No words

Dear Mr. Baby:

There is a scene in Contact, the film adaptation of the Carl Sagan novel of the same name, in which Jodie Foster stares into the fathomless corners of the universe and, awestruck by the enormity and the exquisite beauty of it all, gazes, stricken, saying "no......words.......no.....words...." and opening and closing her mouth in teary, dramatic silent gapes.

I refer to this particular cinematic snippet because I think it best sketches an image of my inner self (with only a few modifications - I weep in disbelief, like Jodie Foster, and in awe and amazement, but of a more negative, a more grotesque, a more olfactory kind; I sense that which awes me not with my eyes but with my nose and with the amygdala or wherever the memory of all tortured smells goes to rot and brand itself to the mind) whenever I open your diapers to a poop these days.  There are simply no....words....(tears)....no.....words.....(open mouth)....to describe it.

Perhaps to start we should discuss the general dismay I feel that so much of my life is now dedicated to discussions, albeit short, of fecal matter.  Whether it has come or gone, its consistency and color, its size and shape.  I have a Master's degree in not one but two platitude-generating fields - I used to be a favorite dinner guest, charming and witty and fairly current on political affairs.  Now, I just spend a lot of time fretting about your excrement, Mr. Baby, and I'm trying to cut back.  But this, the latest, un-freshest hell, I think we must discuss. 

Before, you pooped a lot, and that was a (fairly legitimate, I think) cause for complaint because, well...there was a lot of poop.  We spent what I consider to be a disproportionate amount of time in the laundry room, singing a cloying song I call "Pants Check'' whose lyrics really only embody two or three more words beyond that.  This song can also easily be arranged to be "Pants Change'' if the need arises.  A lot of feet (yours) and hands (mine) and noses (dog's, and occasionally someone else's) got sticky-pooed, and there was a lot of hand-washing and trash and yellowish stuff everywhere, with certain people trying to act cheerful but sounding more like they just walked out of The Feminine Mystique and couldn't find any Valium.  Fred barked a lot.  I don't know why.

Yes, when you were a wee little lad, you pooped fifteen times a day, and that is not an exaggeration of any kind.  I had to write it all down for the doctor, and I always report the numbers honestly. Now, I don't know if doctors do the same thing to a baby's poop reports as they do to alcohol and cigarette reports, which, since you're new to the scene, is this: multiply by three in case someone ''forgot'' something.  But she seemed duly impressed.  You, Mr. Baby, were in the upper percentiles of pooping, frequency-wise.  Stratospheric, vertigo-inducing rankings.

When you gradually reduced your output, and after I got over being nervous and perplexed and checked the Internet to make sure it was a-okay if you didn't poop for two days and then also called TeleHealth and my mother, I was of course quite pleased.  It seemed to me at the time that less frequent pooping meant fewer, shall we say, mishaps.  Fewer adventures, fewer emergency clothing changes.  Fewer tornadoes of baby wipes and profanity, fewer games of Twister in attempts to keep things unadulterated, fewer contortions of the face remeniscent of The Scream.  Less false, shrill giggling and me saying, good poop! vacuously, obviously not meaning it, not meaning it all.

Oh, but I wasn't thinking, and some of our readers more seasoned, more sage, those who have had children are already shaking their heads affectionately, for they know.  Perhaps they are thinking of that time when they too were jejune fools, new to baby poop and unwise to the ways of the world.  Still brimming with optimism and hope, clinging to that silly, fluttering dream that life will return to something normal. Someday. If only the poop will stop.

It turns out - and of course this is all quite logical in retrospect, and hindsmell is 20/10 Mr. Baby - it turns out that you don't actually want the poop to go on hiatus in anyone's bum.  It turns out that human feces, left fermenting for several days, actually just takes on a horrifically fetid odor.  One could say that it actually evolves in there.  When, after several days of squirming and grunting and turning red and wringing your little hands while I act as your doula, you finally birth this little monster, Mr. Baby, there are no. words. to describe it, there is nothing to compare it to, there is simply not a hyperbole hyperbolic enough to capture the essence of this stench.  It's additionally, although not at all unexpectedly, ironic that you began this nasty fermentation process right after we switched to cloth diapers. Thanks for that. 

So to summarize my thoughts on this Mr. Baby, if you feel like going back to more frequent evacuations, that would be met with no small amount of joy and fanfare.  Please.  It's really, really gross.  Really.