Essay on Motherhood

(Author photo by Douglas Mott)

SOUTHERN ITALY

It was when I was at my most flustered, my most embarrassed, just after my four-year-old son, Kevin, had pooped in his shorts in the middle of a restaurant in Southern Italy when I received some words of wisdom from a fellow traveler.

In a rush to get out of our hotel room to go to lunch, I had put shorts on Kevin but no underwear. We had no other thought than getting the hungry kids to a restaurant. Blame it on change in diet or the excitement of being in a new locale, but just after our food arrived, Kevin, without warning, got up, suddenly started running toward a bathroom whose location wasn’t immediately obvious and, long story short, pooped in his shorts. This would have been bad enough if the poop had stayed in his shorts or if we had been near an exit, but it fell out in two successive piles on the floor right in the middle of this crowded and quaint restaurant.

If only my fellow diners had chosen this collective moment to look outside at the cobbled Italian street and take in the scenery or fall deep into conversation instead of glancing up. If only no one had noticed, but, of course, they did. The couple seated right across from us who was clearly on a romantic getaway stopped eating. Another woman who was just about to sit down literally shrieked and ran to the other side of the restaurant. I was so stunned that I didn’t know what to do first. I ineffectually grabbed at some napkins but thought better of it--they were cloth. “Don’t move an inch,” I cautioned Kevin, fearing that more of his load would drop out.

At that moment, just when I was hoping I might somehow disappear, a woman approached me and, with an understanding smile, handed me a package of pocket tissues. “My dear,” she said with a British accent, “childhood is a canal we must all cross.” That was all she said before I whisked Kevin off to the bathroom, cleaning up the trail of turd as I went. Looking back, I have no idea what this phrase meant, but it seemed so compassionate and so British.

I spent the next twenty minutes with Kevin and Avery locked into the tiny bathroom (European bathrooms are so very small) while Ethan ran back to the hotel to get a change of clothes for Kevin. At first I attempted to wash Kevin’s shorts out. All this succeeded in doing was clogging the sink. (European plumbing also can’t hold a candle to the force of an American industrial toilet or the water pressure of an American sink.) I watched with dismay as the sink filled up with brown water. Though I stuck my arm down--at this point, pride was nonexistent--and tried to perform some miracle drainage, it was to no avail. Meanwhile Avery (then two years old) who was obsessed with anything having to do with the toilet and who also was a great imitator, kept trying help me wipe his brother’s butt which he saw me doing, while I frantically tried to swat his hands out of the way. Kevin, who was completely undaunted by the whole event, kept chattering on about something, while I frantically grabbed for yet another handful of paper towels. Since Avery saw that Kevin had his shoes and socks off, he too tried to follow suit. Meanwhile, I kept muttering, like some whacked-out person, “This is a bad situation, a bad situation.”

When Ethan finally arrived with a change of clothes, he walked into the bathroom into the midst of what must have been the most gruesome clean up effort imaginable. I quickly brought Ethan up to speed and, in reference to the restaurant, added, “I can’t go back up there. Please, don‘t make me go back up there.” Though I often find the humor in a situation, in this case, I was completely mortified and saw none.

“We have to go up and pay for the check. The kids haven’t eaten yet, and you have to tell the manager that you clogged their sink,” Ethan said calmly.

Now it was my turn to feel like the errant child. I had secretly hoped that Ethan would not make me go up and report the clogged sink, that somehow we could agree to just throw money on the table and run out, like fugitives or cohorts, but now, much to my chagrin, he was forcing me to be an adult.

Grudgingly, I trudged up to the manager of the restaurant and, while I didn’t go into the details about what it was that had clogged the sink, I did manage to explain in the five plus words of Italian that I knew, along with lots of hand gestures, that the sink “no longer worked.”

We then proceeded to sit down and eat our meal as if nothing had happened: “Nothing to see here, folks.” Needless to say, we ate hurriedly--(“Let‘s see who can eat the most noodles the fastest,”) and left a big tip in a lame attempt at reparations. (After all, we had left a pair of poop-covered shorts in the trash can of the bathroom--some things are clearly not worth saving--and a sink full of poop water.) To this day, I wonder how many health violations we committed in this otherwise very charming little restaurant now dubbed by us “the poop place”.

Somehow this restaurant experience summed up for us travel with children. On the airplane trip to England, a night flight, when I had to take Avery to the back of the plane after he woke up screaming his head off for no apparent reason, people seemed to sprout fangs and glare at us as they roused from their sleep domino-style as we walked by them. And perhaps I would have subconsciously glared too before I had children, but I can’t even remember back that far. Actually, that’s a lie. I do remember my life before children quite clearly, but it seems like someone else’s life at this point.

As we traveled with our brood in tow, among the sighing and groaning crowd, there were always those people who gave me a sympathetic or knowing smile--sympathetic because they had a soft spot for children, they were secretly glad that it was me and not them this time around, or because, as the British woman with the tissues stated, they knew that childhood is a canal that has to be crossed. Afterwards, I considered this saying particularly apt. After all, it is through a canal that a baby first enters the world; as travelers it is a big canal (or ocean) that we must fly across, and then, indeed, childhood is a canal we ourselves have all bridged. And isn’t having children the greatest connector of all, the universal truth, the common thread across different cultures and humanity? The shrieker who darted across the restaurant at the sight of Kevin’s poop probably didn’t think so. Ah, well.