The Check Engine Light

We've all see in it at some point in our life.  Life is moving along rather uneventfully and then there it is, the God DAMN Check Engine Light.  It's yellow glow reminding us that we better be mindful of our car maintenance and better get things looked at right away or else we may find ourselves stranded on the side of the road somewhere.  I wonder if how you react to a check engine light reveals something about your character.

My mini-van's check engine light goes on and off from time to time.  I got freaked out when I first saw it.  My husband plugged it in and it's a bad sensor.  Don't ask me which, cause I don't remember.  All I really care to know about the vehicle I'm driving is whether or not it's going to get me home safely today.  When my car failed to break  down each time it rubbed it's little yellow glow in my face, I learned to dismiss it.  But every time I dare to forget about it entirely it pops up and reminds me that I really should care. 

Because anyone who knows me knows I love a good metaphor, I'm adopting the Check Engine light as my metaphor of the week.  Some people like me are extremely vocal when they're having a tough time, but then there are those for whom a small, quiet glowing warning light is all that exists to indicate to the outside world that something is wrong.  In my magical car metaphor, I'm that clunky noise you try to describe to your mechanic in a rather sad explanation of what's wrong, but I worry about the people and mothers especially who never show any outward signs of distress.  I hope that someone is paying attention to these women and saying to themselves "I better figure out what's wrong before something worse happens."

We all get so used to asking each other, "How are you?" but hardly anybody really expects a real answer.  We wait two seconds for the obligatory "fine" and carry on with our own preoccupations.  I'll never forget that there was one person I asked years ago, who dared to give me a real answer.  I was walking through the halls of my workplace, busily trying to get accomplished whatever my current task was and I happened to say hello to a co-worker and asked him how he was.  As it turned out, his mother was dying and for the next half hour we talked about it.  It was a very personal conversation for co-workers and yet I felt somehow that is was natural.  Losing my Dad had given me a common vantage point to understand what he was going through, to see the very spot on life's path that those who haven't been there simply cannot.

I'm not sure why he trusted me enough to share his feelings with me, but I have the theory that his check engine light had simply turned on and he had been waiting for someone to notice.  In turn he became someone I could talk to when my light blinked on. 

I hope that I'm the type of person who cares enough to notice when someone really needs another person to simply care enough to know what's going on in their lives.  But the truth is we all get preoccupied with our own lives and let's face it, it's incredibly easy to ignore that small glowing light in others that warns that things are not as great as they might appear.  Though I sometimes worry that my over sharing nature might make some people uncomfortable, I know exactly what happens to me when I ignore my light for too long.

It's for this reason that I implore the stoic, the polished and perfected, and the perpetual caretakers to speak up and maybe give someone a chance to really listen beyond the "fine".  Of everyone else I make this small and simple request- every once in a while stop and look around you and really take note of the silent, steady glow.  There's usually a light on somewhere.

Baby Poop And Other Fun Stuff

WARNING:THIS POST IS NOT FOR THE EASILY NAUSEATED.

Very few things really start the day off right like a big healthy dose of baby poop. It's my nice metaphor for life - Baby Poop. It's messy, it smells, it demands our attention and action, and we clean it half-heartily, begrugingly, and for the most part you wish someone else would just take care of it for you. Few people in life get excited about baby poop and those few people are yes, you guessed it MOTHERS.

In the first few months and years of your child's life, you spend an odd number of hours thinking about oh, here it comes again, BABY POOP. There is the wondering about what is normal or not normal - size, frequency, color, consistancy, etc. Then when my eight month old wasn't pooping and was so constipated he cried there was the fun of giving a supository to a crying baby - or as some of us know it - a butt bomb. As if shoving something up your infant's butt isn't weird enough - you watch for a few seconds/minutes for the explosion.

Oh the explosions I've seen in my life time. My favorite was when my daughter was sick and it was so bad I made my husband get this scissors because sometimes, no clothing is worth the price of washing putricity out of it. Now that my daughter is toilet training I wonder if the poop obsession will ever end. Will she ever tell me when she has to go or will my mom continue to find her pulling off a retched pull-up in secret. So where am I going with this? I'm not sure.

It just occured to me that it's a good metaphor for life. Life is BABY POOP, messy and necessary and suck-tastic. It's also a great metaphor for Motherhood because mom's touch, smell, and clean some of the nastiest things EVER. I have held out my cupped palms to catch my daughter's vomit, had poop on my hands more times then I can count, even got it in my hair once too. We are the caregivers and we take the shit. If we didn't love our kids we probably wouldn't do half of the things we do.

So why doesn't Mike Rowe follow us around when filming Dirty Jobs? It's man-tastic programing at its finest and I bet every man in every dirty job featured on that show wouldn't hesitate for one second when he comes home from a long day cleaning porta-potties, cleaning animal cages, or hauling trash, to hand off his son or daughter to his wife at the first wiff of BABY POOP. If you've got a husband, boyfriend, or even know a man who willingly changes stinky, baby poop, and especially if he can do it without making the vomit sound- buy that man a drink because lord knows it takes more intestinal fortitude for him to do what we do every day.

So if you've got a funny Baby Poop moment, feel free to share it cause god knows as mothers, sometimes we need a good laugh to get through life and oh yes the BABY POOP.