Breaking My Own Rules

One of the interesting things about being a blog writer is the number of well-wishers who have sent me other blogs to read.  I am impressed by the number of brilliant writers out there who are sanguine about floating their creations into cyberspace for public consumption.  I am even more amazed that many of these people are making a living at this.  My effort seems somewhat mundane by comparison.   I am not chronicling the mating habits of farm animals.  Nor am I cooking my way through exotic ingredients from challenging cookbooks.  One blog I sampled contained such intimate reports from the writer’s marriage bed it made me blush.  I eschew the “TMI” format, ever mindful that my children and my mother-in-law read these blogs regularly.    Thus, propriety guides my conscience.

“Write about the time Jonathan put the bead up his nose,” my husband suggested.   This story is only partly funny, as I would have to explain not only that my son found a large plastic bead on the lawn during recess and saw fit to push it up his nostril, but also that my husband ignored the emergency phone call from the elementary school.  He chose instead to make it my problem, leaving me a message as I boarded an airplane in Minneapolis.  I was on a business trip; I did not receive the message until I returned home to Boston five hours later.   My poor son spent most of his school day in the nurse’s office.  He was quite a trooper as the physician later fetched the foreign object from his nasal cavity with long forceps.   The doctor placed the bead in a small vial and returned it to my son with a few choice words.  He still keeps the vial in his room as a souvenir; it is embossed with the date and a tape banner that says, “The day I was really stupid.”  He wasn’t the only one!

“Write about when we all got giardia,” my husband laughed, a certain visual image forever etched on his memory.  To tell this story I would have to break my strict no-poop rule.  After moving from San Francisco to Atlanta, my husband, my then one-year-old son, and I each got sick with seemingly different ailments.  We thought my husband had food poisoning, while I was within hours of having my gall bladder removed.  It turned out that we all had been infected by the same flagellate.  Unfortunately, the cure for giardia is more dangerous than the parasite itself:  a drug so toxic that our young son was forbidden to take it.  As a result, the baby kept reinfecting us through diaper contact, forcing us to take as many as four cycles of the deadly drug.  When we made a trip to Oregon later that summer, my son burned through an entire package of diapers on the long air + car trip to his grandma’s house.   On the last leg of the trip—a three hour drive on a rural road—I turned around to check on our young traveler.  He giggled from his carseat and then lifted his leg.  Immediately, poop began pouring out of the leg-hole of his diaper.  It had the airy whipped quality of shaving cream, expanding in every direction as it escaped its confines, spiraling down from the carseat like soft-serve.  It seemed as if it had a spirit of its own, like an alien life form threatening to take over the Earth.   At last we found a convenience store, but it stocked no diapers, cloths, or anything that we could fashion into a makeshift diaper.  Desperate to escape the filth and its accompanying stench (giardia has a very distinct odor!) we opted for some bottled water, a package of paper towels, and some window cleaner.  We laid Jonathan out on the pavement in the parking lot and showered him down, trying our best to clean and reuse that last remaining diaper by lining it with clean paper towels.  We prayed that Bounty was, indeed, the quicker picker-upper.  Meanwhile, the window cleaner worked wonders on the vinyl seats in the rental car, as it left us with the infinitely more pleasant scent of ammonia!

I would love to fill my blog with fanciful stories that demonstrate brilliant insight, cutting wit, and a breezy narrative style. Alas, I write what I know, which is a little heavy in the foolish husband and stinky poop department.

Tomorrow's blog:  Driving Us Crazy