Hobson's Choice
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I want to hear your poop
Children help us explore questions about sharing space and living together. We all must have asked these questions as small children, but of course, we forget them. Family life comes to seem so normal and normative to us that we no longer question the nitty-gritty ways that it works (unless it doesn't, and then you get therapy later on). We join the unwritten contract of social mores, and we forget that we have joined something, that family life is not simply an "I AM" of the universe. Then we have children, and they force us uncomfortably to examine our manners and what they mean, particularly what they mean when we try to live together.
Or to share a bathroom.
What am I talking about, you ask? A conversation recorded verbatim, this morning, in that most intimate of household settings: the shitter.
E: I take a little bath-ie?
J: Yes, just wait a minute until Mommy's done pooping.
(long pause).
E: I want to hear your poop. (She approaches)
J: You want what?
E: I want to hear your poop.
J: Well, I'm just not sure how loud my poop is going to be.
(long pause)
E: Oh.
On more prosaic notes: people really weren't kidding when they said they don't clear the roads here. They don't clear the roads here. I wonder if that frees me from the social contract of shoveling as well.
10:05 a.m. - 2005-01-19
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