The Poop Monster
In theory, Joey was potty trained. It was a requirement for entry into preschool at the center he’d attended since he was five months old. The deadline took my spouse and I by surprise, because his older brother had encountered no such thing at the same place seven years earlier. The teachers had just marched the toddler class to a row of low-to-the ground toilets several times a day until they got the hang of it. When a friend fretted that her son’s preschool took a hands-off approach to “potty learning,” I felt secretly grateful for a less enlightened program.
The policy change at Joey’s school prompted several tedious weekends of no pants and lots of liquids, bribes, and laundry. But he got it, or he got it well enough to move to the Foxes Room with his peers.
Six months later, he only occasionally had accidents at school. At pickup, I always did a covert scan of the shelf where small pink plastic bags containing wet undies were tied to Spidey or Minions or Bluey or Trader Joe’s lunch sacks. I tried not to think of them as Bags of Shame, but I was always relieved when I saw pink bags waiting for other parents to take home.
At home, he was not nearly so consistent. I’m told this is common: Kids hold it together at school when it comes to all kinds of behavior, and let loose at home, where they’re comfortable. Sometimes literally.
As of this writing, Joey has pooped in the potty exactly twice. He’s not pooping his pants at school; what he’s managed instead is to orient his internal clock so that he usually poops after 5:30pm on weeknights. Honestly, that sounds a lot harder than pooping in a toilet, but I guess that’s just me.
I’ve tried asking him why he doesn’t like pooping in the potty. For a while, he would ignore me or say, “Mommy, go over there” and point across the room, a tell-tale sign that he was about to find a quiet pooping corner.
Eventually, he said something about a poop monster.
“There’s no poop monster,” I said brightly.
When he said something about its big head coming out of the bowl, his brother said, “I think it’s because I showed him the Skibidi Toilet video.”
If you were not a tween or tween-adjacent in 2023, you may have missed this one. Just imagine a poorly computer-animated cartoon featuring a screaming, singing, corpse-like head rearing up from a toilet bowl.
One unseasonably hot Sunday in January, I pushed Joey in his stroller to the park. He is sneakier and more stubborn than his brother was at the same age, and usually when I ask him if he needs to use the potty, I get a firm “NO.” Then he either uses the potty later, when he feels like it, or he doesn’t.
Today he said a tentative yes, so I routed us to the rec center for a pit stop. We weren’t in a hurry, so I promised myself this would not be one of those instances where I physically held him on the toilet as he objected or tugged a pull-up over his butt in defeat. For the duration of our time in the stall with its industrial chrome toilet, I would be a Good Mother.
“I want my Rachel potty,” he said in a small voice. When you pressed a button on his potty at home, Ms. Rachel’s voice exclaimed, “You did it! I’m so proud of you!” I wished I had such a button for most of my daily tasks.
“You can use that potty at home, but here we have a big potty. I know you can do it.”
“No, there’s monster,” he insisted.
Above the toilet, at roughly Joey’s eye level, was a small square metal door that had swung open, revealing a dark cave of pipes and wires. Exactly the kind of place a monster would want to hang out.
“I’m looking in here, and I see some pipes where the water goes after we flush. But no monster.”
He was unconvinced.
I returned my attention to the toilet and had a burst of inspiration.
“Joey, do you want to pee on the monster?”
A smile spread across his face. He grabbed his penis and aimed.
Monster defeated.
*
I’ve been battling my own monster—stubborn PTSD that manifests as obsessive anxiety, especially when it comes to medical matters—for years. Whenever I have an upcoming test, no matter how routine, I mentally cower under a table and brace for impact. These are my “flight” and “freeze” impulses, even if I don’t act on them literally. I go to my appointments. I go to work. I parent my kids. But my spouse says, with hurt and frustration in her voice, “It’s like you go somewhere else during those times.” So maybe I do freeze. Sometimes the best I can do is hold myself at arm’s length and try to minimize the stress I cause others. But the people close to me notice, and it stresses them out.
What if I tried on a different mindset, just a full-blown FIGHT, like a battle cry? I thought. It was the first Sunday in February, hot again, and Joey and I were riding an escalator outside a movie theater where my spouse and my oldest son were watching The LEGO Movie in 3D.
In Minneapolis, thousands of Midwesterners were fighting through snow and ice to fight ICE. What was I fighting? ICE’s presence in my own state, a bit, but mostly my own sense of impending doom.
I was trying to summon this mindset shift and reply to a text when I heard Joey scream.
“Mommy! Mommy!”
The child who had managed to deftly step over the threshold of the escalator on several rides had just lodged his hand in the spot where the rubber handrail fed back into the belly of the machine.
I tugged his hand. Stuck.
After a couple of long seconds—during which I pictured 19th century child factory workers losing limbs to heavy machinery—I remembered the emergency button. How could I have forgotten it? Joey had pressed other emergency buttons on other escalators and gotten us into a different kind of trouble. I pounded the red button with my fist. The escalator slid to a halt.
This time, I was able to dislodge Joey’s hand. He cried all the way to urgent care, where they did X-rays (nothing broken) and bandaged him up. Then he was fine for a while, and then the spot where he’d torn skin off his fingers got infected. Cue a 17-hour trip that took us to a pediatrician’s office and two hospitals, as various top-tier medical professionals consulted about the best next steps for a very bad ouchy.
We arrived at the third hospital after 1am. Joey slept against me as I lugged him from parking structure to waiting room to pediatric waiting room. Stylized sea creatures swam on the walls and parents held their babies—one big and smiley, one who looked younger than the eggs in our fridge at home.
A tall teen in handcuffs entered, nudged forward by a cop.
“Want you to get some coloring pages or something?” the cop joked.
When a woman rolled a portable registration station in their direction, it was the cop who gave the kid’s name and birth date. I wanted a mom or a dad for him. I wanted one for me, too, after hours of late-night hardcore adulting.
Joey went home with gauze, a tube of ointment, a prescription for antibiotics, and—as was revealed two days later—a fresh new stomach virus, which made its way through our household over the course of the next week.
I came at Joey with medicine and creams, and he screamed like his hand was stuck in an escalator. The stomach bug begat diaper rash, and soon there was a cream for that too. A week of necessary vigilance begat hypervigilance. Was Joey hydrated? Showing signs of c. diff? Emotionally traumatized by me swiping his butt with Aquaphor? My spouse and my 11-year-old let it be known that they did not enjoy this version of me. Neither did I.
I’m still catching my breath. The poop monster is real. We don’t need to look for it, because it will find us, but that doesn’t stop me from behaving like a prey animal.
The poop monster is real, but it is not everywhere, and it is not all-powerful. The poop monster develops resistance to antibiotics, and we develop new antibiotics. It tells teenagers to commit crimes. It tells law enforcement to commit crimes. We push back. The poop monster is real, and we must pee on it.
About the Author
Cheryl Klein’s column, “Hold it Lightly,” appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA. She is the author of Crybaby (Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press) and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in Blunderbuss, The Normal School, Razorcake, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her MUTHA column “Onesie, Never Worn” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022. She blogs about the intersection of art, life, and carbohydrates at breadandbread.blogspot.com. Follow her on Threads: @cherylekleinla.
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