Published: April 29, 2008 10:26 am            

Parenting requires patience, rubber gloves

While sitting in my basement office a few weeks ago, I judged by the repeated thumping on the ceiling that my son had elected to not take his nap. After saving my work, I made my way upstairs prepared to play "stern daddy" and at least make an attempt to get him to sleep a little. I was ready to employ some simulated anger and maybe threaten some sort of minor punishment, but nothing could prepare me for what I would see when I opened his door.

I had fully expected to find all the blankets pulled off his bed and an army of stuffed animals strewn about the room. While those things had, in fact, happened, I was also treated to the site of my son standing without pants and with one leg in an extremely dirty diaper. It was only as my eyes scanned the entire room that I realized that the boy's poorly conceived effort at changing himself had, to put it delicately, "soiled" his entire room.

Being a parent generally involves cleaning up a variety of disgusting things that come out of your child. In addition to every manner of back end output, children also tend to throw up fairly regularly and they lack the adult instinct to try to find a bathroom to do it in. This can be a bit like caring for an ill-mannered frat boy during Spring Break and often results in having to wash parts of your house or parts of yourself that you had never expected would be sullied in such a manner.

Still, despite my parental immunity to being disgusted, seeing my son's room looking like it had been attacked by incontinent horses startled me. Though he appeared to be as happy as a clam albeit a very dirty clam he had somehow managed to make a mess of nearly every surface in his room.

Despite never actually removing his pull-up the well-intentioned boy had attempted to clean up with an entire package of wipes. He had also tried using a towel and some of his bedding. Most of the stuffed animals had escaped the carnage, but "shrapnel" appeared on multiple walls, one pillow, a changing mat, two pairs of pajamas and our previously white carpet.

After carrying my son by his shoulders into the bathroom adjoining his room, I made him the first cleaning priority, which involved a trash bag, the bathtub and a sponge that was the first of three thrown away that day. Having sanitized the boy I then set up the task of seeing what could be rescued in his bedroom.

Since my wife was at a family event I had originally felt lucky to have been able to avoid I next called my mother to assess what cleaning method one uses when removing human waste from a wall. Let's just say the next few minutes were not Mr. Clean's happiest, but ultimately, with the help of a steam cleaner, I was able to somewhat restore the room to its original condition.

Though I wanted to be angry at my son, it was hard not to see the humor in the situation of a four-year-old who refuses to be toilet trained changing his own diaper. Visions of him entering Harvard, but still too willful to use the bathroom danced in my head, but ultimately I decided to not belabor the issue with him, instead settling for a promise that he would never attempt this stunt again.

In telling this story to my friends, family and coworkers over the next few days, I learned that nearly all childless people would laugh at me and most other parents were sympathetic. It seems every kid does something similarly disgusting and I was not the only person I know forced to ponder how to get the imponderable off of his walls.

An event like this pretty much typifies why parenting a young child offers endless, usually unpleasant, surprises and why it's not something I recommend to the ill-prepared. Still, that which does not cause us to immediately vomit makes us stronger and I now know exactly which story I'm going to tell to my son's future dates to make him uncomfortable.



Daniel B. Kline's work appears in over 100 papers weekly. His new book, a collection of columns, Easy Answers to Every Problem, can be ordered at Amazon.com or Barnesandnoble.com. Daniel B. Kline can be reached at dan@notastep.com.

        

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