In Chapter 4 you will get a chance to live through some of the darker emotional moments that I suffered with my son Jordan.  At this time, he’s between 2 and 4 years of age.  Everytime he needed to pass stool, he’d go behind the plant in the front hall, stand on his tippy toes and clench his butt cheeks together will all his might.  If you think that this is wholly counterintuitive to passing stool, you could not be more right.  I had no clue, either, why he was assuming this stance until later.

Also, when the bolus (leaking stool dribbling past the impacted stool) entered the pull-up diaper, the smell would make me gag beyond comprehension.  My apologies, for the graphic description, but I want no woman or man to go through what I did without knowing that there is a reason for this.

When I asked Jordan if I could change his pull-up (by 4 years, there were no diapers on the shelf left that would fit him and cloth diapers were not yet in vogue back then) he would literally lose his mind.  If I was able to wrestle him to his back, usually with wet stool and bolus leaking all over both of us and the floor, he would bite, kick, hit, slap and scream as if I was attempting to murder him.  To say I detested these incidents is an understatement.

At least when his father was home, he could help to hold Jordan still while I removed the soiled diaper and replaced it with a new one. I felt such deep guilt and shame for my son who clearly wrestled with us in abject fear and terror.  Later on, I mastered changing his diaper with him standing up.  A feat few parents have maybe had to achieve.  At least this way, the abuse to both of us was mostly mitigated.  However, it would not be unusual for me to receive an errant blow to the side or back of my head.

At this point, I was in pure survival mode.  I’d lost all semblance of self in time and in space.  I’d become an automaton, too afraid to even admit how much I truly hated my life.

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