Because Amy is an art history professor down at West Texas A&M University, just about every year she has the opportunity to take a group of students to some far away land to gaze upon old paintings or statues with their dicks out. This year was no exception. In fact, this year she one-upped herself. In fact, one could say she went to the place with the highest dicks-to-statue ratio of any place in the world: Greece. All jokes aside though, this is an important opportunity for her and her students, and she works incredibly hard to prepare her class, secure the travel arrangements, schedule the tours, book the hotels, reserve the tickets, make special arrangements…just writing it out is exhausting. But she loves it, and I love that she gets this opportunity to take these impressionable students from West Texas out to experience the larger world far away from these vast and dusty high plains…and see ancient wieners exquisitely carved in marble.
What this trip means, however, is that again I am being trusted to do some adulting and make sure our kids don’t die while she’s away. Once again it’s time for 10 Days with Dad.
Here are a few highlights so far.
The Mystery Turd
We have a problem with flushing the toilet in this house. I don’t know why the hell this is the case, but it’s true. I don’t have this problem. Usually I can’t flush fast enough, as I am oddly averse to having any kind of human waste near me for any amount of time. I actually have frequent nightmares about embarrassing fecal escapades. Once I had a dream that I was in a meeting at my old job, and the chairs around the boardroom table had holes in the seats with a bucket underneath them. For some reason in this dream, I decided to pull my pants down and relieve myself through the hole in the seat and into the bucket. It was at this point that I saw the rest of the people around the table reach under their chairs, pull up the buckets, and begin to eat what I then realized were peanuts stored in the buckets as snacks. Apparently the holes in the chairs were some kind of new, ergonomic design. They were not for pooping.
I stealthily tried wiggle my pants back up, but my friend saw me doing it and yelled, “Oh my God! Welch shit in his peanuts!” And then I got fired.
I woke from that dream in a cold sweat (and needing to use the restroom, which I’m sure is why the dream occurred) and was weirded out the rest of the day. The humiliation of crapping in a meeting still clings to my subconscious. I guess you could say I have poop anxiety.
In any event, after the girls had taken their bath the other night and were up in their room getting ready for bed, I passed the toilet in the master bathroom and glanced down into the oddly-dark water. There, lying at the bottom of the toilet, peeking out from the hole, was an enormous swollen turd.
I mean, this thing was a monstrosity. Like the size of a toddler’s forearm. I don’t say this [entirely] to be gross, but for the sake of clarity. It wasn’t right.
And the worst thing was is that there was no toilet paper in there. Just a lone, gently dissolving log.
What you should remember at this point is that I was already exhausted. Amy had been gone for a few days and everything had come to a head. It was the second-to-last week of school, which meant on top of soccer (of which I am the woefully inept coach), Girl Scouts (of which I am the woefully inept assistant leader), Sunday School (of which I'm a woefully inept teacher), volleyball, and various games, there were end-of-year orchestra recitals and parties...I mean. It just. Wouldn't. Stop. I know some of you out there are reading this and saying, "Yeah, well, welcome to my world, I've been doing that alone for the past six years." To you, I say I admire the ever living hell out of you. Because I'm beat. I complain about this only so you can understand my state of mind when I saw this behemoth. It was a literally shitty end to a figuratively shitty day.
I immediately shrieked and flushed the offense down. “Girls!” I yelled. “Get down here!” They slinked downstairs, recognizing my tone of mixed anger and revulsion (it happens fairly often) and entered the bathroom, wondering what they had done to incur such a reaction.
“What the hell?” I asked. “Who pooped in here and didn’t flush? And more importantly, who didn’t wipe their butt afterward? Seriously girls. That’s bad. I mean, yuck. For real. Yuck.”
The girls stared back at me, neither saying a word.
“One of you did it. It had to be. There isn’t anyone else around here. And I know I didn’t do it. Fess up kids!”
I thought about the size of that bobbing monster, and shuddered.
“I’m kind of worried about your diets, man. I don’t even know how that was possible. Is one of you in pain?”
Still, the girls stared blankly.
“Okay. I’m sorry I’m yelling. I was shocked is all. But I really need to know who isn’t wiping. You’re going to get sick that way.”
Shay piped up. “But I did wipe!”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “So it was you? Shay, babe…really. You have got to wipe.”
“But I did! Maybe just the paper went down.”
“No, it didn’t. That toilet didn’t do some kind of magic trick. There wasn’t some strange bathroom physics going on here, some buoyancy-defying dynamics. If you had wiped, the paper would have been on top. And I…I don’t even know what to say about the size of that thing. Are you okay? When was the last time you went before all this?”
Shay just shrugged.
“Ok. We need to eat more fiber or something while Mom is away. That ain’t cool.”
“Ok. Sorry Dad.”
“Don’t be sorry, just wipe your ass.”
“Daaaad! Don’t say that word.”
“Fine. Butt. One more question, though. Did you do...that...before or after your bath?”
Shay shrugged again.
“Ugh. Ok. Back in the tub. Right now.”
She started to protest, but she saw I was serious and instead began to take off her pajamas. So I left her alone in the bathroom to take yet another bath. But before she got in I yelled “Now sit on the pot and try to go again! And wipe for God’s sake!”
“Uuuugh! Fiiiiiine!”
Man, kids are gross.
Mistakes
Next year, Mo is heading to middle school, and she’s already a hormonal mess. She towers over the boys in her class and is 105 lbs of solid muscle. Seriously. You should see this kid. Veins are jumping out of her biceps and what not. When she complains about some little shit kid who thinks he’s cool by making fun of her, I just want to tell her that she could beat the holy living hell out of every boy in her class if she wanted to. I once saw her climb a rope to the ceiling of a gym using just her arms for God’s sake. It’s unreal. I think back to when I was her age and I too was 105 lbs…but I sure as hell couldn’t climb any rope past 6 inches off the ground. In fact, I remember the old Presidential Fitness Tests they used to give in gym class and failing miserably. When I was in 5th grade, it was the first President Bush, so I remember thinking that the kids who did well got a congratulatory note from Bush himself, while kids like me got a note from Dan Quayle telling us to “Keep on trying!” The flexed arm hang was an absolute nightmare. It was just my gym teacher struggling to lift me up to the pull-up bar, letting go, and after 20 milliseconds I promptly crashed to the gym floor with a boom. And I think, really, it was all one fluid motion. The 20 milliseconds was only as fast as the gym teacher could hit the start and stop button in rapid succession. I also remember lifting my shirtsleeve so he could pinch my arm chub with the body fat calipers (I can vividly see how he had to re-calibrate the damn things each time he pinched an inch, kinda like how one would adjust an old protractor to draw a wider circle). A week later came the envelope that had our fitness scores inside. The note that accompanied the dreadful metrics told my parents that I was very overweight, and that I was in the bottom percentile for everything.
I remember going into the bathroom, trying not to cry.
Mom was pissed. I thought she was going to go up there and tear my gym teacher limb from limb. I might even remember her saying she was going to cut off his balls and shove them down his throat.
Yeah. I had that Mom. God bless her.
Now, granted, I hadn’t had a single growth spurt yet, and in high school I grew into it…sorta. But regardless, my point is that Mo is vastly more mature than her classmates in many ways.
The other day, Mo and Shay were engaged in their usual sisterly banter, which I usually tune out. Because, you know, I have to or else I’d go insane. But out of the white noise, something rose to the top and caught my attention. I heard Shay say something about Mo’s “big butt.” Mo retorted,
“Yeah, well…second place.”
I stopped the conversation and asked what she was talking about. Second place for what?
“Nothing,” she said. Then she tried to change the subject.
“No, Mo, second place for what? Shay said something about your butt. What are you talking about?”
Silence.
Then a tentative, “You’re going to get mad.”
“Well, maybe. But if it’s what I think it is, I’m not going to be mad at you, but I need to know what’s going on.”
Mo then told me about how the little bastards in her class had made some kind of ranking of the 5th grade girls’ butts. And Mo had “won” second place.
Man, I saw red. I never really thought I’d get so mad over that kind of thing. I mean, I’m aware of her age and that boys in her class are starting to “like” girls and what not, and that kind of talk was bound to start sometime. Even when I was a fat little shit getting pinched with calipers, I was looking at girls’ butts. Not really because I found them so alluring, but because at that age girls became “a thing.” The popular kids (popular for what, I don’t know) were always on about how “hot” girls were and who they had crushes on and who was “prude” (whatever that means in the 5th grade) and on and on and on. So what these boys did wasn’t very surprising, let alone shocking.
In the past, I’d always scoffed at those dads who acted weirdly possessive of their daughters and talked about how “they’d kill any summabitch that comes near my little girl!” as if it were come kind of personal attack or insult. So I wasn’t really prepared to feel that way. But I think I kind of get it now. And in my moment of (admittedly past-due) epiphany, I’m putting it all together. The age. The urge for maturity. The need to be accepted. The ache of hormones. The pressure from friends.
Jesus. I need to talk to Mo. Like now.
Later that night, Mo and I are driving to her volleyball practice and I’m working up the nerve to talk to her about gross stuff. It’s gonna be awkward as hell, but it had to be done. And it couldn’t be like all the previous ones, where I had only been present with Amy doing most of the talking. I’d thrown out a few worn clichés at her, like “respect yourself!” and “wait until marriage!” feeling like I had contributed. But this one had to be different, had to be real. It had to deal with her actual world, not some clinical talk about the mechanics of sex given by some detached adult.
After all, she did win “second place.”
And by the way, who the hell won “first place?” That girl needs a talking to her S.T.A.T.
“So, Mo,” I begin.
She looks at me sideways, sensing my discomfort.
“Yeeeaaaah?” she asked.
“So, uh…look, I have to know. Are any girls in your class, like, making out with boys?”
“Huh?!? Why?”
“Well, just because. At your age, in my school, there were, like, make-out parties and some of the kids’ houses and stuff. And girls were kind of, I don’t know, seemed like they were pressured by their friends to make out with boys. Is anything like that going on?”
She closed her eyes and began shaking her head back and forth, waving her hands in front of her face. Like she had just opened an old refrigerator with a dead raccoon inside and was trying to wave the smell away.
“Ugh, God, Dad…when is Mom coming home?”
“Seriously, I want to know. I need you to know I won’t ever get mad at you if you just tell me something straight out. I mean, I might get mad, but you won’t get into trouble, and I won’t call anyone’s parents if you don’t want me to. Well, unless it’s really dangerous, then…”
“DAD! What are you talking about?”
“Dammit, I don’t know! But I think we’re supposed to have this conversation. And I know I’m worried about what’s going on with you and your friends. I mean, you girls never seem too interested, so I’m not, like, worried-worried, but…next year is middle school. Things will be different.”
“Yeah,” Mo relented. “I know what you mean.”
“You do? So is any of that going on?”
“Well, not with my friends they aren’t. And I don’t think it’s going on at my school, but I do hear about things in middle school.”
“Ok, ok, good, let’s talk about that. Like what?”
“Well, like…”
“Like…sex? Is that going on?”
And just like that, the whole conversation changed.
“Stop, Dad, seriously. I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Mo, honey, we have to…”
“No, we don’t! I don’t want to talk about that.”
“Ok, fine. Do you want to talk to Mom about it? Is it because it’s gross to talk about it with me?”
“No, it isn’t like that. It’s because...well...”
Mo started to get choked up, which is super rare for her. Something was going on here, something I hadn’t anticipated. Something personal.
“I’m sorry Mo! I don’t want to upset you. I know you don’t like to talk about it, but I just need to know…”
“Dad, it’s because sex made me.”
I didn’t know what the hell was happening, but I realized I was woefully unprepared for this talk. We sat in silence for a minute, her getting herself under control, me trying to figure out if what she had just said was what I thought it was.
Cautiously I asked, “What do you mean?”
“I mean, sex made me. And it was a mistake.”
Oh, God.
My guts dropped and I felt like someone had just punched me in the chest.
“What the hell are you talking about Mo? What put that in your head?”
Mo wrung her hands together and tried to subdue her sniffling, quietly shaking her head. Mo isn’t big on showing emotion. Doesn’t like to seem vulnerable or weak.
“Mo?” I asked after a bit. “Why do you think you were a mistake?”
She sighed heavily, wiping at her eyes. She was back in control now.
“Because. Because my mom didn’t want me, and my dad didn’t want me, but they had sex and then I came out. And then they had sex again and Shay came out. And then my dad went to jail and my mom got on drugs and I had to go live with my grandma, which wasn’t even really my grandma, and she didn’t really want me either.”
The girls have lived with us long enough at this point that I forget they are adopted and that they have a past beyond Amy and me. I have always, always taken for granted that my parents wanted me and loved me and cared for me from the very beginning. I don’t have any real scars. Not really. But these girls do. They have scars that I can’t see and can’t understand and can’t really help. I forget because I can’t bear to think of a time when they were hurting and I couldn’t be there for them. I can’t bear to think of a time when they didn’t have anything to eat or anything to wear or anyone around to give a shit. I think it’s because I love them so much that none of it seems possible. But it is possible. And it’s a fact. There was a time when they were utterly alone.
“Mo, do you really think that? Do you really think you were a mistake?”
“I guess so.”
“Oh, God, Mo, you weren’t a mistake.”
“Why not?”
“Because…I don’t know. Because we have you now. We have you and we wouldn’t be happy without you. We’d be a mess. We wouldn’t be whole. Your Mom and I were so sad before you guys came to us.”
“Yeah, but, Mom and you would have just adopted some other foster kids maybe. And then they’d have you guys. And you guys would have them.”
“But they wouldn’t be you.” I said. “And it isn’t worth thinking about ‘what-ifs’ when it comes to this.”
I could feel her eyes on me from the passenger seat as I searched for words.
“We all go to church most Sundays, right? And we’re told to put our trust in God, right?”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Well, what you probably don’t know is faith has always been pretty hard for me. I struggle with it a lot. I know I’m supposed to believe it, but sometimes I…well, I doubt. A lot."
She looked incredulous. I’d never said anything like this to her before. Actually, I don’t think I’d ever said anything like this to anyone before. “Why?” she asked.
“I don’t know. I guess because there are a lot of so-called Christians that have ruined Christianity for the rest of us, and it’s hard for me to separate the people from the truth.”
“So…why do we go?”
I sighed. “Well, sometimes it’s just to get perspective on the week, to be part of the community, to listen to Mother Jo or Father Pace coach us toward being better people. The ritual of it is comforting. And there is truth in the words, in the prayers. Some might say the truth is just words spoken from the best part of ourselves, from within, and not from some external deity. That it’s all just some form of meditation. But I believe there is more to it than that. I do believe in a God that doesn’t make mistakes. I believe I can’t understand what God’s doing and that He’s far more complicated than any one person’s definition or understanding, and that no one really knows the entirety of the true nature of God or even what He is.”
“What should I believe then?”
“Well, babe, you have to come to it on your own. You have to look in your own heart, your own mind, and decide what rings true.”
“Ok.”
“I will say this, though: my faith has gone up a lot of notches since you two came to live with us."
"Uh, why?"
"Because," I explained, “I feel that there was something...I know there was something that knew you were supposed to be ours from the very beginning. You two aren’t some side-story to Amy’s and my life. You aren’t some happy coincidence that ‘just worked out.’ You are what Amy and I were put here to do, put here to love. All our lives have led to this. From Amy and I meeting in middle school to me sitting here, now, with you."
"Yeah, I guess, but what about my bio-parents?"
"Well, maybe your bio-parents ‘didn’t intend’ to have you two. Sure. That’s likely. But you two are NOT mistakes. You are not something that wasn’t supposed to be.”
“But why?” Mo was still struggling with making sense of my ramblings, and I guess I was struggling too.
“Because…because us. This family. If you are a mistake, then all of us together are a mistake. And that simply can’t true. Can’t you feel that? Can’t you know that? In your heart?”
“I guess so.”
She stared out the window for a while, thinking.
When we got to the school gym, Mo began to get out of the car.
“I love you Mo,” I said. “More than I can say. Because I find new ways and reasons every day that surprise me. So we’re gonna be just fine.”
“Ok.”
“Ok then. And make sure you tell those boys ranking your butt that you don’t appreciate it! And that you have a Dad, mistake or not, that can get pretty damn protective. Ok?”
“Ok.”
Then I put on my hillbilly voice. “I’ll keel any summabitch that comes near my baby girl, dammit! They’all better g'on n' git!”
Mo giggled. “Sure, Dad.”
This girl is no damn mistake.
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