"C" is for Calvin, that's good enough for me!!!

Today is the first day of Advent 2010, and Calvin decided to mark the beginning of the season by giving me an early Christmas gift. I don't know how to present this to make it have the magical effect I want it to have, so I'll just go ahead and say it.

I found out today that my son knows how to spell his name.

My 4-year-old, who has autism and therefore doesn't have the easiest time getting out all that he knows and feels on the inside, has shown me, clear as day, that he can spell his God blessed name.

I'm still in wonderment, still processing this, but come along with me and I'll tell you how it went this morning.

At the end of his first 2-hour therapy session of the day, his teacher and I were debriefing as usual. But then she got kind of a "special" look in her eye, and it was like she was trying to find a way to tell me something, something really good, and wasn't sure how to put it out there. What she finally said was something like, "Has anybody pointed out that...I mean, it's really awesome...well, did you know Cal can spell his name?"

I kind of blinked at her like she'd asked me if I knew that Cal had learned how to split the atom.

She wondered aloud if he'd do it again. So I told her that while I totally take her word for it, I'd love to see it live and in person. I grabbed a pad and pen.

We sat down next to him on the couch where he'd retired with his trusty sippie cup. She started him off with the first letter, wrote it down, and said something like "Ok, Calvin, let's spell your name!"

"C!" he began, cheerfully.

Then, after a pause but unprompted, and with nothing but the first letter, "C," written down on the paper in front of him, he said...wait for it...

"A."

I started getting a little dizzy.

She wrote down the "A," then he said to us, all smiles, "L."

She wrote down the "L," and then he said, through a sip of juice and melt-your-heart grin, "V."

You see where this is going. And so on, with "I," and finally, "N."

I might add that he twinkled as he spelled his name. Because he did.

So...as his big sister, my big girl Grace, has become fond of saying, "What the...?"

Sure, I know the members of his wonder-team have all been working on the letters of his name. I know that we have some of those handy flashcards in his at-home classroom and on our bulletin board with his name printed on them. I know that we help him collect his other little cardboard thingee with his name on it when he gets to preschool. I know all this.

But holy shit, Calvin spelled his name!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Was I crying, you ask? I was too stunned, almost disoriented. His teacher left and I walked around in a literal daze for a while. Then I noticed my boy standing in front of the open refrigerator and trying to chew through the plastic wrapper on a piece of American cheese. Such a trooper. That snapped me out of it. I said to him, all apologetic, "So sorry baby, you really want that cheese, let me help you with that."

He giggled up at me and said through the giggle, "Yeah." A chortly little "Yeah," with undertones of "You silly Mommy, I love you so" written all over it, and then I was undone. Blubbering mess. And incidentally, I'm very lucky he didn't pick that moment to tell me that he would like a fully-loaded replica of Lightning McQueen for Christmas, because I would have sold all my superfluous organs on the spot, cleared out the garage, and put in a special order. Done deal.

When I'd pulled myself together and mopped myself up off the floor, I got to thinking those thoughts again--those thoughts that all of us who've gotten to know autism so intimately think day in and day out. Thoughts that go, "What else does he know...what else is locked up in there...what else...what else...what????

I mean, listen, I look into this beautiful boy's eyes every day, and every day I see brilliance shining back out at me. But it's not the kind of brilliance that can be marked on a score card or measured by a testing instrument or tabulated on a grid. It's a quality that has nothing to do with quantity. It's a language that sometimes sounds like unvisible pianos and violins...and tastes like your first M&Ms...and can smell like that time last summer I got caught in an out-of-the-blue rainstorm during a powerwalk. It takes on shapes like the snowflakes that were landing on my black coat one crystally morning over a decade ago when I was waiting for a train and was startled to see that they were shaped like...well, like snowflakes.

Know what I mean? I feel like you do.

And then, in the midst of all this mystery (which I pretend to be getting used to but you never do), he goes and does something like spell his name. With giggly glee, just like any time he finds a treasure like a hidden stash of toothbrushes to play with...or a fleshy belly to bury his face in...or someone who's willing to pick up his 50-plus pounds of everlovingness and spin him around like a planet.

I'm so bewildered.

But it's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas.

He Had to See a Man About a Horse...

One thing I should probably never do (but I do it all the time anyway) is let myself keep dozing once Calvin wakes up in the morning. Because when he's left to his own devices, lots of things can happen. You've all heard about some of it here, particularly the times he's used the contents of his diaper to decorate the house (Poop-casso!).

He's got lots of other interests too. Some days he climbs up into the bathroom sinks in order to get into the cabinets way up high. He thinks he needs a shave, apparently, because that's where the disposable razors are, as high up as we can get them. Or if the mood strikes him, he might empty out a tube of hair gel or a bottle of hand lotion, that's always a real nice treat to wake up to.

Sometimes he just makes off with all the toothbrushes he can find or takes a footbath in the toilet and we get off easy, but you can't count on it.

So the morning in question, my eyes snapped open and my 6th, 7th, and 8th senses told me that the boy was up and ready for action. Better haul ass.

"Cal! Cal!!!! CAL!!!!" Room to room I go, mentally steeling myself for what could have happened in those 2 or 3 minutes I let myself go unconscious knowing full well he was up and around...bad mommy of special needs child, bad bad BAD!!!

But when I arrived in the master bathroom, what to my wondering eyes should appear but...wait for it, wait for it...

My son, sitting on the toilet bowl, pajama pants and diaper off, on the verge of doing the very thing you'd want him to do on the potty, and only on the potty. I'll let you fill in the blanks.

This means so many things. It means he had the urge and recognized what it was all about. It means he went with purpose into the bathroom for something other than a search and destroy mission. It means he had the cognitive wherewithal to take off all the clothes that needed to come off, right down to the diaper. And, maybe best of all, he knew to look at me with a little self-satisfied grin that said something exactly like, "Yeah, cool huh? I knew you'd be SO diggin this."

My reaction was exactly what you'd expect. I sat down on the floor next to him and cried, while I praised him to the moon and back about what a brilliant, beautiful, gorgeous, shining light of a genius he is. Grace came wandering in by and by, curious about what all the ruckus was about, and she got right into the thick of the celebration like I've come to expect of her. "WOW, Calvin! Yer doin it! Yer such a good boy, look how yer learnin! Mommy's eyes are just wet cuz she's happy, right Mommy?"

Right as rain, baby girl.

This latest experience has me thinking (there I go, thinking again). I get to experience pure, unbridled, unfettered, unencumbered joy without leaving my bathroom. I am so not kidding. I only say that I am so not kidding in order to be perfectly clear because I know I can be a little sarcastic, and I'm becoming increasingly aware as I continue to grow up that sometimes sarcasm has no place. Dorothy said it well just before she clicked those fabulous shoes together three times:

"If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I don't have to look any further than my own back yard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with."

I used to think that was a little wimpy of her. Come on, Dot, live a little! Your own backyard? In brown-and-white Kansas, seriously?!?!? What if Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn thought that way? Or what if Alice had said, so it's a talking white rabbit, big deal, ho hum, I think I'll just stay here with my boring sister and make my daisy chains and let someone else jump down that hole after him. What if Frodo had never left the shire, fer Chrissakes?!?! Horrendous!

Now I don't quite see it that way. Who gets to say which experiences are worth having and which ones aren't? Who gets to pick whose exploits are valid and whose are meaningless?

There are all kinds of adventures out here in wild and crazy real life, and all kinds of triumph, and all kinds of joy.

Here's to all of them.

Get Thee Behind Me, Adolf...

So go figure, according to a certified medical professional I've been visiting, the kind who has a prescription pad in his pocket and isn't afraid to use it, I'm in the midst of an episode of major depressive illness. How's that for a kick in the ass? Oh, and with anxiety, let's not forget the anxiety. As the good doctor put it, on a scale of 1 to 6, 1 being A-OK and 6 being "poised to swan dive off the Tappan Zee Bridge," I'm a 5.

I'll admit that this diagnosis wasn't a shock to me or I wouldn't have found my way into this amiable fellow's office. It all started months and months and months ago when I began waking up, every morning while it was still dark, let's say 3 or 4, to experience a full-out attack of what I've affectionately named "the ball of terror." He also goes by Adolf. (For those of you familiar with Ekhart Tolle's work, another term for this entity would be "the pain body," but for now, Adolf will do.) Adolf lives in my solar plexus, and when he's active he whirls there like a cyclone, but with offshoots that radiate through the rest of my body sending all my bits shaking and clenching, arms and legs, hands and feet.

There's really no defense against the ball of terror, but what my body does to cope when it hits is to curl up, fetal as fetal gets, and just ride it out until it's time to get the kids up for school. Not that Adolf is done with me at that point, he pulls back and whirls around in my center for a while, stays just enough out of the way for me to get Grace and Cal where they need to be, and then he really lets loose. He sort of regurgitates himself right up from the solar plexus and spews out in some pretty impressive histrionics where the whole body quakes on the floor and snot and tears fly in all directions and names of angels and saints are invoked and I call out for my mother. If it's a Tuesday or a Thursday when I have to get Cal to preschool by 9:30, I can have this fit while driving the car. Let me tell you, it is a HOOT! New motto: Mental health, not overrated.

Now as exciting and dramatic and Lifetime movie-worthy as that all sounds, the bizarre thing is that by, I don't know, maybe 2:00 p.m., I'm pretty good. There's a rhythm to this madness. And it's not even madness. I'm completely in charge of my faculties, and I'll tell you how I know. If all of a sudden in the middle of an Adolf attack one of Cal's therapists comes up the stairs to inform me that he's extracted a handful of poop from his diaper and wants to use it for fingerpaint, I can pull myself together like I've just been calmly filing my nails the whole time and deal with the matter, spit spot. Plus I hide it from my husband, who has enough on his plate. And Gracie, who it would scare the bejeezus out of. (Cal, he doesn't mind so much, he just burrows merrily into my belly button, business as usual.)

Isn't that nuts, though, the way I can squash it down when I feel I absolutely have to? And is Adolf not a wily and sneaky little bugger? Keeps me sane enough so I do NOT get a vacation in a nice quiet padded room somewhere (goddammit), but in enough agony that my daily life, at least from the predawn hours to around 2-3 in the afternoon, is a debilitating, exhausting suckfest. That's where I pay the piper for the times I fake it.

Even one of my old favorite things to do, shoving food in my face (I mean does anyone not love to do that?) does nothing for me. This blows. And yes, I've lost a bunch of weight as a result, which is not the 5-alarm-fire disaster that some people seem to think it is (i.e. my mother) because while not exactly a humongous girl to start with, I had a few extra pounds I didn't need so much. So I'm thin, I suppose, as a result of this recent adventure. Or so my clothing size suggests...I don't see it in the mirror, I just look like me, only a bummed-out version. In the second verse of "Need a little Christmas," Auntie Mame and company sing that they've "grown a little leaner, grown a little colder, grown a little sadder, grown a little older," and that they go on about how they need a little angel sitting on their shoulder (hear the rhyming?), and it all sounds incredibly Broadway cheery and hokey when they sing it, but I couldn't hear it during the holiday season without doubling over in pain.

Ok, so enough with the bad news, because here's the deal. I have a two-pronged strategy in place to climb my way out of this creepy little pit. Firstly, Dancing with the Stars has started up again, and I think I need add nothing more on that topic. Secondly, like I mentioned, I finally got around to visiting the nice man with the diplomas on his walls and the prescription pad.

Frickin medication. I fought it hard this go 'round. Because I've been at this show before. Post partum with Grace was a trip, took me a while to realize that lying down in the hospital shower in a curled up naked ball the day after childbirth and crying convulsively was more than just baby blues. So yeah, I have some predisposition to speak of. Got dragged kicking and screaming into a pharmaceutical solution back then...and of course it goes back farther...I was a high school and college student with one of those major cases of "amazing-that-I-lived-through-it" bulimia, which is just another way Adolf rears his ugly head.

Anyway, fast forward to today, and can I tell you how much I've had enough of this garbage? I've had enough of the drug companies and their dumbass commercials showing those sad sack people slinking around in brown oversize sweaters before they take the magic pill and then playing golf and picking flowers after. I'm sick of all of it. How many times does a reasonably sane person need someone with a prescription pad to pull her back from the abyss?

And before anybody gets mad at me for sounding anti-medication, let me settle that right off the bat. Brooke Shields is one of my personal heroes, and her courage in telling her story of post-partum hell and the utter necessity of medical intervention to deal with the real-life horrors of that experience was one of the ways I got through mine. She's been there, I've been there, countless others have been there. I am NOT, nor have I ever been, nor will I ever be anti-medication. I am pro-doing whatever you know in your gut is right for you at the time, which might be one thing in 1987, another in 2004, and a whole 'nuther thing today. I just don't want to need the crap anymore, is that so wrong?

So I tried every trick I could pull out of my hat this time before I submitted. St. John's Wort, sunlight simulating lamps, exercise, vitamin this and that and the other. I had this almost ineffable feeling in my gut, that despite the pain, despite the struggle, my body would find a way, natural healing will take over, the body knows how to right itself. Like I've heard Christiane Northrup say, "Depression is not a Prozac deficiency." Just give it another week. Ok, how about another. You're probably almost there. And then there's always that niggling, needling, scary little point of rage ready to explode deep inside of me about how it's altogether possible that the very drug industry that's peddling the chemicals that I'm picking up at the CVS drive-thru to help me in my healing is the evil empire that's helped autism become so prevalent that you wonder how long it'll be before you can find a household without it. You know what Adolf thought of all these musings? He could not keep from holding his sides and laughing. Got 'er right where I want 'er.

Finally, one Saturday morning, during a routine phone chat (we call it coffee talk) with one of my "sisters" (who's really an aunt, but that's just a technicality), I lost it for the umpteenth time. Lost it so bad. Again. Can't tell you how many times she's heard the same song from me. And I'm sure most of you know how it is with your soul sisters and brothers, they can feel what's roiling around in your guts even when it's hundreds of miles away and on the phone. So this is how she gently tugged me back in off the ledge: She softly and pleadingly said to me, in so many words, that enough was enough...and that yes, it's hard to have a beautiful boy with autism...and then have enough left over for the beautiful girl without autism...not to mention maintaining any modicum of health in a marriage....and trying to make your part of the household income out of the home office so that you can do what you need to do for the beautiful boy...which has evolved into a financial nightmare of epic proportions that requires nothing short of a Frank Capra miracle to resolve (not that I don't believe that those happen every day, they do). So why don't you do the thing that could just possibly make you wake up in the morning and look at all of it in the face without Adolf tearing you a new one every single God-blessed day?

That did it. That conversation was several weeks ago and I'm slowly getting better. I'm not yet where I need to be, some days are bad, some are ok. But Adolf's visits have been fewer and further between, and when he does show up he doesn't get the better of me like he could before. He may just have to move out entirely and find someone else to torture. And omellettes taste good again. And I could do some damage on a plate of burritos at a really good Mexican restaurant, I'm almost sure.

I know what you're all thinking, don't hold back so much, Trace. Tell us how you really feel?

I figure, what the hell, Brooke Shields told it all and it hasn't done her one bit of harm, not to mention the untold thousands or more (myself included) that have received the indescribable comfort of knowing that they aren't alone. And that if she could heal, maybe the rest of us have a shot at it too. I mean really, she and Tom Cruise have even buried the hatchet.

Although I'm a little miffed he hasn't returned any of MY calls or texts. I'm sure he's just been very busy...

So happy spring, friends, to all of us. So it has been written, so it shall be done.

Can I get an amen?

My Best Friend's Mother

My best friend's mother died this morning from pancreatic cancer. I want to rock her in my arms right now, my friend, my sister, but she's miles away where she needs to be, the family all loving each other with all their might, all of them beginning the gradual process of getting their legs back under them again in this changed world they now find themselves in.

Your best friend's mother is like your mother once removed...she's proudest of her own precious girl, and then, because her own precious girl adopted you to be her sister, she's second proudest of you. From our high school plays to our wedding days.

Speaking of which, at my first fitting for my wedding gown, my mom-once-removed was there in that big, glamorous dressing room with us, mothers and daughters and sisters, a gaggle of giggling girls, and she said to me as they were pulling the dress over my head, "You've always had such great legs, Trace." I'll never forget it. I've believed in the greatness of my legs since that day. Because when Carol said it, you knew it was the real deal, no bullshit. That's Carol.

This mother has given away lots of gifts in her life, to everyone who's ever known her...for me, the greatest is probably the ten-pound daughter she helped usher into the world of form. Sometimes it seems like she did this expressly for me. That's how it is with someone who makes your world a better place just by existing in it. And yes, ten pounds. If you know Lisa today you probably find it hard to believe she started out such a giant, she's such a petite little shortcake now that she's all grown up. What's not little about her is her heart or her soul or her spirit...that's what that ten-pound beginning portended. It's the size of this great heart and this great soul and this great spirit that's going to turn sadness to joy and tears into laughter again, it's an alchemy that's inevitable and closer than the air we breathe. Just like her mother will always be for her precious girl, as much today and tomorrow and forever as she's ever been, closer than the air we breathe.

I love you, Lis.

Brace Yourselves

A few of my nearest and dearest have asked for a New Years blog from me...ME, the great procrastinator. Is it still officially "New Years" up until the last week of January? Well then, here you go.

Resolution number one, no more procrastinating. Just kidding, that was last year's and I haven't gotten around to it yet.

No, my real resolution (or at least one of them) is to do as Emily Dickinson says, to "tell all the truth, but tell it slant."

Read the whole poem and see for yourself what you think she means, but for me, it's a reminder urging me on to keep telling you all the absolute truth, but with just enough of my "slanted" sense of humor intact that we all laugh to keep from crying...or running screaming through the streets with handfuls of our own hair in our fists with a little scalp still clinging to the clumps, whatever...

Because whatever else you think of the story I'm about to tell you, you have to know that all of it is absolutely true because, as has been said elsewhere, more eloquently, you just can't make this shit up.

By now you probably know my philosophy, which basically states that with a little perspective, much of life's aggravation, of ever varying degrees, has the potential to end up funny as hell-- even the most gut-wrenching experiences (oh, just you wait). Kids keep you up all night? What's funnier than their strung-out mother, hair-on-end, pratfalling down the stairs over a few poorly placed playthings the morning after? Oh I was fine, and when I reviewed the play with my mind's eye it was hilarious, especially since I survived without the slightest sign of quadriplegia. Bank talks about wanting your house? Ha ha, joke's on them, wait'll they see the shape it's in, they'd rather repossess a smoking crater. Coffeemaker won't turn on? Ok, some things aren't funny, I shouldn't have even put that last one out there, cancel that coffeepot one please Universe, delete, delete...

At any rate, you get it, you have to have the right (i.e. sick) sense of humor. Because if you do, and you can squeeze even one small drop of comedy out, the experience must have been worth it...if not to you yourself, at least to the people you tell the story to and set them rolling on the floor. It might take a few weeks, which explains why there can be a pretty long space between my blog posts (and to the fans who've been complaining about the lapse, thanks for that kind compliment), but sooner or later, against all odds, you chuckle.

So here we are again. There's no way to set you up for this, so I'm just going to say it. We're going to talk about enemas. Oh come on, you've been here before, you know I'm not for the faint of heart. If you can't take it, you'd better go faint somewhere else...somewhere a little less real. And dig your heels in people, because you've seen how I roll, the discussion will not be...um...fleeting. (You get the pun, do you? Familiar with the brand, are you?)

First, the unfunny part, which we have to get through, like it or not, isn't that always the way? A few weeks ago we had a very hurtin little boy on our hands...again. I know I've mentioned before that one of the more miserable aspects of autism these days is that many of our kids on the spectrum have bowels that don't want to move. This is for for reasons no one has an adequate explanation for, especially in parts of the medical community that won't hear of the notion that any of our kids could possibly have been overly sensitive to and thereby damaged by an overly aggressive, greed-infected vaccine protocol. But long story short, at least for my Cal, there seems to be a motility issue at the heart of the matter when it comes to his GI tract. The movement of his whole system just isn't up to speed. His overall musculature is what the occupational therapists call "hypotonic" or "low tone," and that applies to the muscles that make up the digestive tract as well.

We try to be proactive about this, stay on top of it with diet, give him doctor-recommended stuff to take by mouth to help keep him going...but sometimes nothing seems to help, and in this particular case I have to admit (bad mother!) I lost track of how long it had been. So this one particular night came along where my poor baby was waddling around with a belly distended out to here, a decidedly NOT laughing Buddha, and I realized, to my horror, that the last time we'd had to clean up a BM was at my mother's for Christmas. It was now ten days later. This kid was backed up to his tonsils. Before we knew it, he was screaming bloody murder, belching with reflux, writhing around in pain, and could barely catch his breath.

Calvin's expressive language development is still in the works, but we get the most out of him when he's the most motivated to tell us something. Well, my boy wanted to tell us what he needed from us more than words can say, and there was language spewing out of him, fully-articulated sentences pleading for help, but so choked with pain and tears and gasping and throwing himself around in agony that I couldn't understand the words. Of course at that point I didn't need to.

We were about to get everybody into the car for a 9 p.m. trip to the ER when it occurred to either Mike or me to call our pediatrician first. This is a guy who picks up his cell phone after hours, a fact that we weren't altogether used to since he's been our kids' doctor for less than a year at this point. Glad we remembered, saved us a trip to the emergency room with a screaming kid, always a plus (and had we just merrily rolled along to the hospital, you'd probably never be hearing the story you're in the middle of, and that would be just sad). I told the doc the situation and that we were at a loss for what to do. He told us, in plain language, that with a kid THAT backed up, nothing "from above" was going to help at this point (i.e. nothing by mouth), but that we were going to have to clear him out "from below."

From below. Uh oh.

Well, we'd been down this road before, sort of--we'd had to make a trip to the ER several months earlier with the same issue and they'd sent us home with a pediatric Fleet enema. Nature had taken its course that time, the problem was a little less far gone, and we hadn't had to use it. Looks like our luck had run out, but at least no one had to race to the drugstore before closing time, or drive all the way to an all-night superstore to get our son some relief.

This might be old hat to some of you parents out there, but we'd managed to get our kids to age 5 and almost 4 before having to use this particular intervention. And we had no idea what we were doing. My dear mother is a registered nurse and never shied away from her good friend the enema (it's ok, I've had plenty of therapy since), and neither did her mother before her, but it hasn't been my bailiwick. I also had my mom's voice in my head warning that you "have to be careful not to perforate the rectum," and that only added to my terror. What if I perforate his rectum what if I perforate his rectum...drumming like the soundtrack of a horror movie in my inner ears.

(Short digression, I promise. My mother's voice is nothing like Dan Aykroyd's impersonation of Julia Child in that legendary Saturday Night Live skit where she tells us to "save the liver," but somehow that's what the perforated rectum warning sounds like in my head...don't know why that happens, sorry Mommy...)

Great, so now we knew what to do, the question was how to do it. (I've since discussed this incident with a friend who's also a mother and a physician, and her response was a matter-of-fact, "You just DO it." I don't know, that just sounds like an impenetrable Zen koan to me.) Well, Calvin tends to relax in the bathtub, and he was so riled up and hysterical that Mike and I couldn't hear ourselves or each other over the screaming, so we figured maybe that would be the place to start.

We get the tub filled, and we get the boy into the tub, and the boy then starts pulling at me like he wants me in the tub with him. I think, ok, maybe that'll help, I'll have a better angle or traction or whatever, so I start getting into the tub. Dear husband reminds me that I still have all my clothes on (it's really hard to think with all the screaming), so I do my best to remedy that while my suddenly very strong preschooler is yanking me headfirst into the water. Somehow, by the time I nearly face plant into the bathtub, I'm sufficiently undressed to be in a bathtub where I'm planning on administering an enema to my wriggling, screaming, highly uncomfortable three-year-old, or at least getting him into position so Mike can do it. (Interestingly enough, this is not the only story about me where nudity makes it funnier, and not for any of the reasons you'd think--that's another story for another blog, but it must be some universal truth...things are funnier when naked...not to mention slippery when wet.)

Ok, fine, so now I'm in. But then suddenly Calvin, with his newfound superpowers (low-tone musculature my naked ass) starts yanking his father into the tub with us too. This is getting a little ridiculous, no? This tub is barely made for one, and besides, Mike's got all his clothes on, so he does his best to remedy that, and I get my dripping-wet self OUT of the tub thinking, ok, Mike will hang on to the boy and I'll do the thing from outside the tub and it'll all work out in the end.

Let's pause here for a minute, because now that everybody in the bathroom taking part in this charming tableaux is naked I need to make the following announcement. From here on in, for the duration of this scene, the roles of Mike and Tracy will be played by Hugh Jackman and Beyonce Knowles. (Yeah that's right, he liked it so he put a ring on it. ) Calvin, however, will be played by himself because, constipated or not, let's face it, he's perfect.

Ok, back to the tub, who's in there again? Yes, Mike and Cal are in the tub, Cal is still upset but calming down, Mike distracts him, I descend like a falcon and do what needs to be done, Cal is too surprised to even protest too much...and I suddenly realize, wow, we did it! The triumphant part of the soundtrack swells, naked Hugh and Beyonce look at each other in relieved, breathless victory, tousled locks of hair playing gorgeously upon their gently sweating brows, and all that's left to do is wait...

It was less than a two-minute wait. And I'd really like to say that Beyonce whisked Cal out of the tub and onto the toilet in time when she saw the look on his face that said the eagle was about to land...but I'd be lying. And I'd like to say Hugh made it out of the tub in time to avoid being contaminated by a clump of doodoo the size of a beagle, but then I'd be lying again. And I'd also like to say that when my husband (still naked) was on his hands and knees on the bathroom floor trying to clean up the little landmines that were being left all over the place once we did get the boy out of the contaminated tub, that I was able to keep Cal from sidling up behind him and peeing on the soles of his father's feet...but that, dear friends, would also be a lie. (Mike says he's sure I was helping Cal aim, but who would do such a thing?).

I'd like to say I was making up even one tiny iota of any of this, instead of having lived it in its entirety, in this body, Beyonce's, or any other. But who would I be kidding?

All I can add is, hats off to Hugh and Beyonce for a display of seamlessly orchestrated teamwork the likes or probabilities of which were never even minutely hinted at in their wedding vows. Not even the tiniest warning. Frickin MacGyver, Batman, and James Bond combined couldn't have pulled this one off.

And the happy ending? That boy was clean as a whistle, inside and out. Slept like a rock, too, which hardly ever happens. Gracie too, remember Gracie? Never even budged during this whole hullaballoo, slept through it all, blissfully unaware (thank God, or she'd have splashed right in there with us, Mother of God, let's don't even think of it...). This quiet time, kiddies asleep, on a long winter's night gave Hugh and Beyonce some well-earned time together to...finish decontaminating the master bath. Hey, these things need to be done, even when you look like we do, at least when well-cast.

Seriously, have you ever? If you have, please let me know. Tell all the truth, but tell it slant.