Nurture the Wow by Danya Ruttenberg

Author:Danya Ruttenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781250064950
Publisher: Flatiron Books

CHAPTER SIX

Exhaustion and Poop

Finding Meaning in the Body Stuff

When my friend Laurence had his first kid—a few years before I had mine—he shared one of his newfound secrets with me.

“You know you’re a parent,” he said, “when you find yourself saying, ‘Oh my God, that’s SO disgusting!!’ at least once a day.”

But not long after Nir and I became parents, we decided that Laurence wasn’t right, not really. That is: Your definition of what’s disgusting changes awfully quickly. Before kids I would have been pretty freaked out by coming in close contact with someone else’s bodily waste. (I am, I admit, especially squeamish—pet owners, medical professionals, and many other kinds of nonwimps probably don’t have this problem.) But even for me, these days, if I find myself saying, “That’s SO disgusting!” it’s because something really special has happened.

Parents of small children are pretty routinely deep in the muck of their kids’ bodily stuff. After diapers (so many diapers), there is a whole universe of potty training, accidents, reminding or dragging a not-very-mindful kid to the loo on a regular basis, and the time it takes to get the hang of using toilet paper correctly. Not to mention all the days when a kid’s digestive tract is just a little bit out of whack, or when the flu comes to town in force. There’s the bloody nose that let loose all over the living room rug, the vomit on the couch, the boogers on the sweater, and I’d rather not think about what the kid with bronchitis just coughed into my hair. Caring for the next generation creates lot of reasons to have a good enzyme-based stain and odor remover handy.

It is, of course, just part of being a human being. We consume food, waste matter comes out. Occasionally it comes up the other end before it gets digested. Sometimes we get sick and the body produces mucus. Sometimes we get cut and we bleed. These are things that bodies do.

I had a revelation about this, though, when Yonatan was probably nine or ten months old. I was changing his diaper, yet again, and suddenly, some liturgical language asserted itself.

There are a lot of different kinds of brachot—benedictions of praise to God—in the Jewish tradition. We acknowledge the divine as the source for everything before and after eating, when going to the ocean, meeting an old friend, seeing a rainbow, hearing either good or bad news, meeting a non-Jewish king, before performing a commandment, and smelling a fragrant tree—just to name a few. One of the brachot that tends to make folks giggle the first time they hear about it is meant to be recited after using the loo—either urinating or making a bowel movement. (Yes! There’s a potty blessing! There’s a blessing for everything. We, as a people, are nothing if not thorough.)

This post-bathroom liturgy is translated as,

Blessed are you, God our deity, sovereign of the universe, who formed humans with wisdom and created within them many openings and many hollows.

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