Raw Drip

Like most 2 1/2 year olds, Tabitha is in the midst of potty training. I had always heard that potty training girls was easier than boys. Honestly, potty training Adam was a piece of cake. So I envisioned a training experience for my daughter that would involve me providing a basic overview of the process, pointing at the toilet and the step stool and returning to find her washing and drying her hands, perhaps applying some lip balm in the mirror – potty training complete. However, I have totally underestimated the complexities of my daughter yet again.

Tabitha is nothing if not complicated. She loves fresh cooked or raw veggies and fruits, but she hates dried anything. She sleeps laid out like a vampire now, and yet refused to lay in her crib for the first 8 months of her life. As much as she loves to spin in her daddy’s desk chair, she detests being made dizzy. She makes a spectacle about going pee in the potty, but poops on the floor like it’s no big deal.

Pooping on the floor is something I occasionally expect to see from the dog. After all, he’s trapped in the house all day and his walkies are sporadic, at best. But the idea that my flirtatious, doll collecting, pink-wearing, cosmetics-loving, little tart would voluntarily stand in the middle of our living room, sans underwear, and take an enormous, stinking dump on the floor never occurred to me. But, to her credit, as soon as she was done, she casually walked in and mentioned that there was poop on the floor suggesting that, “Somebody better clean that up…”

I’ve read books about child development that discourage parents from saying anything that would make your child feel shameful about soiling themselves, particularly during the potty training process. But no where does it mention applying some shame for soiling the floor. Still, I resisted the urge to say, “What the f@#$, girlfriend? You’ve got this potty thing all wrong.” Instead, I tried to do what we parents do, and turn the situation into a learning moment by saying, in as perky a voice as I could muster, “Gosh, that’s disgusting, isn’t it? Where should that poop go?” To my disappointment, Tabitha, grinning from ear to ear shouted with confidence, “In a Pull-Up!” Sigh. I can see now that we have a long potty training road ahead of us.

Still, I can’t help but feel fortunate that the poop is being confined to the floor. Years ago, probably a good 8 or 10 B.C. now, Dick and I had a lunch with an old work colleague who, at the time, also had a 2+ year old girl in the middle of potty training. The poopy problem he was having with her was so awful, I’ve been trying to erase it from my mind ever since.

Apparently, when this guy’s kid would poop in her pants, she would secretly take them off, then carry the soiled undergarment into the family room and fling it upwards as hard as she could, towards the spinning ceiling fan overhead. Naturally, she was successful at splattering poop all over the familly room on numerous occasions. To our horror this guy told us that if we were to come over to his house for dinner, we’d still be able to find brown polka dots on the flowered wall paper in that room. How, um, appetizing. Let me tell you, that’s one dinner invitation I have no problem taking a pass on.

Telling you about how Tabitha poops on the floor is one thing, but informing potential dinner guests of our shitty little secret, is another thing all together. Poop should go in the potty, and crap confessions should stay in the can.

I can’t pinpoint exactly when it happened. Perhaps, it happened gradually. All I know is that one day, Dick and I were having mature, langorous, intelligent conversations with each other, and then the next day we weren’t.

We’ve all been taught that when couples stop talking, it’s a bad sign. Surely your relationship must be heading into Dr. Phil territory if you’re giving each other the silent treatment. Relationship silence brings to mind all those episodes where the husband tries to pin his philandering ways on his wife being frigid until Dr. Phil makes the weasel and his wife admit that their marriage was really lacking something much trickier – intimacy.

While Dr. Phil may or may not be in our future, it seems to me that the silence between Dick and me isn’t a non-expression of underlying hostilities, as much as it is escapism. Dick and I are on intimacy overload. We spend every waking moment in a constant state of heightened awareness of each other – communicating plans, strategizing, and organizing. You know why I think we’ve stopped talking? Two reasons – 1) Adam and 2) Tabitha.

From the moment our little offspring awaken, to the moment they finally surrender to sleep, they talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. Oh – and then there’s the talking. It’s a heckuva lot of talking. A ton of talking. It’s non-stop talking. It’s questions nested within questions kind of talking. Urgently shared observations on minutae such as the teeny-tiny, dessicated, dead bug on the window screen of their bedroom sort of talking. Even worse, it’s our own words being parroted back to us in a simultaneously gratifying and annoying display of attentiveness kind of talking.

I confess, there are days when I reach my talking limit at, like, 3 p.m. and for the next 5 hours, it’s all I can do to not scream at them, “Shut up, shut up, shut-the-f#$% up!!!” I’ve never actually screamed that at anyone – leave alone my family – but oh, the temptation is so there.

Silly woman that I am, I still ocassionally forget that we’re parents now and have no right to free speech. I find myself foolishly beginning a conversation with my husband, only to come face to face with the harsh reality of constant interruptions from chattering children. After a half-dozen failed attempts and false starts, I’m forced to surrender to the verbal tsunami saying wistfully to Dick, “Never mind, dear. I’ll tell you when the children are in college…”

Maybe I should be more concerned about our new silent togetherness. If I bought into the female stereotypes, I would believe that it’s against my nature to value the absence of conversation in a relationship. Aren’t women supposed to be the talkers? Maybe so. Someday I’ll have to throw out that topic to Dick and see what he has to say. But, right now, I’m enjoying the fabulous sound of the dishwasher humming and the plasticky tap-tap-tapping sounds of my fingers brushing accross the keyboard and my brain, exhausted from another day spent fighting off the urge to slap duct tape over the mouths of my own children, is finally saying, “Shut the f@#$ up and go to bed.” Good advice, indeed.

Any woman will tell you that the annual trip to her gynecologist doesn’t rank very high on her scale of fun ways to spend an afternoon. I don’t care how great, gentle, kind or cute your doctor is, it’s just not fun being subjected to a clinical investigation of one’s nether regions.

So when the highlight of my most recent visit involved Dr. G saying, “Well THAT looks interesting…”, in my mind, something had gone shockingly wrong.

My husband checking out the goodies should elicit such an enthusiastic expression of interest. But to think, after all the genitalia my OB/GYN had undoubtedly seen, that I’d have something so remarkable going on down there that it would merit comment – even the word “interesting” no less. Well, that just made me nervous.

Using my elbows to prop myself up, to my relief, I could see that the comment had been uttered not as he was examining me, but as he was hunched over my file reviewing my ultrasound results from early May.

“Yes, this is very, interesting. It looks like the exam you had in New Jersey in February stated that your left ovary is missing, but it’s definitely present on the ultrasound we did here a few weeks ago.”

What? How could this be? This was shocking to me. It was even more astonishing than the brief prospect that my genitalia was somehow so hideous as to merit comment. How could my ovary go missing and then just return? Aren’t organs, more reliable than that? Couldn’t that be a sign of disease or something, that my organs leave and come back? Surely that kind of unreliability in an organ should be cause for alarm, right?

When I pointed out my concerns, Dr. G looked at me with an odd expression and said, “Actually, your organ probably never went anywhere, it was just obscured. But we do find, from time to time, particularly with ovaries, that the organ may atrophy and be absorbed by the body. That just wasn’t the case for you.”

“Okay, so my left ovary never went anywhere and now you’re telling me it’s been there all along. Presumably there was some sort of a trained professional looking over my ultrasound from February, no?”

“You had this done in up in New Jersey so I can’t attest to the training of the person reviewing your results, but I can tell you that you had quite a serious infection at the time and it’s likely the presence of the infection somehow contributed to that finding. I haven’t gotten the film from them yet – but, have you ever seen an ultrasound? Even in the best of circumstances it can be hard to make things out easily.”

I had to admire his candor. My only exerpience with ultrasound technology had been when Dick and I were expecting Adam. In the darkened radiology exam room, our ultrasound technician would point out all the various baby bits during our monthly exam as Dick and I spent all our time squinting at the screen, trying to look like we saw something, too.

Later, showing photos of our baby to friends and family we would describe our interpretation of Adam as looking somewhat like a storm front over Northern Illinois. With all the vague white & gray blobs standing in for organs and body parts, we were hard pressed to find anyone with a sufficiently creative eye to challenge our interpretation. More often than not, people would either make a brief, fruitless effort to decipher our little storm front’s gender by aligning comma shaped blobs with other blobs in the photos, or they’d wave their hands in surrender saying, “I can never make out those darn things…”.

And now I was being assured by a physician that no one can. Not even the highly trained, so-called, professionals can tell what they’re looking at.

And so it goes. I’d like to say I feel happy or comforted by the knowledge of Lefty’s continued presence in my left pelvic area, but instead I feel like a long-sufferring soap opera character who keeps losing the same love interest over and over again to increasingly ridiculous plot twists only to have him resurface in the form of another actor or another character months or even years later. Lefty’s return might have been similarly dramatic were it not for the ridiculous plot twist fate had written for our story.

But come on. You have to admit, as gynecological blog entries go, my case of ovarian peek-a-boo is certainly more interesting than most. Between you, me (and lefty, too, I suppose) I hope future observations of my internal anatomy result in less of a freak show taint and safely reside in the realm of the routine.