It was a tough day.  One calamity after another, begot one breakdown after another.  Near the end of the day,  I walked in the door to our house and saw a note left by my husband: I haven’t collected the sample yet. You’ll have to do it.

What sample you ask? A stool sample from Ethan. He had been having stomach problems over the last week and the doctor ordered a stool sample. I had picked up the kit from the lab the previous day and was praying that Ethan’s crowning moment of the day (no pun intended) would occur on Daddy’s watch, not mine. But alas, today was my tough day. In anticipation of this eventual moment, I tried to pontificate, how does one collect a stool sample? I mean, there have been times in my past where my own doctors have requested a stool sample from me; specifically, the time I came back from Mexico still feeling ill after I ate an uncharacteristically warm mango on a stick from a beach vendor when I was in my early twenties. What can I say? When you’re young and your metabolism is still fast enough to wear an itsy bitsy bikini, you don’t worry about much, least alone what you put in your body. At any rate, my doctor asked for a stool sample but the sheer thought of fishing in the toilet for my own poopy made me want to take my chances of getting better without knowing exactly why I was sick to begin with. 

But, as all parents already know, what we won’t do for ourselves, we will do for our children if the need arises. So, back to the sample. It was nearing two o’clock and I had finally come up with my best idea on how to receive Ethan’s not so tiny turds. A paper plate held in the bowl by yours truly while Ethan did his business. At exactly 4:07 p.m., Ethan ran up to me and said he had to go poop. As I positioned the plate in the toilet and told Ethan to sit on the seat and go, he said, “I don’t want to poop on a plate! We eat on plates! I’m not hungry!” 

“Do it!” I commanded. “This is not for food, it’s for the doctor.” He was a trooper and laid what he called “a snake” on the plate and I quickly ushered him out of the bathroom and locked the door behind him. I didn’t want him to witness mommy playing with a plate of poop and giving him a whole new set of ideas of what can be done with his feces. I put on an industrially thick face mask to block the smell and started to open the containers the lab gave me to store the samples in. Thinking the mask would protect me from the smell, I accidentally got too close to the plate o’ poopy during collection and got a good whiff of Ethan’s “snake”. I quickly stood up straight and saw my eyes starting to water in my reflection in the bathroom mirror. Yup, crap still manages to smell like crap, even with a mask on. 

Now, with my face a good distance away from the plate, I began to divide the sample between three different containers. Each container was sealed with a lid that had a miniature spork attached to the bottom of it. That’s right, a spork. And it was when I was staring at that little poop smeared spork, I figured my day couldn’t get any worse. To know that the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom, have decided a spork was the perfect instrument for school lunches and stool samples alike, and that I, myself, was seeing the rational behind providing sporks for this very purpose, I realized I was engulfed in a world I didn’t want to know anything about and had finally given up on my day getting any better.

But, God’s grace can sometimes be found in His humor. As I was driving down to the lab to drop off the sample, I miraculously began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Yeah, my day had gotten the best of me but the thought of the lab staff handling the sample after I dropped it off made me smile. As an attorney by trade I definitely have to peddle a lot of crap during the day but, at least, I don’t actually have to sift through it for a living. And with that realization, I could end my day on a higher note. I had passed the poop forward.