Ball Poop, Swimming Poop

My toddler talks shit–doesn’t shy away from scatological discourse and description. He has broccoli poop, blueberry poop, poop that swims like fishies. I’m not sure how these flowery descriptions of poop started happening, but I am pretty sure that they’re a byproduct not just of what he eats, but also of our efforts to normalize pooping into a toilet by talking about pooping all the time. 

Potty training is as much about unlearning as it is about learning. Up until they potty train toddlers spend their whole lives pooping and peeing at will. They got used to sitting, crawling, toddling in their own excrement. It’s a pretty efficient system; one can play and have a bowel movement at the same time. And then one day you ask them to sit over a giant hole above a gaping bowl of water that sounds like a whirlpool when you flush it. 

This is why we have used every invasion of privacy as a teachable moment. After stalking their parents into the bathroom toddlers take on the role of an anthropologist as they observe what you are doing the same way you might observe the way a rhino poops when you go to the zoo. 

They’ll want to copy what you’re doing, and eventually they start voiding their bowels into the toilet. Potty training also requires some reprogramming on your part when, for the first time in your life, you have to congratulate someone for taking a shit. 

Some toddler whisperers recommend that you don’t go overboard in praising your child for performing a task that is not meant to be novel, warning that your toddler might weaponize their bodily functions against you if they know how much it means to you that poop into a porcelain bowl instead of, say, into their toy  dump truck. 

In  my effort to be encouraging but not emotionally overwhelming I fear that I sound an unenthusiastic soccer mom. The ball is different and so is the hole, but the goal is the same: get it in there. 

“Poop is coming,” Boo Boo will inform me.

“Oh, that’s good.”

“A big one.”

“Oh yeah?”

If there are signs of struggle my role changes accordingly and I become more of a doula: “Don’t worry. It’ll come out soon!”

If a stool takes more effort to evacuate he’ll classify it as a ball poop, and I think these are his favorite because they plonk into the toilet with a satisfactory splash.

Today his bowel movement produced multiple stools. They announced their arrival with a big splash, a medium splash, and finally a small splash. 

“So many!” Boo Boo said proudly. He has been pooping on the toilet for a few months now, but apparently the novelty of what his body can produce has not worn off yet. 

“Yes, lots of poop.”

“A Daddy poop, a Mommy poop, a Boo Boo poop!” 

When he’s done he likes to peer into the toilet to make sure each stool is accounted for because he likes to have something to show for his time in the bathroom. Sometimes he offers an assessment.

“Poop swimming! Like fishies!” 

After being wiped he removes his special toilet seat himself and likes to flush the toilet, with Mommy’s help, often protesting when I shut the lid because he enjoys seeing the poop embarking on its mysterious journey into our sewer system.

When I was very young I asked my dad what happened to our poop when it goes down the toilet. 

“Goes into the ocean,” he said. 

This was confusing because I had never seen poop featured in any images of the ocean that I had seen in picture books or in television. Then a new possibility dawned on me that day: every time I pooped, a fish was born.