THE PARABLE OF THE TOT-SPOT POOP

Towards a secularly accessible form of faith

I need to write about faith. I will start with poop.

I took my kids to Tot Spot, the Ithaca Youth Bureau’s indoor play space. Some brilliant person realized that parents and young children are trapped in winter, and opened a community indoor play space for masked kids, with slides and ladders and balls and small vehicles and dolls— and, most importantly, Lots of Room to Run.

Any activity with twin toddlers is a big deal, logistically and emotionally, but especially going to Tot Spot. I was solo parenting that day, it was cold, it was a new place we’d never tried, there was registration and mysterious digital and monetary protocol involved (not my forte).

We packed up our half-frozen bag of playground snacks and managed to roll the bulky double stroller through 30 degrees and 15 mph wind across Stewart Park, with the small passengers mostly inside the vehicle. We approached the new, strange building. I doused the kids with positive chatter about how great it was going to be, improvising tales about specific toys based on some photos I’d found of the facility online, though truly I had no idea how these small, deeply conservative and occasionally heartbreakingly fearful beings would take to this completely unknown place, with only one parent to manage, console, and facilitate. I heard the chipper words come out of my mouth, ringing hollowly like someone kicking an aluminum can down the pavement.

After working through the initial parking of the stroller and unloading baby bag/ snack bag/ winter coats and boots and socks and binkies and emotional support rags, some acute shyness with the attendants, an awkward moment when I realized I wasn’t supposed to leave my recently unpacked kids in the room but I had to go pay at the front desk, and some severe aversion to the nametags we were supposed to wear and subsequent sleights of hand by mama to get said tags onto our backs without anyone noticing, one child miraculously peeled off in pursuit of a large bouncy ball, and a fraction of the weight of apprehension on my heart slid off. The other kid, with some patient fostering, eventually found plastic bowling pins that seemed a great thing to load into a toy grocery cart. The morning was opening up, the world starting to glitter at us, look, you will soon have access to parts of the planet beyond your living room!

We all seemed pretty chuffed with this breezy new freedom settling around us like light. We relished the use of our emerging skills like Front Desk Interfacing, Bowling Pin Setup, Large Ball Pursuit, and Peeking into Spot Under Slide. Ten minutes into Push Dolly in Shopping Cart, which was turning towards Can Cart Go Up Slide?, I noticed something in the middle of the shiny floor. Was it a toy grocery? Maybe it was a protein bar someone had pulled from the baby bag.

I walked my mind through various other certainties about what the item on the floor could and couldn’t be as I approached it, all the while undergoing a long, shuddering wince, because I knew full well it was a giant, wet turd.

[Denial is like a companion animal in the sense that it keeps you busy tending to it so you can’t put all your energy into the flourishing of your marrow-deep panic.]

I don’t know how I got to the baby bag, how I used it to block the line of sight of the other humans in the room, how I managed to get enough wet wipes out to pick up the turd, or why I hadn’t packed a plastic bag that day. I don’t recall the doing of any of this, but I know I did it, because in short order, the floor was clean and sanitized, no one was the wiser, and I had a huge wad of wipes and a large, barely concealed poop in my right hand, the wrist of its creator in my left.

I stared at the child, trying to fathom how this had happened. This child’s diaper was still on, both sets of outdoor playpants were still on, both layers of shirt were still on, and there were no visible external smears or clues as to how anything at all could have escaped, let alone something of this size and consistency. I groped at reason, at my limited knowledge of physics, to try to understand. The only physical action that could have begotten this result was a handstand followed by an abrupt sit-and-scoot with a shimmy and lean. I deflated visibly as I was forced to acknowledge that this particular combination was not at all outside of Baby B’s wheelhouse. So I was stuck with this particular reality, not having been able to cancel it with the certainty of its impossibility.

I began to swing the child in slow arcs beside me to make its other arm fan out, in an approximation of a fun kinetic game— all to keep that free hand away from its back and pants, where I could now make out the slowly seeping signs of the full-scale disaster beneath (all the way up the back, both sets of pants and shirts, etc.) I looked up and glanced around like a person pursued by a silent predator, remembered with a shock to the heart that there was to be “no diaper activity in the room,” and that “parents shall not leave children unattended.” I glanced to Baby A, who was a mile and a half across the room with a stack of bowling pins. Baby B was getting wise to the swinging arc game, and beginning to think there might be something worth exploring beneath all those clothes. The little arm started venturing back and down, towards the ferocious mess.

I swung Baby B harder and farther, gulping out some cheery nonsense about monkeys jumping through the trees, and called to Baby A with a desperation barely iced with nonchalant cheer. Baby A decided, that morning, right then, for the first time, that it could not hear me. It sat, back to me, and continued playing with the pins. The stroller was parked out in the hall beyond a heavy double set of glass doors, our bags sat in the middle and corner of the room, Baby A sat in the opposite corner, and the poopy child swung at the end of my arm, increasingly fractious and curious about what was happening, working hard now to get its arm into its ruined pants.

The kind attendants, whom I’m now sure must have known exactly what was happening, offered to assist in reclaiming Baby A, which I took them up on, as I asked for directions to the restroom, which it turns out was outside, past the stroller and cubbies, all the way down the hall near the back entrance. The changing table was a wall-mount in the hallway between the two bathrooms, open to the lobby. Well, the world was going to get a real show today.

I don’t know how I got both children and the stroller down the hall, or how I got Baby B onto the changing table, or how I got its clothes and diaper off without laying it down (for to lay it down would have been to lay it in a swamp of poop), or how I got the sea of wet wipes, used and unused, into the diaper pail, which was in the other corner of the restroom alcove.

I do know that Baby B danced on the changing table, naked and still mostly dirty, facing the world, while I tried to soothe Baby A, now buckled into the stroller and deeply unsettled by the unfolding events; I know I ferried used wipes to the pail, hoping Baby B wouldn’t leap off the wall-mounted plastic table while I rushed back and forth, and I know I maintained something I thought approximated calm chatter, and that I eventually wiped Baby B down well enough to put on a new diaper.

I don’t know how I secured the four layers of ruined clothes without any plastic bags, but somehow they went into a secure location and didn’t spread their soiling. I got the mostly clean, mostly naked child into nothing but a winter coat, recovered the boots and socks and snacks and my own coat and purse and keys from the cubby area, and got everyone re-buckled and out the heavy glass door towards the car. It was a half mile back to the playground parking area through the cold wind, so I stuffed my coat around the kid with the naked bottom half, which seemed to please it, as an exciting, arctic-expedition sort of novelty.

*

What I don’t know about faith would fill many bath tubs. I can make no use of a deity; I have no personal ease with the notion that there is a presiding unified force in the multi-verse. But neither is entropy alone a workable construct for me to inhabit. In the same way I know I have to get out of bed, I know I have to find some functional version of faith.

What I suspect about faith, what it is and how it works, comes to me by process of elimination. I can see its shape only by the boundaries around it, as in a woodcut print that you can’t make out at first because you’re “reading” the white space instead of the ink.

Reflecting upon the Parable of the Tot Spot Poop, I feel that the moment when faith’s utility is possible is at the intersection of uncertainty and hardship. I had NO IDEA how I was going to manage the situation, how we would all get home. AND YET, it happened.

Faith may be astonishingly simple: it may be little more than the acknowledgment that there is space outside of what we know. In that space, things happen. In that space, even we happen, can move, can act. Though we can’t create or manage that space—of the unknown, undesired, unanticipated, unmapped—we can move around inside of it. All I did was keep going, keep trying, keep working the problem, despite its relentless entropy. There was no way to be precise or especially effective about poop on the floor and all over one kid and the other one not listening; it was a disaster the likes of which one cannot hope to mitigate or undo. The only option was to move into uncurated space and take my many small actions there.

By inhabiting my role of actor in the situation, not its architect, I was admitting my limitation. I could neither prevent further difficulty nor undo what had happened. I was allowing my poor little biped self, with children and supplies falling out all over the place, to simply contend with poop, with the many material considerations of being a human parent— all the textiles and wheels and preventatives and fuels and salves and goals and efforts. I performed actions even though I had no substantive control. One of my deep suspicions about faith is that it has something to do with the even though, the despite. Which means it requires some rough weather to unlock.

*

Brene Brown was on NPR last week talking about the Buddhist concept of the “near enemy.” Her topic was connection. She posited that if cruelty was the far enemy, or roughly the opposite, of connection, then its near enemy—the thing that dressed up like connection but was actually a threat to it— was control.

I wonder if faith has the same near enemy of control. It was only because things were patently out of control at Tot Spot that I got to take actions in uncurated space and find out what was possible. As long as we pretend we know all, as long as we fantasize that only what we reckon is possible should be attempted, as long as we suppose we have a handle on what we’re capable of and whether something will be worth it— we can’t entertain faith.

I didn’t know how I was going to move through the ninety-seven steps of struggle it would take to get out the door; I didn’t believe my resources, mental or material, up to the task. In fact, curiously, faith at Tot Spot looked a lot like ordinary doubt followed by ordinary doggedness.

There was nothing magical about pulling out more wipes or keeping up the chatter. I was not in a beatific space as I swabbed over and over at poop on my child and the floor and the wall and my hands. But there was something transcendent about doing stuff even though I knew it wasn’t very effective. There was something a little bit magical about run-of-the-mill, clumsy-ass doggedness, about the slowness and chaos of the fifteen minutes between poop-drop and exit-sign, about persisting despite a very bad forecast.

I think that magic was born of acceptance: I had no choice but to accept my lot. During those slow, messy fifteen minutes, railing against reality wasn’t on the menu for once. It was kind of a lovely break from striving. I think faith is more spacious than striving.

If we can’t conceive of how something might get better, we are by definition standing in the face of our limitation or inability. To recognize our limitation is, necessarily, to acknowledge the space beyond what we know. To acknowledge a space beyond the self is, as I see it, to allow for the sacred to open.

[If “sacred” and “profane” reflect not stationary concepts, but ways of perceiving— who hasn’t looked at a tree one day and seen only bark, and another day seen some great and thrilling mystery told all at once?— then what better to awaken the sacred form of seeing, the awareness of all that is beyond the self, than to face-plant into ones smallness, one’s limitation and ordinariness?]

These are clumsy attempts to reclaim and inhabit some terms generally reserved for the religious. They are, like my diaper-changing-in-public skills, passable, at best. [I want a home that fits me; let me place this notion, faith, by the fridge; let me tuck sacred by the stove. Over time, maybe we’ll figure out a decent groove and make some pretty great soups.]

I guess I have some form of faith that these attempts may, even though they are awkward and incomplete, despite their relative ineptitude and profane origins — help the world open out to me, and me open up to it, if only a sighing, breezy little bit, like the light that fell all around us, one morning at Tot Spot.