Poop! (and Prawn Pesto Pasta with Pangrattato, as Penance for Poor Parenting)
Can you mitigate rage with a recipe?
That’s a lot of Ps. And speaking of a lot of pee, a little over a month ago we started potty training my son, who is two and a half. It has been… kind of successful, but kind-of-successful potty training is like kind-of-successful minesweeping. There will be accidents, there will be explosions – with devastating consequences.
The boy mostly has peeing under control. Every now and then he has an accident, but I’d say he makes it to the toilet about nine of out ten times. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for when he poops.
Currently about six weeks into our potty-training journey, poop accidents are a regular, almost daily occurrence. On some days, even more frequently. Overall, he has far fewer hits than misses. We aren’t sure why – like I said, peeing is no problem. The experts say it’s natural to want to keep crapping your pants when that’s all you’ve ever known. It just feels right, I guess? I mean, I can’t empathise, but to each their own.
Anyway, poop accidents are very dismaying because they’re gnarly. Without a nappy in place, it just gets everywhere, and it's so gross, and not easy to clean. Just the other day he had an accident, and a couple hours later I noticed there were poo-prints all over the floor. It must have slid down his leg, and then he stepped in it, and wandered off. Occurrences like this are depressingly common.
Of course we are very up on positive reinforcement when he does poo in the toilet. We shower him with praise and even gave him a sticker chart to track and celebrate his success. But the wins happen so infrequently that the messaging never really sticks. So we often default to the inverse tactic, which is shaming or scolding him when he gets it wrong. Actually, ‘tactic’ isn’t the right word, because it’s not pre-meditated; in fact, it goes against our agreed-upon potty-training strategy.1 The scolding is just an honest, direct, emotional response. Cleaning up shit is dispiriting, and it’s natural to be upset with whoever made such a a mess.
But the reason you don’t want to scold your kid when they poop their pants is because it doesn’t help. It just makes them feel bad about it, without helping them learn.2 But it’s a very strange thing, trying to teach a person how to poo in the right place, because first you have to teach them how to recognise the urge to poo. Felix seems entirely oblivious to any rumblings or internal pressure that might alert him to the situation as it develops. I cannot understand this at all. When I have to poop, I can feel it approaching with waves of increasing urgency: There’s a storm a-brewin’! followed by There’s trouble at the old mine! and finally Get back! She’s gonna blow!
Not so with the boy. For him, shitting appears to be as seamless and sudden as turning on a tap. He is clueless.
As a parent, there are lots of things you get to look forward to as the kids grow up. For me, at the very top of that list is not having to clean up shit. And it’s not so much because of the shit itself but because of how my own disgust and impatience too often curdles into anger.
A month or so before we started potty training, Felix suddenly developed an aversion to having his nappy changed. I don’t know what sparked it – maybe he had a traumatic experience with nappy rash, or maybe he was just sick of being interrupted all the time. But the resistance often resulted in physical struggles, sometimes requiring both of us parents to restrain him.
Some days, being changed would make him absolutely apoplectic. He would shout I DON’T WANT IT over and over, red in the face and writhing as if possessed by a demon, rolling back and forth, banging against the side of the changing table. One day I had to grip his ankles so hard it made my thumb seize up, and I was afraid I’d leave bruises on his little feet. I could have shown compassion – I could have paused to comfort him and reassure him. But I was trying to prevent poo from getting everywhere, and my deep-down crisis-mode animal-man brain had woken up and taken the wheel. This is a power struggle now, it said, and you have to show him who’s boss, how it is. This is the way the world works, might makes right and I’m in charge. He is only two, but I am sending a message – does he receive it? Does he understand, will he internalise it, and when he is a dad or a boss or a boyfriend or a football fan or a head chef, will he transmit it to others, his baby-man brain shouting at him from deep within the caves of his subconscious, THIS IS HOW IT IS?
And when the battle is over, when the shit has been wiped away and he is clean and contained, I give him a hug and all I can think is why didn’t I stop to hug him earlier, to tell him I’m here and everything is going to be okay. Calm and reassured, he goes off to tinker with his Duplo, and I to the kitchen to make prawn and broccoli pasta with pesto. It’s an act of care and comfort to counter the anger, mothering to offset the bad dadding, atonement to absolve the sin. And we eat and enjoy, and everything is okay.
A recipe follows, for paid subscribers!
a good glug of olive oil
a little knob of butter
a couple of anchovies
a clove of garlic, minced
a heaped ¼ cup of panko
sea salt, pepper, and dried oregano, all to taste
a small handful of parsley (if you got it), finely chopped
250g spaghetti, or whatever pasta you like
about 250g raw prawns, peeled and deveined
a head of broccoli, cut into florets
pesto from a jar, as needed
Heat the oil in a frying pan over medium heat and at the butter and anchovies. Break up the anchovies as the butter melts, and when it’s foaming add the garlic and sauté for just a minute or two, until it softens. Add the panko, and continue to cook, stirring frequently, until golden brown. Remove from heat and stir in the chopped parsley.
Bring a big pot of salted water to the boil and add the pasta. When the pasta is four minutes away from being done, add the prawns and broccoli. Everything should be cooked at the same time that the pasta is done. Drain and return to the pot, and stir through enough pesto sauce to coat. Serve in pasta bowls, garnished with spoonfuls of the pangrattato on top.
Another tiresome thing about potty training is that it starts to dominate conversations with your partner. My wife and I used to talk about movies and politics. Now we talk about human feces.
One of the better pieces of pithy parenting advice I’ve read is to use the term ‘teach me twos’ instead of ‘terrible twos.’ It’s pretty twee, but true.
it's like they say: it gets better....you'll stop cleaning poopy pants soon enough, and it'll be glorious. And then you'll just be wiping poopy buttholes until I-don't-know-when-because-Theo's-nearly-6-and-I-am-still-on-poop-wiping duty.