Fireworks

I just realized something. You would think it would have occurred to me before this but it did not; my husband saw me poop.

He didn’t peek in the bathroom while I was going, or come in right after. He didn’t see the remnants of my business in the toilet. It wasn’t a skid mark, or even a shart.

This is the reality of labor. I get it. But my husband, that sweet man, was holding my legs apart. He was solely focused on watching our daughter be brought into the world, which was foreshadowed by me pooping. All over. And not just once.

Four days past due-date, on a lovely Saturday morning, I took castor oil. I thought it was something different; an olive oil of sorts. But after scouring the aisles at Whole Foods, I discovered castor oil is a form if massage oil– that buttery spread that gets poured onto your skin and leaves you slimy for days.

Pouring that shit into my orange juice was a mistake, for instead of drinking it in one swig I had to endure a full cup of orange juice laced with massage oil. My tongue felt perma-coated in a layer of slippery, foul tasting grease.

Castor oil is supposed to get your bowels moving, coaxing your body into labor. This should give a lady some serious toilet-time, clearing out her body of all fecal matter before pushing.

This didn’t happen for me. I didn’t poop all day. In fact, it had been a while. I am not known for planning, or for thinking ahead. So the consequences did not dawn on me until it was too late.

I went to the hospital around 11pm that night. I still hadn’t pooped. It wasn’t until I was in full-blown labor that I realized I hadn’t dropped the kids off at the pool. In fact, I had over-crowded a full load of fecal children into my metaphorical bus and then left them rotting on a hot day, windows up.

I didn’t want to push at first. I really, really didn’t want to poop on a table while a nurse, my mother and my husband watched. But I quickly grew too tired to care. I pushed for an hour and a half, with the strength of forty wild horses. And while my husband watched I shat, repeatedly.

I guess with all of the commotion I forgot. Or maybe I blocked it out. But a friend recently told me she had accidentally farted in front of her husband and it got me thinking…I have done so much worse. I opened my legs wide, wide, wide and gave my husband the show of a lifetime. I gave him diarrhea fireworks.