out of the bathroom. What do we do then? Pass them off as pets? We can't endanger her, and we can't endanger ourselves. There's no telling what we've got here, so maybe before we flush it we should--"
He stopped himself. It had gotten mighty quiet inside their john.
Together the couple looked down and each stared open mouthed at what they saw. If Brad or Marsha were able to speak there would have been no words either of them could have found to say. In a day filled with impossibilities, one more awaited them within their toilet bowl.
The tiny wad floated on the surface as relaxed as if it were enjoying a day at the country club. In the span of the few moments during the couple's dispute it had taught itself to stay afloat. Toss it a little rubber raft and a Sony Walkman and it would have made itself right at home as if the crappy little bastard had toilet trained itself.
"That does it!" Marsha shouted. "It's going down right now!" She pushed past her husband and, still clutching the baby, hit the appliance's handle. The whirlpool spun the wad around the bowl several times, and for a moment Brad almost expected it to let out a feeble "Help me! Help me!" as it got sucked into the vortex. In the next instant it disappeared down the hole. The toilet burped and refilled with clear blue water.
An awkward silence followed while the couple simply stared at the empty gullet of the bowl. For the time being their ordeal had ended, at least until they explored whatever new surprise their daughter had left for them in her Pampers. One thing was for certain. The next time anyone passed wind around him, Brad was going to be looking over his shoulder.
Brad moved first. He washed off the pad and returned it to the baby's crib, and Marsha lowered Kelsey into it, draping a fresh blanket over her. The infant was already asleep and they stood over her watching her curl into a tiny ball. Brad knew the next thing he had to say, and he knew Marsha had known it too. There was really no getting around it.
"There's something you have to tell me, isn't there? It isn't like you not to fly to the phone to call the doctor the second you think there's something wrong with Kelsey, but you just reacted as if I'd suggested an exorcism. This whole time I've been going out of my mind trying to figure out how something like this could happen, if maybe we had made a mungo screw-up in her formula or something. But it isn't anything like that, is it? All those times in the bathroom with the door locked, it wasn't because of your girlish modesty, was it?"
Brad already knew the answer. He would have called back his words if there had been any other way to say them, but he knew there was no other way. He took Marsha into his arms and could feel her trembling.
"I'm so ashamed!" she moaned into his chest. "It's been so hard keeping it from you all this time. No one in my family could understand it---It just happened when I was a little girl, a little older than Kelsey. Tonight I saw it had passed on to our daughter, and I just---I just panicked. But I've managed to live with it, Brad. I swear it. I've been careful all my life and I know there's no danger to our daughter if we just teach her how to deal with this. I never wanted anyone to think of me as a freak, Brad, and I never want anyone to think of our daughter as one. Can you understand that? It's just potty training, you know? That's all we have to do. We can teach Kelsey how---if only we---"
The tears came, and Brad stroked his wife's hair. Holding her face in both hands he looked at her. Her eyes had gone red and she was shivering in his arms. Like the old Chinese proverb said, it was time for him to either shit or get off the pot.
"We'll work this thing out, the three of us," he said and kissed her lightly on her cheek. "Shit happens, right?"
Brad brought a smile to Marsha's face right in the midst of her tears.
"Every day," she said, and almost in full grin added, "Regularly."
He held his wife more tightly than he had in months.
Phil Donahue would have been proud.
