A Tough Day
By: Heather Ijames
Topics: humor, Family, children
Posted by HeatherIjames Thu Jun 21, 2007 14:48:27 PDT
Viewed 1290 times
0 responses 0 comments
A Tough Day
It was a tough day. It started with me losing my patience with our pool contractor. A pipe had broken, the pool was losing its recently filled water, he let us know that completion was going take two extra weeks on top of the eight we had contracted for, and I was just plum tired of being nice about it all. I told my husband that he needed to deal with them, while I retreated to my computer to respond to some e-mails.
That’s when I noticed that the computer wouldn’t even turn on. After attempting to fix it myself, I reluctantly found myself standing in the repair line at Best Buy for thirty-five minutes with my toddler, Ethan, and my oversized computer tower. When I finally found myself talking to a member of the Geek Squad, (their term, not mine, and he definitely looked the part with his pasty white skin, half-inch thick round-rimmed glasses, his 110 lb., 6’4” tall frame, and a perfectly but unfortunately placed white-head smack in between his eyebrows), I started to cheer up because he was definitely excited about providing me with excellent customer service.
He opened up the side of the tower and Ethan quickly said, “The fan doesn’t work, the fan doesn’t work, the fan doesn’t work.” He was right, the fan didn’t work. He repeated his observation a few more times and I followed by telling the technician Ethan kept repeating this because he had overheard me say it earlier when I was trying to diagnose the problem myself. But, as I finished my explanation, Ethan put up his little right index finger in the manner of a thought occurring to him and said, “Oh, but really, Mommy said ‘you fricking computer’ and started to punch it a lot. And then she said the fan doesn’t work when I asked her why she was punching the computer.”
I raised my eyes to the ceiling as I could hear the technician and other strangers around me chuckle at my son’s candidness and offered myself a mental note: even at three, he hears, sees and understands ALL! Unwilling to spend five hundred dollars on a five year old computer, I took my broken computer tower back home. I walked in the door and saw a note left by my husband: I haven’t collected the sample yet. You’ll have to do it.
What sample you ask? A stool sample from Ethan. He had been having stomach problems over the last week and the doctor ordered a stool sample. I had picked up the kit from the lab the previous day and was praying that Ethan’s crowning moment of the day would occur on Daddy’s watch, not mine. But alas, today was my tough day. In anticipation of this eventual moment, I tried to pontificate, how does one collect a stool sample? I mean, there have been times in my past where my own doctors have requested a stool sample from me; specifically, the time I came back from Mexico still feeling ill after I ate an uncharacteristically warm mango-on-a-stick from a beach vendor when I was twenty. I recall that despite the doctor’s orders, the sheer thought of fishing in the toilet for a sample made me want to take my chances of getting better without knowing exactly why I was sick to begin with.
But, as all parents already know, what we won’t do for ourselves, we will do for our children. So, back to the sample. It was nearing two o’clock and I had finally come up with my best idea on how to receive Ethan’s not so tiny turds; a paper plate held in the bowl by yours truly while Ethan did his business. At exactly 4:07 p.m., Ethan ran up to me and said he had to go to the bathroom. As I positioned the plate in the toilet and told Ethan to sit down and go, he said, “I don’t want to poop on a plate! We eat on plates! I’m not hungry!”
“Do it!” I commanded. “This is not for food, it’s for the doctor.” He was a trooper and lay what he called “a snake” on the plate and I quickly ushered him out of the bathroom and locked the door behind him. I didn’t want him to witness Mommy playing with a plate of poopie and giving him a whole new set of ideas of what can be done with his feces. I began to divide Ethan’s sample between the three different containers given to me by the lab.
Each container was sealed with a lid that had a miniature spork attached to the bottom of the lid. That’s right, a spork. And it was when I was staring at that little poop smeared spork, that I figured my day couldn’t get any worse. To know that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that a spork was the perfect instrument for school lunches and stool samples alike, and that I, myself, was seeing the rational behind providing sporks for this very purpose, I realized that I was engulfed in a world that I didn’t want to know anything about and had finally given up on my day getting any better.
But, God’s grace can sometimes be found in His humor. As I was driving down to the lab to drop off the sample, I miraculously began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, my day had gotten the best of me but the thought of the lab staff that had to handle the sample after I dropped it off made me smile. As an attorney by trade I definitely have to peddle a lot of crap during the day but, at least, I don’t actually have to sift through it for a living. And with that realization, I could end my day on a higher note. I had passed the poop forward.
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