February 11

unwarranted knowledge
Random fact: prolonged constipation can lead to, no matter your physical size or frame, a big arse, colossal sized poo-poo. You might ask yourself why I feel the need to pass on this information, yet if you walked a day in my shoes, you’d see that this is all too mundanely the contents of my life. After Lasa moved away, Chamrong filled the shoes, as the smallest kid in the class. He has little round cheeks and a squeaky voice, and skinny little frog legs that look so cute and sprightly as he jumps rope.

Anyways, this morning he laid his head down the desk, eyes blurring warmly with tears, “Teacher,” he said, barely looking up at me, “Call mother, go to home me.” We started for upstairs to the office, and he could barely stand up straight. “My stomach,” he said. He stopped midway, bending at the waist, his face and lips got white as if he were in deep concentration. I picked him up and then felt his bottom, warm and mushy. I quickly put him down, alarmed, “Rong, did you poop?” He nodded weakly and waddled to the bathroom, squatting, holding his stomach. I led him inside, and as he started to unbutton his pants, the most gigantic poop, from any size man, fell out his pant leg. It lay in a clump on the floor, and for a moment, I stared in disbelief at the size of this thing, that it was physically possible it could have come out of a child so small. It was greenish brown, and if it had been randomly placed in an open space with no clues of its origins, I’d assume it came from some sort of large wild animal, a horse, cow, maybe an elephant.

I instructed him to take off his shoes, then socks, then pants, then shorts underneath, and then he bent over, stark naked from the waist down and shivering, as I showered him down with the hose. “More coming,” Rong said, as it started to drip down his legs and onto the floor once again. I brought him to the stall, and Faye came in from the library to help me. She got a roll of toilet paper and attempted to pick this poop off the floor. It was too big to go down the hole, so she started hacking at it with a toilet brush, explaining that he must’ve been constipated for an extended amount of time until he burst, and how she was worried this might clog and break the whole CAS plumming system. I rinsed out his shorts, rung them out, put them back on him, and his mom just dropped him some new pants and he returned to class. So these grotesque situations probably don’t need to be retold or recollected, but they do remind me, I’m more ready than I ever planned to be for motherhood. Not just because of the poop thing, but you know? I wouldn’t trade my life for anything.