A Moving Experience

I kept ignoring her pleas that she had a puppy. Every two minutes she would walk up to me and say, “I have a puppy.” I assumed that she was merely playing a game whereby there was an imaginary puppy in our house and Gertrude was its imaginary caretaker. Stranger things have happened.

Turns out I couldn’t have been more wrong.

A puppy, by conventional definition, is a warm-blooded animal with a wet nose, gangly legs and teeth that are used to make wood pockmarked and shaven.

To Gertrude a puppy happens to be a bodily excretion that polite people call a “poopie”.

She did not have a dirty diaper, it turns out. She wanted to make a deposit in our plastic baby potty.

This was a momentous occasion. When your baby suddenly realizes she has control over some of her bodily functions, there is much rejoicing. It means that within a year you will no longer be sedating her on the floor in order to convince her that she needs to have the foul odorous mass in her pants removed and a new sterile paper and plastic catching device attached to her nether regions. You try to explain that if we do not do this that there will be no more dividing her from a simian than her lack of hair. She does not care.

Once she is potty trained you don’t have to worry about changing the diapers. Instead, you end up changing the sheets and airing out her bedroom when she lets the flood gates loose in the middle of the night and she cries in shame. Years of therapy follow and when she eventually becomes an artist you notice that her paintings depict you in a diaper eating a hot dog.

So there she was sitting naked on the potty with Mom watching her cautiously. I was in Matilda’s room changing her sheets and trying to figure out how the hell that stupid little quilty thing that goes between the mattress and the fitted sheets exactly works. Instead of being rectangular it seemed to be more oval or oblong. But that’s another story.

Just as I was becoming successful we hear a loud cry of triumph and joy from the bathroom. “Daddy, come quick and see what Gertrude did!”

Okay, I must stop here and ask a cultural question. Why is it that when we potty train children we are required to inspect their work? As if we don’t trust them that they’ve succeeded? That we have to rate their refuse on a scale of one to ten? “I’m proud of you honey, but next time I think your effluvium could be a lot more impressive . . .”

I came running and found the naked baby standing over the potty with a look of glee and accomplishment. She had, indeed, made a deposit.

We cheered. We jumped up and down and told her how proud of her we were.

And that’s all I remember. Shortly afterwards I passed out from the fumes.