Wherein karma in crap’s clothing follows me to a pizza party because maybe, just maybe, I flipped my hair in a restaurant, and now I have to pay a plumber to install someone else a new toilet

I love you guys. You give me hope, you give me strength, you provide me with creative ideas for escape. Hitchhiking to Mexico is at the top of my list right now. You are the wind beneath my wicked, witchy wings. Please stay and keep chatting. My children hate me and my thumb still hurts and my heart may never stop hurting and I am covered right now in microscopic shreds of the fecal material belonging to two 5-year-old gymnasts. I washed my hands. You’re safe where you are.

For those who think I write too much about poo, well, you’re going to hate this one, so just beat it right now. Scram. This is not the blog you are looking for. That was my attempt at Jedi Blog Control. There are many blogs to choose from, so don’t worry, you will find something else to complain about at someone else’s URL. I set you free. Go.

I had a great writing teacher who told me always to write what I know. Do I want to know poo? No. NO, I DON’T. I would be very happy to write about my trust fund and my philanthropy and my world travel and my Paraguayan paramour and that wild thing he does to me with ceviche and whipped cream.

But apparently, poo wants to know me. Intimately. Repeatedly. I didn’t ask for the poo to rain down on my life, but it does, again and again, and I have no choice but to write about it. Because my life is what it is, and my life these days? Is. Poo.

It is impossible not to wonder what it all means. It is impossible not to ask why. I know I write long posts, but that is simply because my days are three times as long as the usual blogger’s days. I am a noble victim.

I must type quickly because what happened tonight made my mother pee her pants and she is staying up hoping I will post about this evening’s debacle by midnight. (Jesus! Now the woman is reduced to pee? Her own mother’s pee? I feel sooo sorry for her relatives! Her in-laws must be APPALLED! Can you imagine having to eat Thanksgiving dinner with that wretched pottymouth? NO WONDER SHE CAN’T GET A BOOK PUBLISHED!)

Who said that? You there in the pinstripes, you with the pinworms, you with the pinhead? Go. You are ban-ish-ed. My life is moist and sullied and I am learning to live with it. Find a cleaner, crisper, starched blog and feel good about that blogger and your own clean, crisp, starched, pristine life. Good for you. I can’t help it if I am Poo’s Chosen One. I am Fate’s Whoopie Cushion.)

****

Thursday. Gymnastics at the Y for the Sophster and her friends.

FORESHADOWING IMAGE:

“It was this big.”

Pizza after gymnastics, as always, at my friend Monique’s home, near the Y. Wholesome weekly fun. Ten little girls in various combinations of gymnastics leotards and princess costumes run wild as the mothers inhale homemade pizza and slurp red wine and trade babies and force the gymnasts to eat two slices of cucumber and drink half an ounce of milk before they get dessert, which is usually ice cream and then more ice cream.

The Sophster disappears. Another gymnast disappears. They are gone for a while.

I venture upstairs and find them in the bathroom, pants-less. Soph is on the potty, N. is standing. They are poo buddies, they tell me. Sophie asks me if I can check out her buddy’s bum, because Soph “took a good look and thought [she] saw something still there.”

I am very fond of this buddy of Sophie’s, but I call in her mother for reinforcement. We discipline each other’s children freely, but wiping bums is a different matter.

N’s mother is as amused as I am by the scene. We are less amused and more concerned when we see that the girls have attempted to create a Poo Sundae in the potty. Group poo, like group sex, is bad. Very bad. We have never seen so much poo. And Soph is not done. Oh, no. Not even close.

N. and her lovely mother and all of the other mothers and their children go home. My mother and the H-Bomb are downstairs with Monique and her delightful daughter, M. I am stuck perched on the side of their tub, as Soph continues her diligent efforts.

For a second, I consider trying to flush what’s already in there, the Poo Sundae and its heaping mounds of whipped toilet paper, but then I worry…

[IRONY ALERT! IRONY ALERT! OPEN YOUR IRONY GULLET AND CRAM IT ALL DOWN!]

…that if I flush, my offspring’s tender bum will be sprayed with microscopic particles of fecal matter. After all, I am nothing if not hygienically inclined. I decide to wait until she is fully cleaned out and off the potty to flush.

An hour passes. I beg my child to try at home. She refuses. Draped over my knees, she whines and moans and has small desperate seizures. Clenching. Teeth grinding. It’s a bad one.

Finally, as I am about to drag her off the potty, the Poo Heavens open and our reward plops down. She is finished, and greatly pleased. Cleaned up, she heads down the hall, skipping.

I stare into the potty. The last time I saw poo and toilet paper like this was in the women’s restroom at the Spectrum during the Live Aid Concert in 1984.

I hesitate. I flush.

Which suddenly makes the Spectrum restrooms look like Martha Stewart’s white marble cutting board, really.

It is gruesome. It will not go down. Of course it will not go down. Any lobotomized radioactive diseased monkey would have known better than to flush that damn toilet.

I am yelping. The water rises to brimming. I shriek and scream for a plunger.

“A bungee?” yells Soph. “A sponge?”

“A PLUNGER! ASK MONIQUE FOR A PLUNGER!”

I hear her humming and inspecting the pretty wallpaper in the hallway. This is a very clean house. I mean a VERY CLEAN HOUSE. Monique is one of my cleanest friends, which is why this hurts so very much.

I bellow, “SOPHIE! GET A PLUNGER! NOW! RIGHT NOW!”

Monique delivers a plunger and surveys the scene. She is very polite, very tactful. I tell her NO NO NO, OF COURSE I WILL HANDLE IT, ALL UNDER CONTROL, YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DEAL WITH THIS WHEN IT IS MY CHILD’S POO SUNDAE PROJECT WITH HER POO BUDDY.

She looks skeptical, but appreciative. The plunger is not a variety I have ever seen. It looks like a fake black plastic umbrella combined with a fireplace bellows. I dislike it on sight and it takes an immediate dislike to me.

I insert it into the gore and pump. You-know-what sprays up into my face, onto Monique’s toilet paper, onto her shower curtain. I smile apologetically and plunge on. She smiles uncertainly and allows me to do so.

At this point, the sequence of events becomes mucky. The floor was also becoming mucky. Very mucky. My voice, somewhat hysterical. I was NOT USING MY INDOOR VOICE. I was plunging anything BUT the sh*t out of this goddamn toilet, yelling motherf*cker motherf*cker motherf*ckingsh*ttyass potty, you swallow those little gymnasts’ Poo Sundae right now or—

At which point, Monique wisely decided to take over. She tends to make wise decisions. We pumped. We plunged. We took turns. I complained about carpal tunnel. She stared me down. I took another turn.

We shut off the water (her idea, wise move). I turned back on the water and flushed again (my idea, bad move). Poo particles are swimming happily across the floor. Her dainty black dog enters and begins batting at them with her front paws.

Children rush the scene. Mommies lose their indoor voices completely, screaming for children to evacuate the second floor. My mother calls from downstairs, wondering why we are not leaving. I lose my indoor voice again and bellow that we may never leave because the Apocalypse is real, and it has begun in Monique’s toilet.

Monique fetches a new plunger from a neighbor. I know this kind of plunger, the rubber/wood combo. I pump with confidence. More overflow. Monique is now carrying furniture, towels, soap dishes from the room, discreetly, as if they are Jewish infants to be smuggled quickly to safety from the Gestapo.

We mop up the floor with towels that were not really old towels, but Monique is too nice to admit that.

The damn thing will still not flush. The thing is crammed full of child-poo. Our shoulders are sore. Our feet are filthy. The children need to be put to bed.

“I swear to God, this is all my karma,” I say. “I apologize for my karma.”

“It’s not your karma.”

“I went out to dinner the other night with an old boyfriend.”

Monique looks up from the revolting mess and eyes me carefully. “Did you flip your hair?”

I consider this, ashamed. “I may have flipped my hair.”

“You totally flipped your hair. How many times did you flip your hair?”

I stare into the potty, chagrined. “I don’t know. Maybe twice, tops.”

“Uh huh. Impure thoughts?”

I hesitate. “It was all very chaste.”

“Right.”

“We hugged goodnight.”

“Long hug?”

“Not really.”

“Uh huh.”

We call her husband. He works at a big important museum and when she describes what I have done to the toilet, he is home in five minutes flat with another plunger. He was not supposed to leave his job, surely, but he says he should be able to fix this. “I grew up on a farm,” he says.

Monique and I exchange disturbed glances as her husband savagely violates the toilet. What he does to that toilet is beyond description. I cannot watch, because now I am starting to feel sorry for the toilet and wondering if there are plunger-crisis hotlines it can turn to.

It is difficult to tell if it is sweat or toilet water that is dripping off his glasses and nose. We decide not to ask.

After an hour, he gives up. “I think it’s too far down.”

Holy crap. I realize what this means. The P Word.

“We’ll call the plumber in the morning.”

This is the sign of good friends. They wait until the morning so you will not have to pay extra for a late-night plumber visit.

“I am so sorry,” I say. I cannot say it enough. “We will pay the plumber, whatever it costs, I am so sorry. Sophie has at least three piggy banks. Totally full. Like her intestines. Ha.”

They smile kindly but weakly.

I mop the floor with Pine Sol. I have not felt this soiled in a very long time, not since I had that bad relationship with the guy who called me Ann whenever he looked at my breasts.

The girls cry all the way home. My mother laughs and laughs and laughs and nearly drives us through a cemetery. Then she nearly takes out a fire hydrant because she is laughing so hard.

I tell Sophie she will have to pay for some of the plumber’s fee and she wails, “ALL OF MY MONEY? ALL OF IT? IS IT MY FAULT? IS IT MY FAULT?”

I say something warm and understanding like, NO HONEY IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT BUT IT’S KIND OF YOUR FAULT BECAUSE IF YOU HAD JUST POOPED AT HOME LIKE I BEGGED YOU TO WE COULD AT LEAST THROW MONEY INTO OUR BATHROOM AND NOT INTO SOMEONE ELSE’S.

My mother nearly drives up the side of a building, laughing, laughing, laughing.

At home, the girls freak out when I say no stories, no books, straight to bed, because Mommy had her face in a toilet bowl for two and a half hours, which replaced quality time. At one point, Sophie stops whining and wailing long enough to say, “I could tell it was a clogger.”

My mother staggers into our bathroom, laughing, laughing, wheezing, peeing down her leg, laughing.

All this because I flipped my hair a little. What a craptastic life.

Plumber’s estimate to follow in the a.m.

Flushing is such sweet sorrow.

[BELOW: THE BATHROOM WE WOULD PREFER TO THROW MONEY AT. THIS IS OUR PITIFUL BATHROOM. IT LOOKS EVEN WORSE WHEN THE LAUNDRY IS NOT COVERING THE FLOOR. THIS IS A BATHROOM THAT IS VERY COMFORTABLE WITH RUNAWAY EXCREMENT.]