My father left this morning after being in town for over five days. Unlike my mother’s side of the family my father does not abide the talk of bodily functions and will get up and walk away from you if you so much as insinuate that humans take shits. Luckily for him he got to spend the night at our house on the night that I had to stick a glycerin suppository up Leta’s butt.

Last Thursday afternoon while I was working in the basement my babysitter started screaming for me to COME TAKE A LOOK AT THIS YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE WHAT JUST HAPPENED. I leisurely strolled up the stairs unalarmed because if what just happened involved Leta in any way then odds were I would totally believe what just happened. Standing at the top of the stairs were the babysitter and Leta, a protruding structure in place of where Leta’s butt used to be. She had pooped a fossilized torpedo and it was so big and hard that the elastic in her shorts was in danger of popping.

That was the last time she had pooped before my father came to stay with us on Sunday afternoon, so math was telling me that we were in trouble. I don’t handle stress very well, especially poop stress, so instead of waiting and waiting for The Poop That Would Never Come I opted to try out a suppository, more for my peace of mind than for the peace of her rear. I usually honor my father’s preference to leave shit talk out of the conversation, but he was staying at my house and in my house HUMANS TAKE SHITS.

After dinner and at precisely the most inconvenient time, that time being Leta’s bedtime and witching hour, I got up from the table and told Jon I’d be in Leta’s bedroom INSERTING THE GLYCERIN ROCKET INTO LETA’S ANUS. Jon started to get up to come help me but I needed to him to distract my father, to help my father forget that someone in the house was not only about to go poop but was going to be COAXED into going poop, a sin on par with being coaxed into felony misdemeanor.

I’d never inflicted a suppository on someone else let alone a baby that now no longer resembles a baby but more of a furry creature wreaking havoc on the ecosystem in the Australian Outback. I had to turn cartwheels to get that kid to sit still for 15 WHOLE MINUTES while I injected a foreign object into her butt and held her cheeks shut. All I could think while I stood there, her little rubber butt in my hands, was oh my god, how many of my friends and relatives have done this very thing and then gone back to their normal lives as if they hadn’t ever held someone else’s butt closed? How can I go back to the life I once led, a life before the anally inserted suppository, without thinking, hey, I just held someone’s butt closed for 15 minutes?

While I stood there closing her butt nothing happened and nothing seemed like it was going to happen. THEN WHAT? You cant just insert a suppository, not have it work AND THEN GO ON LIVING. I started to panic and risking my father’s permanent disdain I ran out to the dining room with a waist-down naked Leta, her bare butt closed in my palm.

“Jon. It’s not working. IT’S NOT WORKING. We’re all going to die.”

Jon has seen the poop-panicked Heather on many spectacular occasions and he knew how to handle the situation, the first thing being to assure me, “Heather, we’re not going to die.”

I ran back into Leta’s bedroom, the irrational part of my brain taking over and thinking that Jon wasn’t taking me seriously. Oh, we were going to die alright. My baby was never going to poop again and we’d all be dead.

Leta could of course sense my anxiety and it was past her bedtime. Thus began the screaming. She wasn’t screaming in pain, no. She was screaming because she was tired and she wanted someone to rescue her from the crazed, butt-closing lunatic. My father walked back to the bedroom to see if he could help in any way, to see why she was screaming so loudly, and I told him she was mostly tired and grumpy. He made an appropriate remark about how, shoot! They don’t make suppositories for that!

Thanks, Dad. GO BACK TO YOUR SHITLESS WORLD WHILE I DIE.

Jon finally took charge of the situation, removed the demon from my arms, dressed her and put her to bed WITH THE SUPPOSITORY STILL IN HER BUTT. I was having a hard time seeing straight at this point, and when I left her room to be with my father in the living room he asked me, “Is everything okay?”

“We’re putting her to bed and hoping that she wakes up with poop in her diaper. If she wakes up and there isn’t any poop in her diaper Jon’s going to take me to the emergency room tomorrow to have my brain removed.”

The night passed (HA! PUN INTENDED) without incident and we only heard Leta’s usual remodeling noises coming from her crib. I had visions of waking up to find Leta unconscious in a pool of poop: BABY NEARLY DROWNED BY SUPPOSITORY. But when we woke up she was smiling, a small turd sitting perfectly round in her diaper, all of us still alive. Turns out she was saving up for the poop she took this morning, The Biggest Shit I Have Ever Seen, a poop so foul that 20 minutes afterward when we met my friend for a bagel she asked, “Why do you smell like poop?”