Boo Boo’s Book List: Everyone Poops

The title does a good job explaining the content of this book, but I’m going to let you read what Wikipedia has to say:

“Everyone Poops does not have a plot. The first sixteen pages contain various prompts regarding defecation in animals such as opposites (“An elephant makes a big poop” and “[a] mouse makes a tiny poop”), comparisons (that various species produce various sizes and shapes of poop) and questions (“What does whale poop look like?”).[2][3]”

This book does not have a plot. But is has a point. And doesn’t it have you wondering what on Earth does whale poop look like? 

I think I got this book at a used book sale organized by a Kiwani group or Rotary Club at a parking lot in Howard Beach. I was pregnant at the time, but definitely not pregnant when I first saw this book, which was over twenty years ago when I was at Barnes and Noble with my neighbor, Laura. 

I was probably 12 and I babysat her son (and then her second son and also her third son) and ahead of the holidays she invited to take me shopping so I could blow my babysitting money on presents. 

The store was crowded. I was drawn to the blatant honesty of the cover, which showed a young boy grimacing in concentration as he presumably birthed a turd. I covertly opened it, looking over my shoulder to make sure no one my age was around. It was the most frank book I had seen, and though I didn’t know what taboo meant at the time, it was the most taboo book too. Poop was private. No one talked about it. And here was this book full of it–not just of animals pooping, but humans pooping! Not only did it show poop, but also butts!   

I was so engrossed I hadn’t noticed Laura looking over my shoulder. Startled, I slammed the book shut. 

“This book is gross,” I declared. Even though I changed her son’s diaper, I desperately needed her to think I was not the kind of person to be interested in poop during their leisure time. 

“We have that book!” She said, and explained that she planned to use it to potty train her son. 

“Oh,” I said, not sure if I was more embarrassed at having been caught looking at a book about poop and the implications that could carry, or curious that there were gown-ups who spoke candidly about poop, especially since school-kid poop jokes were closer to my memory than my own early childhood, which was swimming with poop given that my mom ran a daycare at our house and I had two younger sisters. 

When I was standing at high noon in the parking lot among sexagenarians and septuagenarians sifting through the used books of the denizens of Howard Beach (at a leisurely pace, given that I had already voided my bowels) I figured now was the time to buy Everyone Poops. 

I don’t have a morbid fascination with poop. It’s just something that happens, and it happens that it’s something people just don’t talk about. And why would they? It’s smelly. It’s inconvenient. But also, why shouldn’t we? You wanna know how know you’re close to someone? It’s when you can talk about poop with them. Figurative and literal shit. 

What is there to not talk about? There’s whether or not someone had a bowel movement recently, there’s discussions on whether or not kimchi aids bowel movements, the texture and consistency of poop on a gluten-free diet, the expulsion of poop after eating a ghost pepper, how tea produces a firmer stool than coffee, the smell of poop if you’re had too much meat, the color of poop if you’ve eaten a lot of beets, the texture of your poop when you’re doing an apple cider vinegar cleanse, whether or not one has crapped their pants on the subway, what one’s morning routines are so as to avoid crapping on the train. Someone I know drinks warm water, does squats, then eats a bowl of fruits, in that order and only in that order, so as to preempt a bowel movement before getting on the train. This also begs the question of where to go if you find yourself on the subway and have the sudden urge to crap. If you don’t have an unlimited Metrocard and your stomach is stronger than your sphincter there are bathrooms in the stations at Union Square, Times Square and Atlantic Terminal; if you have an unlimited Metrocard the Whole Foods at Columbus Circle, the Ruby Tuesday at Times Square and even that gas station outside Broadway/Lafayette are much better options. Someone recently shared a story of how she actually begged a homeless person who was waiting in line for the bathroom at McDonalds–the one near the subway at W4–to let her use it first because she was two seconds away from crapping her pants. He obliged. Other people apparently had not made it. Some turds lined the floor and one was even draped over the rim of the toilet bowl like giant slugs trying to drag itself to freedom from certain death in the River Styx of the New York City sewer system, where it would certainly end up as a cell in a massive block-long Fatberg–Gotham’s version of the Golgotha Shit Monster.  

These are my friends’ stories, my co-workers’ stories, my family’s stories and mine–but they’re yours, too, no matter how much you pretend they’re not because you also poop.Now that I’m a mom, I have so many more poop stories to tell, and now that I’m hanging out with other parents poop is not a taboo talking point–as long as we’re only talking about our children’s pool. Half the time we are wondering if it was my child who pooped or theirs, how often one’s child poops, the consistency of the poop, what kind of undigested food they’ve found in their child’s poop, whether it’s more preferable for your child to have a large bowel movement in the morning that nearly overwhelms your child’s diaper, or to have smaller defecations that are easier to manage, except when they happen while on the train or if you’re at a restaurant that doesn’t have a changing table. 

Speaking of changing tables, one of the reasons I got Everyone Poops is because it shows that not only does everyone poop, but that many humans use toilets! Boo Boo shows his studious side when I read this book to him. I’m not going to pretend that the toilet is the most exciting thing for him in this book–he’s here for the animals–but when he sees all the different ways that humans poop–in a diaper, on a training potty and on a toilet, he gets very quiet and introspective. 

I point to the baby on the changing table, with an extremely modest poop in their diaper (how can I get my child to poop like a cat?). 

“See, look! The baby pooped in the diaper,” I say to Boo Boo. 

“Pup,” he says. 

“That’s how you poop, too!” 

I make sure to point to the big kid and the grown-up pooping on the toilet. I tell him that’s how he’ll be pooping–when he’s big enough. Not to solely rely on a non-fiction children’s book from the 1970s to teach our child about the virtues of voiding your bowels into a toilet, we’ve also taken action to demystify the concept of using the bathroom in real life by inviting Boo Boo into the bathroom with us at least a few times a day. And sometimes it’s true that he just forces himself into the bathroom while we are trying to have a bowel movement, at the end of the day, we have accepted that it can be a teachable moment as well as a ridiculous one. I also recently bought a toilet seat that fits on tip and collapsible stool that I’ve shown to Boo Boo. 

He smiled when I explained to him that this will be what he sits on when he has to poop and pee, just like he has a special chair that he sits on to eat. So far he’s mostly smiled and nodded and only expressed interest in the stool, which he likes to bring to our living room so he can sit on it in the middle of the floor.  

Anyway. Sometimes I imagine what it will be like when Boo Boo can use the bathroom by himself. We have already started giving him books to read while we change his diaper and sometimes if I squint I can see him already sitting on his special toilet seat, feet dangling above his stool and a book in his lap. The book is Everyone Poops, and he’s on page 18. He’ll smile when he realizes that he’s doing exactly what the big boy is doing. And while I might have to fight back a tear, I’ll mostly be smiling with pride and relief.