Anyone driving or walking down Marie Avenue in Akron, Ohio on any given day in 1985 or '86 might have heard the voice of a little girl in an upstairs window calling out...
"MOM! I NEED YOU TO COME WIPE MY BUTTHOLE!"
For those people who know me or my family, I'm sure it's completely unsurprising that some of my earliest memories are about poop.
It seems my family's genetics predisposed all four of my brothers, all four of my sisters, and me to senses of humor and comedic timing centered around the toilet. On what chromosomal pairing does poop humor lie you ask? The missing one.
My first memory of poop was very early. I must have been about a year and a half because I was still waddling around in a diaper and my vocabulary was limited to a couple words here and there.
On this particular day, my mother was in the bedroom, folding "Mount Clothesmore," our not-so-fondly-named perpetual tower of laundry. In her distraction, she didn't notice me leave the room. I had a mission I was dying to complete and I would have done it much earlier if the family would just leave me to my own devices for a change instead of constantly picking me up and setting me down away from the objects of my curiosity. I entered the bathroom and headed straight for it. There it was, gleaming in all of its ivory porcelain glory, its upper deck sweating in the hot summer air. The toilet looked more mysterious and magnificent than ever. I eagerly peered over the lid and, to my delight, a lone floater met my eye. Unsure of what it was, but too young to care, my hand shot straight into the bowl to claim my prize.
With each poke, the turd bobbed elusively away from my dimpled hand and I found myself myself reaching further and further into the toilet. My oldest brother entered the bathroom just as I was about to take a nosedive into the toilet bowl, startling the tiny living shit right out of me by shouting, "MOM!"
In a breath, I was being plucked from the edge of my watery fate and deposited in the adjacent sink, elbow deep in soap suds and trying to make sense of the flurry of angry and panicky words coming from my mother's mouth as she scrubbed me clean. I didn't know exactly what she said, but from her demeanor I quickly deduced that toilets were bad, poop was worse, and both were terrifying.
It wasn't long after that I was potty trained, but with a catch...
I was scared to death of falling in the toilet and even more terrified of touching my own poop. Every time I went poop, I was insistent that my mother wipe my butt for me. She accomodated me for a while, but when it became apparent that my fear was turning phobic, she decided it was time to dole out some tough love and stopped responding to my requests...
...But I was a stubborn kid.
I once sat on the toilet and shouted for her to come wipe my butt for an hour straight, while my family sat downstairs at the dinner table ignoring me.
It must have been a couple weeks of this before I gave in and began taking matters into my own hands. My father spent much of 1986 unclogging massive wads of TP from the toilet and barking, "Whoever's using this much toilet paper is in for it," knowing exactly who the culprit was. I never fessed up. The thought of being forced to use anything less than 5 inches of toilet paper border between me and my poop was too frightening to bear. Luckily, he let it go for a while.
My fear of poop came to a head when I was four or five years old.
My parents had some family friends over and I had been swept up in playing house in the basement with a couple of kids my age. I was having so much fun that I ignored my urge to go until it was too late. I attempted to run up the stairs to the bathroom, only to stop abruptly as my last ditch effort at pinching failed miserably.
Red-faced, I found my way up to my room and shut the door. I was wearing cable-knit tights that day, causing my biggest fear to be nestled tightly against my bottom. There was absolutely no way I was going to let anyone know that I pooped my pants, least of all my mother, who I was sure would be beyond upset. I had to face my fear.
I carefully pulled off my bottoms and quickly replaced them with new ones, breathing a sigh of relief that I made the switch before anyone walked in. I was so proud of myself for taking care of my own business and being within such a close range of a turd-out-of-water, that I marched happily downstairs to resume the fine game of playing house. My fecalphobia was, at last, conquered
Later that night, as I was helping set the table for dinner, I heard my mother yell out in surprise from my bedroom. She was in there picking up dirty laundry when she stumbled across my turd, perched like an egg atop a nest of skid-marked underwear and cable-knit tights. Oops.
