"That's Not a REAL Toilet!" Is Something You Never Want To Have To Say

On a cold night last winter, my husband and I curled up in front of a roaring fire to finally watch Vince Vaughn in "Couples Retreat." We'd wanted to see it since we saw the first preview, but life - or parenthood - kept getting in the way. Book the babysitter, kids get sick; you know how it goes. So when it came out on DVD, we were ready to laugh our Christmas-cookie padded abs off. (Ever seen him in "Wedding Crashers"? Hilarious.)

Minutes into the movie, Vince Vaughn's character and his wife visit their local home improvement store, looking at tiles for their remodel. Now, most husbands hate that kind of thing, and are only too happy for any reason to walk away from the 3,492 options available - most of which look nearly identical to them - and Vince's character is no exception. So while he's on his cell phone talking to his buddy, he's not really watching what his kid is doing - probably assuming that his wife is on kid-duty. Suddenly, the camera pans to the boy, who is peeing in a display toilet as customers and sales people look on in horror. Vince shouts, "That's not a real toilet!" at his son. He gets off the phone, picks up his kid, and says, with classic Vince Vaughn intonation, "There's not really anything more to say," and walks away.

No embarrassment, no wiping up the pee, no apologizing to the manager.

Yeah, that's the Hollywood version.

In REAL life, in MY life, I'd find myself with a makeshift glove made from wads of generic paper towel wrapped around my hand, scooping "I've eaten nothing but fruit all day" type poop out of the display toilet. In REAL life, when MY 3-year-old was playing in the design center's kids' area and she told me she had to poop, I told her to put on her shoes and I'd take her - and then, distracted by my Level 5 flooring options, promptly forgot about her "needs". So a few minutes later, when I heard, "Mommy? I can't find the toilet paper!" I knew EXACTLY what had happened. And so did my husband. In one of those "are you thinking what I'm thinking" moments between long-married couples, we looked at each other in horror, shock, disgust. And mentally argued over who'd have clean-up duty.

Thankfully, our real estate agent, the designer, and the sales manager did NOT realize that their upgraded Ecru Low Flow/Elongated Bowl display model was now completely full of crap. Literally. No, in REAL life, the kid doesn't merely pee into the model toilet. She poops. And poops. And poops. And it's after hours, so the deserted design center is completely without its custodial staff who might know where the cleaning supplies are stored. Nope, just us and our helpful real estate professionals, ready to sell us $40,000 in unnecessary upgrades but unable to locate a single pair of rubber gloves and a bottle of bleach.

Yes, in a bizarre twist of "Art Imitating Life", I found myself watching Vince Vaughn and flashing back to that memorable May evening some three years earlier. (I should get a cut of the movie's profits. If only I'd written about this earlier, then claimed Hollywood stole it from me! I'd never clean toilets again!) There I was, reliving the time I'd crouched in front of a fake toilet, paper towels wrapped carefully yet ineffectively around my entire hand, shoving recently manicured fingers into the toilet to clean it out. (Truly, you have no idea how long that pipe at the back of the bowl is.) It took an hour, two rolls of paper towels, and all the Purell wipes I had in my car and my purse - but that toilet was cleaner that it had been on the day it was installed. It shined like the top of the proverbial Chrysler Building. There was no evidence at all that we'd ever been there. We apologized, washed our hands, and got the heck out of Dodge. (And yes, we DID buy a house from them, Level 5 upgrades and all. It was the least we could do.)

Slacker Mom Says... parenthood isn't always kisses and pretty Hallmark cards and sweet-smelling babies. Sometimes it's a dirty job, and sometimes you get the short end of the clean-up duty stick. Sometimes our kids ruin things that aren't theirs and we have to take care of it. Because that's what we do: take responsibility for our young children and their actions, even when they poop where they shouldn't. Even when we know it will take approximately 825 gallons of scented soap to wash the smell off our hands. We take care of it. We take responsibility. Because what's the alternative? Walk away? No, that only happens in the movies. In real life, parents must teach by example. What would I have taught my children if I'd walked away from the mess? My preschooler was too young to take care of it, and after all, it was my fault for putting her off. It was my job to take care of the situation, no matter how unpleasant. Our society is plagued by a severe lack of personal responsibility. I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. Caring for our kids, teaching them to take responsibility for their mistakes, to own up to what they did, to make it right and apologize for inconveniencing others, that's our job. We're parents. It's a messy job, but we volunteered, after all.

Besides, now I have a really good story to tell at her prom, her graduation, and her rehearsal dinner.