One Mother's Unnatural Fascination with Her Children's Bowel Movements

I like to think of myself as a good mother. My husband refers to me as 'uber-mother', and I'm never really certain whether that's a compliment, or an unfinished insult. All the same, mothering is what I do, and I try to do it well.

Anyone can give birth. When I gave birth for the first time, I naively thought that I was through with the really hard part of the entire parenting process. I mean, what could possibly be more difficult than pushing eight pounds of human flesh through a hole the diameter of a pencil? In my own defense, I was young. One of the wonderful things about youth is that it goes hand-in-hand with stupidity.

So there I was. I'd just managed to push a watermelon through a Cheerio, and I was feeling pretty cocky. I'd joined the regal ranks of Motherhood. I had a 'labor story' to tell. I had a beautiful baby to brag about. Life was good.

Then we took our brand new baby home. This is where the stupidity of youth came in very handy. My husband and I were much too dumb to understand that dealing with an infant was really, really hard. Neither one of us had the intellectual prowess to understand that there were about a million-and-six terrible things that could happen to our precious child. Instead, we just struggled through, day by day, assuming that it would all work out in the end.

In those days, it seemed as if the biggest concern in my life was the quality of my baby's bowel movements. I monitored texture, amount, and odor as carefully as if I were conducting some sort of scientific experiment that could possibly result in a cure for the common cold. In later years, as I watched my baby sister giving her infant son's doody a close inspection, I wondered just exactly what it is that we're looking for. I mean, it's not as if there's much chance that there will be gold coins hidden in the baby mookey-stinks. The only real worry is if they don't poop. And loose poop, of course, should be dealt with - when changing a diaper, explosive diarrhea is a clear and present danger - but other than that ... why do we watch the stuff so closely? What exactly is the fascination?