When I went to pick Kipp up this afternoon from a lunch hour at his grandmother’s house, she informed me that he had been asking about me anxiously for the past ten minutes, just sitting in a chair looking out the window, waiting for me. Odd behavior indeed for my usually rambunctious four-year-old boy.
“Are you alright?” I asked him, feeling his forehead, noting that he looked especially pale and listless. But there was no evidence of fever. I’d just have to keep my eye on him.
“Let's find your shoes and your coat. Home we go.”
Once in the car, the truth came out in a very small voice, “Mom, I had a little accident at Grandma’s. I was in the bathroom trying to close the door and I had a little diarrhea in my pants.”
Now I understood. The listlessness was not just illness but new-found shame as well. In his angst, he was afraid to pull down his pants and finish the job in the toilet. There was very little smell for me to notice, because as yet, there had been no contact with air.
“Oh, honey,” I said. “Oh, don’t worry. That’s alright. Everyone has accidents now and then. It’s no big deal. We’ll get you cleaned right up when we get home. Why didn’t you tell Grandma? She would have helped you?”
“I just wanted you. I just wanted to go home.”
While I don’t expect this posting to garner much favor from the more fastidious element out there in blogland, the incident ties in to all of my thinking of late. I took Kipp home, and as I undressed him, doused him down in the shower, and rinsed out his underpants in the toilet, (before giving in to my inner 21st century woman and tossing them in the garbage), I was thinking about every tender mother who had ever done the same, and about how difficult it must have been in less sanitary times than ours. I thought about how cleanliness, in this case, was so integral to my little boy’s human dignity that I would have come to serious blows with anyone who would imply there was only the lowest societal value in in the act of wiping his bottom clean, and in clearing the mess, and his shame, away. How could any act, infused with such love, be devoid of value?
Reading both Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan brings up the same questions to me again, and again, again: but where does love fit in with all that you have to say? Why do you care so much about what society thinks and values?
Are you the strong women you think you are?
12:04:52 AM 
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