We met
as usual at the church for our Saturday morning primary presidency meeting.
However, the parking lot was crowded on this day. Due to the annual youth conference, the
building was packed with teenagers, no room for us to have a quiet meeting. I
had all three kids with me, Adam, 6, Seth 4, and Gabriel, 8 months, since Ben
was involved with the ongoing conference. So even though I don’t often take the
boys out for fast food, I welcomed the suggestion from another member of the
presidency that we hold our meeting at the McDonald’s play land, so the kids
would be occupied while we talked.
We
reconvened at McDonald’s, and I, feeling quite generous, bought the boys
smoothies and herded them into the play area, a route of tubes with a ball pit
and slide. The other ladies and I parked ourselves at a booth and proceeded to deal
with the business of planning for teachers, music time, and gospel instruction
for all the children ages 18 months to 11 years in our congregation. Adam and
Seth alternated playing in the tubes with bouts of sucking on their smoothies,
and all seemed to be going well.
The
meeting finished around lunch time, and while the other ladies left, the
thought of packing up the boys, driving home, coming up with something for
lunch, and then cleaning up after it all seemed too daunting for me. Even
though it was summertime, and Ben was not teaching, he had been gone most of
the week preparing for an upcoming scout encampment, youth conference, and the
middle school musical he was involved with in the fall. I had been sole adult
authority figure for the boys much of the time and I was tired. So I decided to
give myself a break and treat Adam and Seth to some fast food goodness. No food
preparation, minimal cleanup, and I would earn some “cool mom” points at the
same time.
We made
our way back to the counter and ordered their Happy Meals and something for me.
I hoped to enjoy a leisurely meal while the boys ate food they would not
complain about and play in the tubes. Gabriel proved to be a bit fussy though,
so I wrangled him one handed and fed myself with the other. Adam and Seth ate
their food somewhat messily and went back to playing. Not my ideal lunch, but
adequate. I’m not sure how long it took me to notice, but at some point I saw
that Seth was walking funny.
This
particular walk was familiar to me. It was the walk of a little boy who has
been out of diapers for a while, but has made a solid deposit in his underwear
and is trying to keep his knees pinched together so that the squishiness in his
pants does not make its way down his legs. I was exasperated. Seth had been out
of diapers for a long enough period of time that I no longer carried a change
of clothes for him in my diaper bag. Oh well, I thought, I can bag up the dirty
underwear and he can just go commando until we get home. I handed Gabriel to
Adam and told him to stay in our booth, then guided Seth towards the bathroom
all the way on the other side of the McDonald’s. We were about a third of the
way there when I noticed little nuggets dropping out of Seth’s pant legs, and
these were NOT Chicken Mcnuggets. Apparently the deposit had been in Seth’s
pants longer than I realized and with every step he took was making its way out
and on to the floor of the eating establishment. After a momentary panic, I
told Seth to freeze right where he was, dashed back to my diaper bag, grabbed a
package of wipes, and rushed back to Seth. I used the wipes to clean up any
leavings I could see, all the while flashing apologetic looks at my fellow
McDonald’s patrons in the area, who I don’t think entirely realized what it was
I was cleaning off the floor. I then swooped Seth up in my arms, elevating his
feet over his head to prevent any more droppings of fecal matter in the dining
area, and whisked him into the bathroom to assess the rest of the damages.
He did
not have a single article of clothing that did not have excrement on it, with
the exception of his shoes, which he had placed in the cubby before playing in
the tubes. I stripped him completely in the large handicapped stall and threw
away his Lightening McQueen underwear, which, in my assessment were not worth
the effort it would take to salvage. Seth was very upset. “You don’t throw
underwear away Mommy! You wash them!”
I was
not in the mood to negotiate. “Well Seth, if you are going to treat them like
diapers than I am going to throw them away like a diaper!” I countered angrily.
With Seth’s contaminated clothes piled in a corner, I proceeded to wipe him
down with the baby wipes, hurriedly tossing them into the toilet, frantically
trying to figure out how I was going to get him out of the McDonald’s naked and
worrying about how my six-year-old was managing my baby while I was thus occupied.
Once Seth was cleaned I ordered him to stay in the stall while I ran back to
our table in the play area. I grabbed my sweatshirt and assured Adam that I
would be back before I rushed back to the bathroom with the only extra article
of clothing I had. I dressed Seth in the fluorescent orange Alaska Grown
sweatshirt that hung to his knees and addressed the aftermath of our baby wipe
bath. The toilet was full of wipes, which, against my better judgment, I attempted
to flush down. Unfortunately, the
industrial strength toilet still could not handle the load and clogged. I
couldn’t bear to leave behind the evidence of our ignominy and I couldn’t bring
myself to further humiliation by telling an employee that we clogged the toilet.
So, in desperation, I reached into the clogged toilet, grabbed the wad of wipes
and plopped them into the trash can, right on top of Lightning McQueen. The
toilet flushed easily after that and I followed it up with a thorough hand
scrubbing.
Seth
and I then emerged from the bathroom, a bit oddly dressed, but at least all the
essential parts were covered. We made our way to the booth and I took Gabriel
back from Adam and ordered Seth to sit down and finish his cheeseburger so that
we could go. Not surprisingly, Seth was not used to wearing what amounted to a
dress, and he kept scootching his feet up on the bench, inadvertently
displaying his nether regions to the rest of the play land. Somehow, in between
finishing up my meal, and reminding Seth to put his legs down, I noticed some
small brown smears on the floor of the play area. Apparently, the breach of the
underwear had occurred well before we headed to the bathroom. I got out my
wipes again and tried to track it all down, at the same time wondering that no
one had noticed my desperate situation and offered to help, and feeling
extremely sorry for myself. What was I doing scubbing fecal matter off the
floor of McDonald’s? Was this what I had come to, my best intentions of having
a fun meal and being a cool mom reduced to fishing around in clogged toilets
and scouring the floor for errant nuggets of poo?
Somehow
I managed to gather everything together, pack up the much used diaper bag,
return the baby to his carseat and herd the children out the door and into the
van. But my conscience was nagging me. I had heard a little boy in the play
land complain that it smelled funny in the tubes. Could a bad situation
possibly be worse? Had Seth actually pooped while playing in the tubes? Visions
of myself crawling through the tubes, baby wipes in hand, nearly pushed me to
tears. Once I had them all buckled into the van I questioned Seth carefully:
“Seth,
where did you go poo?
“ In my
pants!” He answered emphatically, and a bit patronizingly, as if he couldn’t
believe I was quite that simple.
I
rephrased my question. “Where WERE you when you pooed in your pants?”
“In the
tubes” came the dreaded reply.
I sat in the driver’s seat. I was at my limit, I just couldn’t
go back in there and crawl into the tubes to investigate. I could drive away
and pretend I didn’t know anything about it. But what if some other children encountered the remains of Seth’s trouble in the tubes? I
got out of the van, and headed back into McDonald’s. At the counter I edged
over to the teenage boy working at the register.
“Ummm, my son had an accident in the tubes,” I managed,
being deliberately, nonspecific. “You might want to check that out.” I finished
and bolted for the van.
Once back in the van, I sent a desperate text to Ben, the
only outlet I had to vent my frustration and humiliation.
“Seth pooped at McDonalds didn’t tell me mashed it all
around in his pants until it started dropping out the legs he is now wearing my
sweatshirt everything else is poopy i threw away undies you better not be
laughing because i want to cry”
No response.
Apparently he was in the middle of a devotional and couldn’t
read it right away, but I didn’t know that, so I followed it up with another
text.
“YOU RESPOND TO ME”
And then I drove home and swore that I would never go to McDonald’s
again.
