Twyste

Earlier I gave the Reader’s Digest Condensed version of this story…

Jason was gone.

The dog puked.

The kids pooped.

The poop was on the wall.

I kicked a hole in the wall.

The end.

Put that way, it almost looks like some kind of poetry. Go ahead, read it again with your poetry voice and pretend to have a sip of tea… see what I mean? Even the word poop can be poetic. But it wasn’t.

So, now, (cue the Paul Harvey voice)… here’s… the rest of the story…

There was nothing special that day. We were living in a rental house while working on building our home, so I suppose that added some amount of stress to our lives (did you know that you even have to choose the colors of your hinges and outlet covers… and that there are actually a LOT of choices for each?!?). Jason was traveling some for work, but not a crazy amount. I have to assume, though, that on this particular occasion he was off to some exotic location doing intelligent work-related things with exciting people who spoke to him without snot coming out of one nostril and whose bottoms he never had to wipe. So I may have felt a little like a single parent… based on which, I have to assume that if I was a single parent, my walls would look like swiss cheese.

At any rate, I can no longer remember all the specifics of what happened that day. What I can remember is the boys were about four and five years old. They’re really two years apart in school, but there are a few months there where they are only separated by one year in “how old are you?” terms. Regardless of the specifics of their ages, they were old enough to understand where poop should go and where poop should NEVER ever go.

The boys had just gotten done with the “can we just sit in the bath until all the water drains out?” eternal draining of the tub process… I think they kept sticking their little butts on the drain to plug it up because it always took forever. Eventually it got down to nothing but drips in the tub. I left to go get something, while the boys were supposed to finish putting away their bath toys and get dried off.

When I left the bathroom, I was greeted shortly by my yellow lab walking in circles. That was rarely a good thing. It usually was anxiety-based and involved some kind of “oops, I didn’t mean to” on his part… as in, “oops I didn’t mean to eat that pan of scrambled eggs on the stove” or “oops, I didn’t mean to chew up that shoe.” In this case, he was pacing and guiltily admiring the pile of throw up he had left for me. As I hastily worked to clean up the mess, I tried to maintain some control and progress back in the bathroom by yelling to the boys to finish drying off and be done.

The details of what happened after that are gone for me now (PTSD?), but I know that when I walked back into the bathroom both boys were out of the tub but still naked. My first reaction when I saw the brown “substance” on them and on the wall, was “what on earth did they get into?” But that didn’t last long as the realization of what I was looking at unfolded for me. I didn’t even know how to react. What do you do when something happens that is so far from what you imagine (I’d love to see that one on a Hallmark card… Happy Mother’s Day, may the poop always wipe up easily)?

It wasn’t like I could even put them to work cleaning it up. They were wearing it, so the more they did, the more the poop was not contained. And, that was NOT okay.

Somewhere in there the dog threw up again and I lost it. I was so frustrated and mad. I wanted to break something. So, I kicked the wall (a non-poopy section), but I held back a little so I wouldn’t break my foot or the wall. Which, of course, I did. I broke right through the drywall. In retrospect, knowing that the wall was gonna cave anyway, I really wish I had just hauled off and given it my all. I’m sure it would have been more satisfying. As it was, I had done this stupid wussy kick and was still stuck standing there with two poopy kids in the tub, a pukey dog downstairs, and a hole that was the size of my size eight and a half foot, which I had no idea how to repair.

So, I called my husband and told him I had done “something bad.” To which he slowly responded, “o-kay… what did you do?” When I told him I had kicked a hole in the bathroom wall, he paused, then asked if my foot was okay. He assured me that regardless of how big I said the hole was, he could fix it. I’m sure he must have gotten off the phone thinking “who is this woman I married?” I know that’s what I was thinking.

So, based on my experiences described above, I believe that there probably was a child, actual poop, and a fan involved at some point that led to the expression in the title… “when the *spit* hits the fan.” It doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to add a fan to the images of my boys in the bathroom that day.

On an interesting side note, I just read that the more poop a chimp throws, the smarter he is… Interesting, considering I have bright children. And, to think, it all started with a little poop on the wall …and another poop story I’ll tell you later. Sign up to follow the blog so you get the story in your email and don’t miss out (or you can like “Twyste” on Facebook and get it that way too… choices, choices- but not as many as for hinges and outlet covers).