Making Shit Beautiful
Tiny True Stories #13
Welcome!
to the thirteenth edition of Tiny True Stories! If you’re new here, hello, and thank you! I’m so happy to see you. This is a monthly newsletter where I share supershort true stories you can read in 5 minutes or less. I also share recommendations for other things I loved this month—food, books, poems, memes, anything. Tiny does not just mean short—I write about the forgotten, small, mundane stories of our lives, where most of us spend most of our time, and look for their unexpected magic.
You might have guessed, or have seen if you follow me on social media, that we are expecting a second baby next month. It’s been harder to share about this one for reasons I can’t quite pin down (anxiety about the miscarriage? So much more tired this time? Just less time in general?). But now that it’s closer I am looking forward to it, terrified knowing what’s coming and of starting all over, and excited to share it with you.
Today’s Tiny True Story
This month’s story is going to use the word shit a lot. If that bothers you, please feel free to skip this one! But for me it has a particular quality of, well, shittiness, that a word like “poop” just doesn’t have.
This story was begun at the Hippocamp writing conference, where I gave a talk with the wonderful Amy Monticello about this exact thing—writing about the “mundane” (which, of course, never ends up being all that mundane). We asked the audience to think of the most boring, forgotten parts of our day, and someone suggested taking a shit. Yes, I thought.
A shorter version of this where I had to change “shit” to “poop” originally appeared at Insider. I like that version, but here is a longer version with a little more depth and more shit, and my attempt to make shit beautiful. Just in time for more diapers.
Holy Shit
Let me tell you about my bidet. When I sit down, the seat is already warm. The seat makes a kindly ding-ding to let me know it’s ready. When I’m done, I can choose exactly how I’d like to blast my anus clean: icy cold water, for when I’m taking a shit after my infant daughter woke up at 5, and by 7 I put her down for her first nap and it’s not even light outside yet, icy, please wake me up; or warm, a perfect baby bath temperature; or hotter still, the kind of heat that seems unnecessary and maybe dangerous, but sometimes its sting is just right. I choose the angle, choose the stream width (a gentle fan, or laser-thin power-washing?). Holding the bidet’s remote in my hands, pressing the buttons is a pleasant video-game effect—I press a button, and something nice happens to me. I press a button, and the bidet obeys.
I am a bidet evangelist. Before getting the bidet and before having a child, I didn’t think too much about my own shitting. But now, when people come to visit, I almost beg them to go try it out. To feel what it’s like. When someone I know gets a bidet, we trade stories. I’ve never talked about my butthole so much, or wanted to talk about it. But when someone else has a bidet, we share a secret. We know a joy that others don’t know yet. We get to turn this mundane task into something lovely. Yes, lovely. To know a joy that others don’t know yet.
Before I had a child I hated everything everyone told me about having a child. The good, the bad, all of it. I hated every time someone told me it was a magical time. I hated when they told me I’d never sleep again, that I’d never eat alone again, be alone again, have sex again, love my body again. I knew, of course, that they meant well—they wanted me to be prepared, to tell me the truth as fully as they could. But their “advice” felt like they had some secret about my future that I was too stupid to see. Like I was a child, and they were patting me on the head—it’s okay, honey, you’ll understand when you’re older.
The worst part is that they’re right. I didn’t understand. Having a daughter was like finding new doors in my mind I’d never seen, bright rooms with brand-new colors. Maybe like what scientists feel when they see a new galaxy. It’s impossible to write about without cliché. Every time I edit this essay I come back to this paragraph and try to find a new metaphor for the sharp pain in my chest when my daughter sees me in the morning and brightens like a flashbulb. It’s beyond language; impossible to write about. A joy that I didn’t know yet.
When I’m in the bathroom on the toilet, and my now two-year-old comes in, plays with her horse toys on the lip of the tub, the bidet can keep going with its work. I am hands-free, multi-tasking. Each horsie slides down into the tub—whee! my daughter says. Oh no! she says, when they hit bottom. She drapes her whole body across my knees while I shit, and I love the weight of her, wonder what it feels like to be her: to love someone so deeply you want hug them while they’re shitting. I press a button and the warm water obeys. My daughter on the other side of my body says, tender, “Hi, mommy,” as if she missed me, even though I’ve been here the whole time.
And of course, I realize I do know what that love is like. When my daughter was a tiny baby, everyone warned me about diaper blowouts, shit everywhere, endless laundry from baby shit, ending up covered in baby shit, your entire house smelling like baby shit. People cried over baby shit, gagged over baby shit. I understood their revulsion, I did—but I loved changing her diapers.
I loved the way her poop changed colors in the exact way it was supposed to. The black-green-yellow poop told me the thing I wanted to hear most, the thing she couldn’t yet tell me herself: that she was okay. And when she wasn’t okay, when she had an allergy, I didn’t hesitate to take pictures of the shit. To look for blood, I put my face right up next to it. I loved the way I could wipe her clean, tie everything up in a neat bundle, throw it away, and everything was fixed.
When she was so little, every cry was a desperate ask from a person who I adored, but whose language I couldn’t speak. I said “I don’t know” several hundred times a day. I felt like I was doing something wrong at nearly every turn. I yearned to know the “right” thing to do for just one single task. Some days the whole day microscoped down to the trash can: slowly filling with diapers, wait till the baby is sleeping, then dump it, the diapers thumping to the bottom of the trash bag, heavy and insistent, life force, garbage; snap out a new bag, wash hands, chapped from the tenth or twentieth time washing today, wrestle open a new pack of diapers; and the baby wakes up again. Sometimes, when I’d hear her wake, my whole body would fill with rage like boiling water as I tied off the garbage bag—this was all I did today?
But most days, changing a diaper was a love letter. It did not matter that this was all I had done. It did matter—our life, my daughter’s life, depended upon it. Changing a diaper was my favorite shitty thing: a dry diaper was the clearest way I could say, “I see what’s wrong, and I know what to do.” It was practice in being gentle. It was care. It was love. I sang while I wiped, took my daughter’s feet and kissed them, the soles of her feet still as tender as the top, still so new.
On my bidet, once I’m washed, I can hit the dry button, and a warm fan of air dries my behind off while I wait. Someone else takes care of my butt. I play Wordle on my phone. I get frustrated and scroll through Instagram stories on my phone. I should not be on my phone, so I set it down. For a few seconds I close my eyes. But even over the whir of the fan, I can hear my daughter downstairs. She is crying, or she is laughing, it doesn’t matter; my body says go. I stop the drying, and go to her. She hears my feet on the stairs, and calls out “Mama!”
My husband sits on the bidet long enough for the entire dry cycle to finish. I don’t begrudge him this time—your butt being dried like you are laying nude in a Caribbean breeze? Please take the extra minute. I only envy his ability to stay put, to say for himself: one more minute, please. Sometimes when my daughter is in the bathroom with me, I let her push the buttons. I teach her go. I teach her stop. I teach her wait. I teach her gentle.
You see what I am doing, right? I am making this shit magical. This shit is transcendent. I still haven’t figured out how to write about the joy of having children. It’s easier to write about the shit. So many people wanted to tell me how hard it is to have a child, and yes, I know why they did; some days, many days, I think I simply might not be able to do it. But then there is a diaper to change. I can throw the shit out. For these few short years, there is always this thing I can do to make her feel better quickly and easily.
Then my daughter bursts into the bathroom while I’m on the toilet waiting to be dried, because she just cannot wait a second longer to see me. I pull her up onto my lap and love the way my arms can go all the way around her. She rests her head on my shoulder. The dry cycle finishes. We both feel better.
Today’s Letters of Recommendation
Especially if you are a writer or in the publishing industry, go read Yellowface by R. F. Kuang. This book is so sharp it’s hardly even satire anymore? I’m not even sure how to describe it but it’s CUTTING in the best possible way.
Visit the Kaleideum in Winston-Salem, NC! It’s a hands-on children’s museum, very new and STEAM-oriented without feeling dystopian. I realize this is very niche, but we were visiting family there it was a wonderful time!
Play the free, fun fighting game Multiversus! My husband worked on it and I am so proud of him! If you watch the credits you might find someone familiar there.
Please get in the comments and tell me your letters of recommendation, or what shitty thing you found beautiful this month. Next time, I might have a new baby while I send this to you.
Until then,
Jill
A new baby! I didn't know. Congratulations <3
Love you! Love this shitty installment!! Best wishes