Shit Storm: or why I’m glad the DHS is too busy with ice addicted parents to worry about the merely incompetent
We’re toilet training Izzy, our wilful two-and-a-half-year-old. This is a boy who can make the same request 25 times a minute, for three straight hours, in the middle of the night. The plan had been to wait until he showed an interest. That’s what all the good parenting websites said to do and we were certainly going to be good parents. But then the volume of Izzy’s shit began to exceed the carrying capacity of his nappies.
So my long-suffering wife decided to push the moment to its crisis. If this was a metaphor, it would be a good one for the fate of all good parenting intentions — failure oozing out of the frilly white edges of a nappy — but actually it’s just a lot of shit on a neighbour’s carpet. So it’s mid-winter cold turkey underpants for Izzy, and a lot of laundry for his mother.
By way of further scene setting, at the particular moment I’m describing, we have clean, new sheets on the bed. Clean, new, expensive sheets. Nina and I don’t usually spend a lot of money on small objects, but every now and then when one or both of us really want something we’ll treat ourselves. These sheets were just such a treat. They were flannel — so they didn’t feel cold when you got in them, and very nice looking — and we’d never slept on them.
Nina is at the osteo, and I’m at home with the kids. Ada, our six-month old, is asleep but due to wake soon and I’m reading Izzy a story. Then I smell something — could be a fart, maybe not. I lift Izzy’s t-shirt without pausing the story and there’s a little tongue of pooh poking out of his pants, across his perfect pink skin.
It doesn’t look too bad and is quite well contained for the time being, so I finish the story, getting slightly agitated though because Ada is beginning to stir and I’m not sure how I’m going to deal with waking baby and shitty toddler.
I start getting Izzy onto the nappy change table, dealing with the usual level of protest and delay. By the time I get him lying on his back on the table we’re both pissed off, and Ada is starting to grizzle. I take his pants off, expecting a neat bum-crack-shaped turd.
But I discover that both legs are smeared thickly almost to the ankles. Izzy must have been aware of this through much of the story reading, but was far less perturbed by the sticky feeling than he was by the pending inconvenience of being cleaned and changed.
I start cleaning him in the usual way, with a small container of water and several wet cloths. He’s getting more and more upset and starting to flail his arms and legs with intent to harm. His cries of “Please stop Daddy, pleeeaaase,” make forced hygiene sound like child abuse, but I’m the one getting punched and kicked. Soon I’m clinging to his two ankles with one hand, wiping grimly with the other, his head and shoulders on the table, the rest of his body arched and thrashing like a shit-clad eel. Already the poo is dropping and spreading onto floor, change table and my personal personage, but despite the willingness of the outer layer to flick and fly, the last smears are very resistant to wiping.
At this point I’m getting nearly as stressed as Ada, who is screaming fit to burst, and I get this very fixed idea that the best way forward is a shower, for all three of us — to stay there in the cleansing warmth of it until Nina comes home. It’s a ridiculous course of action, because, for starters, how in their current states of literal and figurative shittiness, am I going to get one child, let alone both, to enter and remain in the shower? Plus, who knows how long we’ll be there, and what will I do with Izzy while getting Ada naked, and vice versa and everything else.
But it is, nevertheless, a course of action, a clear one, and a course that leads to a shit-free existence, a place of total, pink, smooth cleanliness to banish the total, brown, lumpy, filthiness of my current situation. So off we go, arms extend in front of me, carrying the flailing shit storm through the bedroom into the ensuite bathroom.
“We’re getting in the shower,” I say, as though those simple words will conjure up calm obedience like water in the desert. “No, we’re not!” says Izzy, bringing me back to reality with characteristic eloquence.
I take Izzy’s shirt off, leaving him naked, and then I make a decision that I am now at a total loss to explain. The decision to have a shower was stupid, that is clear, but I can understand the thoughts and feelings that lead to it. This next mistake is like a bolt of dumbness sent from heaven, a sudden flash of unsight that renders me blind to all reason —
I stand my poo-laden toddler on the bathroom floor,
I let him go,
and I turn my back.
Seconds pass before I experience a temporary lapse of dumbness and turn around to see what he’s doing.
He has clambered into the middle of our bed.
The plush new sheets are a lovely, milky, coffee brown. In Izzy’s wake is a series of unlovely, un-milky smears.
I fly into a not-quite-rage, a flurry of angry action. I lunge bedwards and yank him off it, thrusting him into the shower. He is screaming now, about the yank. I tear the expensive shit-stained sheets off the bed; drop them in the wash basket. I grab my daughter, again with undue force, again with an increase in screaming the predictable result, and plonk her on the surprisingly clean under-sheet of our bed, ready to strip her for the shower.
I’m naked by now. Can’t remember how I got there.
So, Izzy is in the shower, curled on the floor wining, long and high, almost a keen. Ada is on the bed screaming so hard she has to gasp for breath in between howls and I’m getting her clothes off.
Then lighting strikes a second time — another act of barely explicable dumbness. It seems at this point that shit is everywhere in my life except within those items designed to contain it. So I am genuinely surprised when removing Ada’s nappy lets a large turd roll out onto the sheet — onto the clean under-sheet I had just exposed. As stupid acts lead to frustrating results, so frustration leads to further stupidity, and so we go on a merry jig; harming small children and scattering faecal matter like confetti.
I pick up the turd (crossed that boundary long ago) and take a single large step into the bathroom to drop it in the toilet. Then I hear a thud, followed by a pause and the discovery of a new level of screaming intensity. I have abandoned my youngest child on the bed, and she has rolled off, landing face-first on the floor.
At this point I’m ready to join the kids and just lie on the floor and wale for a bit, but I don’t. I’m a father. I cuddle Ada, make a one-sentence phone call to my wife and step into the shower.
We’re there, no one is bleeding, and we’re slowly getting clean. My two little loves and I crouch together, naked in the wet warmth, clinging, sobbing, waiting for Mummy to come home.
