“DONE!”

I’m tired and am pacing in the kitchen muttering to myself about unfulfilled and only partly articulated creative aspirations, muttering quietly because the baby’s asleep tucked into my hoody. She fell asleep to The Methadones. Fast rock drumming and percussive guitar lull her to sleep more quickly than anything else. I wonder if it’s sort of like a heartbeat or if she heard a lot of this music while still in utero or maybe she just hates the music and goes to sleep as a coping mechanism. I’ve lost that ability in the literal sense but can still occasionally deploy it in the spiritual sense. I walk to the living room and grab the laptop, set it on top of the stove, tuck the baby better into the hoody, spread my feet out like Dee Dee Ramone’s bass-playing stance - it drops my torso lower so I can type on the laptop without slouching further - and blink at the blank document. I haven’t written anything really in, shit I don’t even remember. The last calendar year?

The cursor blinks at me and The Methadones sing about bad memories about friends who got bitter because of futures that never came to be when my middle kid shouts “DONE!” from the bathroom just off the kitchen.

“Did you poop?” I call back.

“Poop AND pee!”

“I’ll be right there.” I straighten up and in the five steps to the bathroom click off all the brooding, tune out the music, and run a quick calculation of how I’m going to angle my body to wipe Middle Child’s poopy butthole without waking Smallest Child. The trick of it will be to keep my torso upright, no hinging my hips or bending my back forward. Up and down motion doesn’t tend to wake Smallest Child, as long as she’s not tilting. The toilet is tucked into a kind of alcove at the back of the bathroom, I can probably lean one shoulder on the wall and slide downward.

“Okay, bend down.” Middle Child complies, getting into leap frog position. I grab the roll of the toilet paper off the back of the tank, remember for the nth time that I need to put the toilet paper holder back on the wall, turn, lean on the wall with my right shoulder, squat low, rotating my left knee far out and my right knee far in, using my left hand to hold the toilet paper and stabilize on the opposite wall. My right knee protests. It tends to. I have limited internal rotation on my left leg, one of many things I need to work on, like recaulking the gap between the driveway and exterior wall of the house and getting the gutters done. My right knee has to pick up the slack caused by my leg’s inflexibility lot of the time. I think it’s the full time parent in the relationship.

The need to perform maneuvers like this along with my body’s growing weakness and inelasticity is part of why Smallest Child will not have a younger sibling. Last spring when middle child threw a tantrum in the driveway one day and lit out in the direction of the street I bent quick and picked her up and my lower back recalled its diplomats. The physical therapy was like six hundred bucks and it hurt for like six weeks. Five years from now I don’t know if I’ll be able to do this weird twisting goblet squat motion necessary to hold baby and wipe butt.

As I get into position I keep my chin tucked to my chest so I can see the top of Smallest Child’s head. If she wakes up like this it will lead to screaming, hers out loud and mine in my mind, because I won’t be able to comfort her until I’m done wiping her sister’s butt. She doesn’t stir.

I wipe, twist to put the toilet paper in the toilet, twist back. It takes a bit of time. Middle Child is getting bored and probly tired from being in that position. After the second wipe she starts asking “done?” after each time. The second time she asks I say “after your birthday we’re going to start working on you wiping your own butt.” She groans. “It’s part of being a big kid,” I add. “I don’t want to.” “Every big kid wipes their own butt.” “But I don’t want to wipe my own butt!” She starts whining. It’s the whine with the edge that says she’s genuinely worried - I get it, poop is gross, I don’t want to wipe her butt either - and that means it’s my job to try to put her at ease, and if I don’t she may start to cry or yell. That invariably wakes Smallest Child, who may think that the crying of her sister means there is a threat to which she must alert the pack or may have my same terrible taste in music and so thinks ‘atonal hollering, I shall bellow along with this!’ “Honey don’t worry about it, your birthday’s not for a long while.” “But I don’t WANT to wipe my butt!” “It’s not for a long time anyway.” “I don’t WANT to!” “Okay. You don’t want to.” Luckily I’m done now. “Done. You can run and play.” She hops up and lights out of the bathroom like I was about to hand her the toilet paper roll.

I put a hand on edge of the sink and pull down as I push off the ground with my legs, which are protesting at having been kept in that position. It’s like a nightmare funhouse mirror version of a yoga pose. I wash my hands, careful not to bump Smallest Child on the edge of the sink or splash water on her, and walk back to the kitchen where The Methadones are urging me to say goodbye to my generation. I hear Middle Child and Biggest Child playing Barbies in the next room, one of the Barbies is telling the other, who is a vampire, that she better not try to suck her blood or she will hit her. The tired comes back. We’re out of ground coffee and grinding more is not worth waking Smallest Child. The angst has not come back. I’ll have tea. Enough cups will add up to coffee. I’ll feel not tired again eventually. Probably not today, but maybe. Maybe today will be the day I get to take a nap, or a shower. We’re going to the library this afternoon and getting shakes at McDonald’s. It’ll be fine. It’s all good.

I type that and Biggest Child marches into the kitchen to announce it is Time for Her Bath. Smallest Child stirs. God damn it. Biggest Child walks into the bathroom then back out, angry that Middle Child left a bunch of bath toys in the bath last night, “I don’t want those in my bath!” “Then take them out!” Smallest stirs again, probably from my tone of voice. By the time Biggest is in the damn tub Smallest is awake and crying. She won’t go back to sleep. I check the diaper. Dry. Okay. She smiles big at me and coos. Really okay. Small lives lived small-ly.