Push it

As I sat on the floor with my son this afternoon, cheering him on as he pushed out a particularly constipated batch of poop, it occurred to me just how much time I spend encouraging people to push ridiculously large things through impossibly small holes. Why have I chosen this as my profession? Who am I kidding? It never gets any easier.

CJ was lying in the lithotomy position, his legs in the air (fashioning a pair of tiny stirrups out of shoeboxes and flip-flops did cross my mind), and I could do nothing but look at the tears streaming down his face and say stupid things like, “Good job, bud!” and “A tiny piece! You pushed out a tiny piece!” Some of the kernels he had early on looked like petrified chocolate chips, like his body had leeched every ounce of water and nutrition possible before finally allowing him to let them go.

CJ worked on this poop for literally 45 minutes, easily the longest he’s spent on any poop in his short, constipation-thwarted life (and incidentally, almost as long as it took me to push him out). I knew he was tired, I knew he wanted to be done, and it absolutely killed me that I could do nothing to help him. I mean, let’s be honest, the kid needed an epidural. (I did take a moment to imagine what that would look like: me running into the emergency room, flushed with fear and adrenaline, CJ limp from effort in my arms, naked butt hanging out for all the world to see, “He’s been working on this poop for 20 minutes and there’s no end in sight—somebody get him and epidural and let’s dig that sucker out!” But then I wondered how old you really had to be to get an epidural, wondered how small CJ’s epidural space must be, and ultimately decided it wouldn’t be worth the trip.)

Laboring moms get tired too. Sometimes they give up. They say things like, “I can’t do this anymore.” They say, “I want a C-section.” And sometimes I get in their face and tell them to focus, that they can do it, that they need to do it, because the baby hanging halfway out of their vagina needs them to do it. And then they do and then it’s fine and the pain is gone and in its place is a baby.

I couldn’t get in CJ’s face today, though. I couldn’t tell him to just push and it would be over, that the pain would be gone after the poop came out. I tried, I really did, but I just couldn’t. I had to step away after ten minutes and again at 40, when I couldn’t bear his cries or my helplessness any longer. The second time, I was in my room looking through a magazine while my kid was feet away in the hallway, whimpering. Sooner than I expected he called out, “Mommy!” and I rushed back to him, ready for another go-round. But instead there was an adult-sized log of poop on the floor, easily two inches thick, and CJ was smiling. “Mommy, I did it.”

We all have mommy guilt, and we all have kid issues we have to deal with. In the grand scheme of things, I realize it could be a lot worse than the occasional bout of constipation. But today was just awful, I felt just horrible for CJ, and I wanted to call Chris so many times over the course of those 45 minutes, if nothing else than to have someone with whom to share the pain. But I didn’t, I didn't give in. It was just me and CJ, and we did it, in his words. We did it.