Content note: this is a parenthood post but also I am pooping in it. Pretty centrally so.
I have completely flipped from “babyhood is probably the least rewarding part of reproducing” to “probably it does not get better than this? that would be really surprising?”.
The creature was refusing to sleep tonight. My husband and I took turns walking her around singing, putting her in the crib, and setting a timer to see if she’d stop crying this time and go to sleep. On one of my turns, I realized I needed to poop. She was immediately happy in my arms, and I had experience peeing with her in my lap, so I took her with me to the bathroom. I kept only the little wall light on, to avoid waking her more.
Not that she was sleepy. On my lap, she was content but alert. “And why not?” I said in a silly voice. “You’ve pooped while sitting on my lap plenty of times.”
I’m normally an efficient defecator – it baffles me when other people aren’t in and out in under two minutes – but this one took longer than that. So we were hanging out, two of us, for a period longer than I expected. I kissed her hair a lot. She doesn’t quite have the core strength to sit without support, but she’s close. I kept one arm around her as she twisted her body and turned her head as she pleased.
After a minute or few, she tilted her torso around a bit and raised her chin to look at me, and I kissed her on the nose. She did it a few more times, and the third or so time she looked up at me and I kissed her nose, she giggled.
My friend who’s lived with three children tells me all babies laugh weird in different ways. My creature giggles without any restraint. Her quieter laughs – such as this one – sound sort of normal on the breathy to squeaky spectrum, but the louder ones are quite squeaky, a little bit of a toy sound to it. The vowel my brain imposes over it is eh, although the quieter laughs have more of an ee. She’ll sort of hiccup a bit, so she’s going ehehehe. Maybe four times a second, sampling off one audio clip of her. To me it sounds like pure glee.
Well, it was indeed a funny situation to be in. And her laugh was infectious. So I giggled too. Which kicked off a giggle loop. We sat in the semi-dark, amiably cuddling as I pooped, staring at each other and making hee hee hee noises together. I thought: incredible, life doesn’t get better than this… this? Really? Oh yes, really. This was 24 hours after I went to a party and took a substance described by a friend as ‘halfway between LSD and MDMA’, and man. The giggly poop won hands down.
I am terrified of losing my mind in a nursing home. Of an ambiguous decline where I lose the window to commit suicide with the support of my loved ones. I envision indignities, trying to integrate and form more accurate beliefs about future path. I don’t dwell on it, but neither do I want to feel surprised and betrayed as I enter late age.
I imagine taking an excruciating shit as an orderly waits outside with laxatives or other medications. (Having hospices and orderlies for me in 2080 seems like we’re already in the good timeline, though.) I imagine experiencing the toilet as only a place of pain and humiliation. My wish is that, even if my mind has started liquefying a little in its basin, this memory of laughing with my baby while I work through mild and painless constipation be so potent that it punches through the years and provides relief to a mind adrift in pain and confusion: that too was real. Dwell there instead.