Blood, Guts, and Motherhood

As a combat veteran of the Marines participating in the invasion of Iraq in 2003, you can correctly assume that I've seen a lot of ugly stuff. Sparing you the grisly detail, I can sum it up by saying I dealt with the bad encounters well.

Needless to say, I was overly confident that this iron-clad stomach would be able to carry over into motherhood. I consider myself to have a high threshold for handling the gross. I cruised through the first couple of years of my first son's life without an issue; bravely conquering explosive diapers, runny noses that never seemed to want to drain, and prying out half eaten bugs out of my boy's grinning mouth.

Then came the day that my stomach (and will) was tested.

I was doing some schoolwork in my office when I caught the scent of my little one's dirty diaper. Halfway out of the office and on the way to change my then two year old son's little bum, I noticed something on the floor; his dirty diaper...followed by a brown foot-printed trail that let to his bedroom. Oh boy.

There, at the "scene of the crime", was a bedroom massacre. Poop EVERYWHERE!

In the eye of the hurricane was my two year old son, happily running his trucks through one of the brown masses.

Gag reflex activated.

I ran from the room, sucked in a deep breath of air and held my breath as I evacuated my son from the mess and into the tub. Cleaning him was one of the easier parts...the room? Not so much. It took many trips of me holding my breath, scrambling into the room to clean as much as my oxygen supply would allow before I'd have to leave the room to get another breath. Unfortunately, there were some casualties (puzzles, action figures) that didn't make it back to the toy shelf that day, but that's expected on any battlefield I suppose.

Who would've guessed that my nerves of steel and iron stomach, which was able to endure war,would do somersaults over a normal day of motherhood? Go Figure.