Man-Child
“…But Coach is a great show,” I said, “Look, Luther is eating a sandwich and about to cause a ruckus.”
“I wanna watch Dora,” yelled Adam, age 3.
“Just try watching Coach. You might learn something.”
Adam’s mother had a job interview that morning, and because of a last minute cancellation by the babysitter, I was the unfortunate friend asked to watch her son.
“Dora! Dora! Dora!” he exclaimed in frustration, and in order to avoid a tantrum, I reluctantly changed the channel.
I never liked children. Even when I was a child myself, other kids annoyed me. On the playground during recess, girls would skitter around in groups, yelling and screeching that typical young girl screech, and I would put my hands over my ears and plead, “Will you please be quiet, please?” When my childhood birthdays would near, my mother would recommend going to an arcade, or worse yet, Chuck E. Cheese, to which I would reply through my teeth, “But Mother, there will be children there!” Seeing, hearing, and interacting with other children always came in a distant 9th on my list of things to do, behind reading a Calvin and Hobbes book, or playing Mega Man 2 in the safe confines of my bedroom. I never imagined having a child of my own, or even babysitting one. But life always throws you a curveball, and it’s these curveballs that cause introspective thought and maybe even build character, as Calvin’s father always says.
Adam was a cute kid, I guess; if you find kids cute. He had blue eyes and bushy blonde hair, but all I could concentrate on was the overwhelming responsibility of keeping this tiny human being alive for the next 2 hours. He found a Starburst between the sofa cushions and asked if he could have it. Were 3 year olds allowed to eat Starbursts? They were gooey and small, sure, but large enough to choke and kill a child if placed in the wrong mouth. I gave him permission and watched breathlessly as he chewed, my arms extended and ready to grab him in case he started choking. I didn’t know how to perform the Heimlich maneuver, but I did know what to do if you were choking alone: throw your chest against the back of a chair and force the stuck object out with a gush of air. It looked like the back of the kitchen chair had the sturdy craftsmanship to sustain the blow if Adam’s chest was slammed against it.
Thankfully, the Starburst was swallowed without incident and we began watching Dora the Explorer. I had a problem with the show right from the start. First of all, the acting was simply atrocious. The woman who does the voice of Dora couldn’t act her way out of a paper bag. Every other word she said was terribly emphasized, like, “We need to get to the other side of the bridge! Can you help us?!” Her voice aroused a sense of panic in me, making me think that if I didn’t show her how to cross the bridge, she and her monkey friend would surely drown. And she would often slip a Spanish word into a sentence, but without giving any explanation of what the Spanish word translates to in English. How are children learning from this broad? I thought.
Dora’s world, in my opinion, was completely fucked. In her world, there were waterfalls placed in the middle of the ocean, as well as a bridge. A bridge in the middle of the ocean! On one end was the ocean, and on the other was, you guessed it, the ocean. And by god, in order to cross that bridge they had to answer various questions, and they would wait for the viewer to answer as well. They waited a really long time. Even after Adam would yell the answers to the television, Dora still waited, and Adam, who got annoyed easily, would scream at her until she started moving again.
Call me cynical, call me old-fashioned, but I grew up hanging out with the underground outcasts of Fraggle Rock, and spent many mornings on the mean streets of Sesame, and let me tell you, if you couldn’t keep up with The Count, then you were left by the wayside. They gave you only a second or two to answer the question, then they would explain the answer. Explanations: that was the key difference between Dora and Big Bird. Big Bird taught, Dora yelled at you and never explained shit. If she were to be held responsible to explain her actions, she wouldn’t be crossing bridges in the middle of the ocean, or hanging out near a rainbow in the middle of a deep, shady forest. No one was monitoring her; that was the problem.
“Hey Adam, are there waterfalls in the middle of the ocean?”
“Yeah, Mike.”
“See? That’s a problem. I really do think you would learn more if you watched Coach.”
“Mike, you’re silly. You’re silly, Mike.”
I decided not to push the issue with Adam. He wasn’t my child, and all I needed to do was keep him alive, and for my benefit, quiet for the next two hours. Let his brain rot with lies, I thought. Just as long as he doesn’t freak out, child-style, I’ll be fine.
Adam was totally engrossed in the show. It looked like he was absorbing all of the crap Dora was feeding him, and I became a little mystified by the beauty of human life, and the awesome potential of the human brain. There is so much to be learned in life, I thought. There is so much hope and promise when you are a child, when your brain is a clean slate, and there are so many options, so many forks in the road of life that are yet to be traveled, and all of it seems so exciting. Looking at the serious concentration on Adam’s face, his brow furrowed, his blue eyes wide, taking in all of the information he could, I began to wonder what he would look like when he was an adult. How tall he would grow, what kind of career he would have, what he would contribute to our society. I began to sense just a little bit of the appeal of becoming a parent. The idea of creating a human life with a person you love, of teaching a child the ways of the world, to mold him and make him strong, to know what’s right and wrong, to not just make a human being, but also undertake the task of making him happy. Maybe the immense burden I felt watching a young child was equal to the amount of pride and triumph a parent would have when the child is happy and well-rounded. Adam looked so serious watching the show, and I smelled something funny.
“Mike, I poop-ted,” Adam said while still staring at the television.
“Wait, what? Just now?”
“Yeah, Mike. I poopted.” He reiterated.
“In your drawers?”
“Yeah, Mike.”
“Well, go to the bathroom! It doesn’t exactly smell like roses in here.”
Before she left, Adam’s mother had informed me that they had been working on his potty-training, but he had been constipated for the past couple of days. That was apparently no longer the case.
He went to the toilet, and I tried searching for a clean pair of underwear for him. I found some as he called from the bathroom, “Mike, Mike you have to help me.”
“Help you do what, exactly?” I asked as I found him standing there, naked from the waist down, his butt and legs streaked with poop.
“You have to help me wipe,” he said. “You have to wipe. Here.” He handed me some toilet paper.
“Do I really have to do this? I mean, I thought potty-training was about taking care of your own dookie.”
He laughed. “You’re silly, Mike. You’re silly. Come on, you have to wipe.”
I balled up the toilet paper and started cleaning up the mess he had made on himself. He was holding all of the cards in this situation, and he knew it.
“Here, Mike,” he said as he pointed to some on his leg. “Get that.”
“Dude, how did you—it’s on your fuckin’ leg...”
The word slipped out way too easily, since I had absolutely no experience with children, and I thought that if I didn’t act like I had just said a bad word, he would forget that he ever heard it. It didn’t seem like he did though, for the sound of the new word must have tickled his ears and he let out a giggle. He continued to point out various places for me to clean up. After it looked like I got it all, I helped him put on his Sponge Bob underwear and we went back to the living room.
Ten more minutes of watching Dora walking across water, and Adam said again, “Mike, I poopted,”
“Very funny,” I replied, “but I’m not buying it.”
“Mike, I poopted.”
“Hey, I didn’t enjoy wiping
all that stuff off your leg, and if you actually pooped, you should go to the bathroom.”
He did.
“Mike, you have to help me,” I heard him say. “You have to wipe.”
I fearfully imagined Adam’s mother coming home to find him naked and covered with his self-secreted filth while the marching band theme song of Coach echoed from the living room. I reluctantly went to the bathroom, wiped him down once again, and before I put another pair of Sponge Bob underwear on him, I asked, “Are you done pooping? Cause honestly, this is a tad absurd.”
“Yeah, I’m done, Mike. I’m done.”
Back to the living room, where we sat comfortably for quite a while, but I could just sense that he wasn’t done pooping. I knew he had more left. I kept looking at him, sneering, waiting for him to get that strained look on his face, and wondered if I could carry him to the toilet in time, like grabbing a puppy while it is urinating on the carpet and trying to get it outside before it finishes.
Every five or ten minutes I asked him, “Adam, do you have to go to the bathroom?”
“No, Mike. No.”
“Adam, do you have to go to the bathroom?”
“No, Mike. No.”
Adam, do you have to go to the bathroom?”
“Mike, I poopted.”
The frustration I felt was unbearable because I had no way of releasing it. I couldn’t shake him, I couldn’t swear, I couldn’t even punch a pillow, worried that I would scare him. All I could think of to say was, “Your Dora privileges are hereby revoked! We’re watching Coach till your mom gets back!”
I wiped him down for a third time, not saying a word, not even trying to reason with him. He tried asking for baby powder for his butt, but I outright refused. It was bad enough I had to clean him up three times, I sure as hell wasn’t about to literally blow smoke up his ass.
Back to the living room again, and he didn’t really seem to enjoy Coach. It bored him, so he began climbing the furniture, which was fine, as long as he didn’t defecate on me.
Shortly after the show ended, Adam’s mother came home, and I felt somehow proud that he didn’t injure himself or die while he was my responsibility. She asked me how he behaved, and before I could answer, Adam said, “Mommy, I poopted.”
“Ok,” she said, “Go to the bathroom and clean yourself, ok?”
“Ok, Mommy.”
“Wait,” I said. “Wait. He takes care of himself when he does that?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to go over all that stuff with you. I was hoping he wouldn’t have to go until after I got back.”
Adam took me for a sucker, and he succeeded! He got himself a morning of Dora the Explorer and three free wipe-downs, and I’m sure he was reveling in his cleverness.
I told his mother about the three pairs of dirty underwear, and how he took advantage of my babysitting ineptitude.
“…I mean, it was a real mess,” I said. “It was even on his leg. I wiped, he pooped, wipe-poop, wipe-poop. I…I gotta go. I hope the interview went well.”
I left somewhat abruptly, ashamed to admit that a three-year-old child outwitted me, and later that evening I received a phone call from Adam’s mother as to where her son might have heard the “F” word, since her son had used it for the first time today at the dinner table.
“That’s intriguing,” I said into the phone. “Have you seen the shit they teach kids on Dora the Explorer?
Contents
Flush the Floaters