Until you become a parent, you don’t realize how much poop will affect your life. The consistency, the frequency, and the color will take on such importance that you find yourself obsessing about it. Sure, you buy the diapers and understand that changing them will probably be gross, but you don’t really know until you do it. You also never knew how much variation could be in poop and what the different nuances of it could mean.
You didn’t know that your child pooping could make or break a day
I have experienced this frequently over the past year with my youngest.
Thankfully, infants usually poop pretty easily. Part of me misses those days when pooping was easy for my baby. I didn’t worry about it nearly as much as I do now. Babies just let it happen. They do not think about holding it in or how it feels. They don’t remember. It is not a big stressful event that affects everything else. The next shiny thing takes their attention, and everyone goes about their days.
Then, your baby gets older and starts eating solid foods. Now you have to worry about how those things will affect their stomach. You worry about allergies and making sure your child gets enough solid food. You worry if he is eating enough of the good things. Your baby becomes a toddler, and now he develops preferences. You try to get him to eat well, but there’s really only so much you can do.
Then, the poop problems begin
All that attention paid to it, in the beginning, comes back. Now I fret over how many days it’s been since he’s gone. He doesn’t eat enough because his stomach always hurts, and I worry about that, too. When he feels like that and is trying to hold it in, all he wants to do is sit. He can’t play and run around. He feels too terrible and knows that sitting is the only way to keep it from happening for as long as possible.
Your kid’s tummy troubles will cause your tummy to fill with dread. Forcing my son to do something he hates is overwhelming. He is so afraid to poop that he will hold it for days, which just makes the whole thing even worse. And the screams. We have tried many different things and all of the doctor’s recommendations, but in the end, he is the one that has to stop holding it. I can only do so much and it’s terrible.
The helplessness that I feel is overwhelming
It makes me anxious, which makes him even more anxious. I have cried more than once, and he tries to comfort me, which breaks my heart a bit more. The inability to make everything better for him makes me feel like a failure. Not knowing how to help him better creates such despair.
As moms, we feel guilty about everything, and our kids’ bowel movements are no exception
I feel bad that he feels so lousy so much of the time. The fact that he makes it worse by holding it doesn’t do much to expunge my guilt. I still feel bad, but my anxiety just makes it worse for him. The best I can do is try to remain calm and hope that he figures it out. Waiting for him to grow out of it is hard and frustrating, but he needs to learn it for himself, and I need to let him.
