Leave It Cleaner Than You Found It

Wade and I have a terrible habit of eating out and are not exactly timely in making our food choice decisions. By the time we make up our apathetic minds, it’s usually eight o’clock or later, which leaves us with Boston Pizza (BP) as our main late evening choice. Thrown into this mixture is our three-year-old daughter, who is going through the rite of passage of potty training.

            On an unseasonably warm February evening, with our daughter’s insistence of “sgetti,” we made the decision to go to BP. I could have easily cooked spaghetti carbonara, which would have admittedly been significantly faster, but we lacked two of the main ingredients in my recipe; mozzarella cheese and eggs. I cursed my lack of desire to go to Costco earlier in the day and we readied ourselves to go out for dinner.

            I should also note that upon rising from her afternoon siesta, my daughter had what appeared to be a nasty case of diarrhea. The kind of diaper that one peels off and then delicately places the fruit of their loins into the shower, to aggressively hose off. Since many hours had passed and she hadn’t had further signs, nor symptoms, I chalked her bowel habits up to a one-off. Being that she is at the point of insistence on wearing panties instead of diapers, I obliged.

            We made it out of the house and were sitting in the car when my husband declared that he forgot the diaper bag. “Should I go back and get it?” His question gave me pause. What if the diarrhea came back? In public? No. That wouldn’t do.

            “Go get it,” I replied. “I don’t think we’ll need it, but better safe than,” he was out of the car and the garage door was opening before I finished verbalizing my thought. He came back and placed the well used black diaper bag, which vaguely resembles an old school doctor’s bag, in the back seat of the car. I breathed a sigh of relief and we proceeded to our destination, secure in knowing we had wipes and more clothes and perhaps a diaper or two.

            We arrived without incident and made our way into the restaurant. Our favourite server, Louise, helped us to our table. Food and drinks ordered, we engaged in conversation mingled with texts from friends or a funny article or meme on Facebook. Our daughter was happily colouring for a while and then decided that standing up on the seat in the booth, like a gopher, peering through the glass at the front entrance was more entertaining.

            My husband’s starter Caesar salad arrived, green and fresh, doused with dressing and topped with bacon, parmesan and croutons. I reached over “I’m just going to borrow some bacon,” my husband rolled his eyes, laughing. He looked over at our daughter standing there, crayon in hand smiling.

            “Uh oh,” he said.

            “Wha-oh?” I asked, heart sinking. He gently turned our daughter’s posterior in his direction and pulled the back of her pants toward him. He paled and looked at me. His eyes gave away what he had just observed.

            “Did she just do what I think she did?” I asked, hopeful that maybe he had seen something that was manageable. Like maybe her first period.

            “Poop.” The word hit me like a tonne of bricks. I started to pass the diaper bag over to him, since I have always been a proponent of equality and believed that since I had dealt with the post nap diaper incident, it was his turn. He shook his head and eyed his salad. Damn. I couldn’t ask him to leave me unsupervised with his bacon. Although, I would have happily sat alone for however long it would have taken for him to deal with the deposit our daughter had just made in her very cloth underwear.

            I slid gracefully out of the booth, pulling the diaper bag along. He hoisted our daughter over his salad and on to the floor. “Hold hands,” I insisted. She curled her little fingers around mine and we weaved our way to the bathroom. I had my head high, staring the world in the face. I was not going to let a little poop get in the way of enjoying a night out of the house. I opened the door of the lady’s room into the face of a moderately alarmed, yet spatially obtuse woman. She mumbled her apologies and I mumbled my okays.

            There were two stalls; a regular and a wide-body. My preference was the stall with the largest square footage. My daughter loves the assistance bars in the handicapped stall, to steady her tiny tot bottom, which ensures that she will remain topside and not plummet into the depths of the cold toilet water below. I was looking forward to facing whatever was awaiting me inside of her pants in the luxuriously sized and appointed handicapped stall.

            To my horror and dismay, it was taken. By a single, apparently able bodied and childless person. No wheels or cane were visible. No whining or whinging was emitting forth from the stall of my desire. I clinched my teeth, grudgingly giving the toilet bound person the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that the other stall had been occupied during their moment of waste elimination need. I steered my daughter towards the narrow, cavernous stall.

            We were greeted by a small square shit lying in the drain hole of the toilet. “POOP!” Exclaimed my little poo princess.

            “Yes Sweetie, that’s a poop. Come on, let’s close the door and go potty.” I didn’t bother to flush. There was no time.

            I finally had the opportunity to privately peer into the back of her jeans. What greeted me was not unlike what I had seen in her diaper earlier in the day. The one that I had hosed off in the brightly lit and comfortable bathroom at home. “Fuck,” I muttered under my breath, low enough for my daughter not to hear. This was going to be a clothing change for the ages. I unzipped the diaper bag, muttering hail Mary’s, which not being Catholic, I’m not entirely sure where they originated from. I was praying for one of two wet bags, or both, from the cloth diaper days of our past. Failing that, a plastic grocery bag. Anything to contain the mess that I would have to remove eventually. Maybe I was stalling. Maybe I was contemplating my strategy. Whatever it was that I was doing, her clothes were not magically changing themselves. I was relieved to find that one of my wet bags was in place, full of butt cleaning paraphernalia. I enthusiastically dumped all of it into the big black diaper bag.

            While holding the yellow, water and leak proof, bag by the zipper, I started thinking ahead to how I would get the vessel of my child’s shit off of her without too much collateral damage. So, I took off her boots. She was wearing a dress over her shirt and jeans. I did not remove this. I really should have, in hindsight. Next I carefully undid her pants and started to slide her pants down her hips, while holding her shirts up out of the trail of biological effluence. I hefted her onto the toilet, her pants mid-thigh, shirt and dress slipping from my grasp. I looked down, the back view of the jean situation had not told the full story. A wave of diarrhea was sloshing back towards the posterior of her panties. I panicked. I crouched down and quickly started to remove her jeans, keeping her panties and socks in place. I stopped. 

            “Don’t touch anything!” I whisper shouted into her pretty little face as she started to closely point at the ocean of crap just above her knees. We were in a pickle, and we were in it together. “I have to save your socks, since I don’t see any in the bag,” I said half to her, but mostly to myself. Sometimes, I have to hear the sound of my own voice to know that I am, in fact, alone in this and have to remain calm. I pulled her pant legs up to expose her fluorescent yellow and grey socks. I removed them quickly and put them in the diaper bag.

            Next I took off her jeans, shit variegating its way down her little legs, and put them into the wet bag. Her panties were resting up against the lip of the toilet in the gap left by the incompleteness of the commercial toilet seat. I felt something wet touch the back of my hand. It came from her dress. I stood up to look at the back of her shirt. More shit. This was a five alarm blow out. I carefully rolled up the dress to ensure containment of the contaminate and preventing it spreading to her hair.  She let out a cry of annoyance of removing her pretty dress.

            “There’s poop on it Sweetie. I can’t save it. I has to be washed,” I soothed her, as I stuffed both articles of clothing into the wet bag.

            A flush came from the next stall. Excellent timing, madam.

            I soldiered on with my battle. I came up with a slick plan to dunk the knickers in the toilet bowl since I couldn’t very well carry them out to the very public sink to rinse them. I pulled the mess off and noticed that there was shit not only on the surface of the toilet, but also running, Niagara Falls style down the front of the commode into a puddle in the grey grout-line on the floor. Oh well, one more thing to clean, I thought to myself as I carefully reached around my now entirely naked child to plunge the underpants into the toilet. The water muddied and I could no longer see the stranger’s digestive left-overs my daughter had noted earlier.

            Dignity was gone. It had deserted me with the first dunk and failed to return. My daughter kept saying “poop mommy, poop.” I kept responding with grunts and noises of acknowledgement. I carefully placed the newly “rinsed” underwear into the wet bag with the rest of her clothes. I closed it with a satisfying zip and placed it on the floor. I wouldn’t have to deal with those until later. I pulled the thicker of the two wipe holders out of the diaper bag.

            The first one was destroyed on the first swipe. I dropped it into the ruin of the toilet. Plumbing be damned. I was not concerned about the flush-ability of the wipes. Half ply toilet tissue would be no match for this mess, and my hand was no place for someone else’s poo (even if that someone was my offspring). I finished squeegeeing her off with wipes and moved to cleaning off the front of the toilet and floor. The phrase “leave it cleaner than you found it” from my days in Brownies erupted from the depths of my memory. I dug through the diaper bag and came up triumphantly with a disposable under garment. The only disposable under garment in the bag. Sigh.

            I quickly redressed her in clean garb and put her boots back on. I flushed the toilet with much satisfaction. There was slight trepidation as the wipes clung stubbornly to the side of the toilet, and then the enthusiastic fountain of water washed them neatly away. No plunger or amateur plumbing skills would be in my future, nor would there be an awkward discussion about how I clogged up their toilet in the tiny stall. We exited as though nothing horrific had just occurred in absurdly tiny water cave.

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I washed my hands for a full minute and contemplated a hot shower with bleach body wash. I looked at my reflection. I was still me. Yet somehow I was changed. I looked for my daughter who had taken up residence in her clean clothes directly behind the closed bathroom door. “Get away from there, you’re going to catch the door with your face.” I growled at her. She complied and took my hand. We walked back to the table, shit besmirched clothing neatly stowed in the diaper bag, and continued with our evening as though nothing monumentally traumatic had just stained my young parental life.  

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