Wrecked

“We’ll take care of your bum in the morning. How about you bathe early tomorrow before school? That should take care of it.”

How do you teach kids to wipe their asses thoroughly? I feel that even at thirty-three I could be better at it, so how can a kid master it? I don’t want to turn into a neat freak and constantly talk about hygiene. She shouldn’t be disgusted by her own body. She should be free. More so than I am. Nobody ever talks about the art of cleaning your bum. Nobody taught me. My mother, Elli, didn’t. We’re all Elizabeths in our family, all the women anyway. Which is the only gender that counts in our family, unfortunately. Each Elizabeth tried to bring a trace of individuality to the name. Even if we all have the same name, at least each of us has her own nickname. She told us that she never crapped and never farted. That made a big impression on me as a child, and I felt disgusted with myself because I couldn’t manage to keep myself from doing those things. She told us that her waste evaporated into the ether, through her skin, I suppose. She had learned that from her own mother, Liz, our deranged grandmother from Camden. She acts to this day as though she is the rightful queen of England. For which the name Elizabeth is perfect. She also has never taken a crap or farted. How nice for her. You can’t expect to get any help in normal human functions from those two. Just have to teach yourself.

You also can’t bother anyone else with such a nasty subject. Which means you just have to get creative and try to guess how other people do it. Earlier I would just wipe once, regardless of what came off on the toilet paper, and then pull my underwear back up. I just didn’t think about it enough. These days it goes like this: I wipe once, twice, and then I look to see what the situation is on the paper. Usually there’s still something there. So I wipe until the paper shows no sign of anything. I’m sorry, Greenpeace, but I use a lot of sheets of toilet paper that way. But at least it’s recycled paper! Which is once again about sacrifice. Everything that’s good for the environment entails sacrifice. Back when I still didn’t care about the environment, I used the thickest, softest, whitest toilet paper I could find, sometimes it was even dyed light blue. Like a typical English girl. But I made the switch and will never go back.

Once I can’t see any signs of anything on the paper with the naked eye, I do two rounds of wiping with spit. Just to be safe. Because commercial wet wipes are out of the question on both health and environmental grounds. They take a lot longer to break down than regular paper and are pumped so full of chemicals that you don’t want them near your body anyway. Better not to use them. Most of them are manufactured by the worst companies, too. I spit on a few balled-up sheets and rub myself good and clean with the saliva. Then I repeat it to be safe. Wiping with wet toilet paper creates those horrible little clingy minirolls of paper that you have to pull off with your fingers. With my fingers and some water from the sink, I get rid of those. Then I use a paper towel to pat everything dry. Done. Shipshape. And the entire process thought up and perfected on my own. I’ve never talked about it with anyone. What a crazy world. You have to figure everything out on your own.

I should have anticipated the problem with the door to Liza’s room. I’m familiar with this fear of hers, and closing that door is part of the bedtime routine. I almost never forget. Liza has two doors in her room, and the one that connects to our room has to be shut, or else she’s afraid that someone or something will come through it. She sleeps on the floor. Her room is designed to look like an ocean, with a pirate-ship bed. She could sleep in the pirate-ship bed, of course, but she doesn’t want to. She always sleeps on an air mattress placed on the blue tiles that represent the seawater. If you lie next to her, you also have to lie on an air mattress—otherwise you’ll slip beneath the sea. And ever since I’ve had to lie there every night, I have noticed that you feel oddly helpless lying there on the floor, totally defenseless. From that vantage point, the door does look gigantic and imposing, especially when it’s slightly ajar.

I’ve often worried about all the various and ever-changing children’s fears Liza has. She’s scared that snakes live in our apartment—poisonous snakes or the ones that strangle you. She’s scared that a tiger lives in our back garden and will jump into her room through the window. She’s afraid of burglars. And of people who abduct children. She’s scared of ghosts, witches, wolves, foxes, badgers, skeletons, lizards. But only at night. Never during the day. Frau Drescher says these are inner fears that children project outward. Children are afraid of the inner evil inside themselves. When they get upset at their parents and secretly wish the parents were dead, they immediately feel bad and project their evil thoughts instead onto evil animals that could attack them and hurt them. That way they remain innocent and can feel like victims instead of culprits.

My initial impulse when she first started to express all these fears was to tell her that all the business about animals in the house and garden was ridiculous. There are no ghosts, my child. Not a single person in the entire world has ever seen a ghost—at least not a person with all their marbles. But my therapist told me that is the completely wrong approach. If all I do is to constantly tell the child that all her fears are absurd—to tackle the whole thing with arguments based in reason—she’ll just stop telling me her fears at some stage. But she’ll still be just as afraid. She’ll just carry her fears around with her silently; after all, the fears are ridiculous and she won’t want to make a fool of herself. So she’ll have to get over her fears all on her own, even as they become greater and less easy to control. As a good mother, I took this to heart and immediately changed my approach. Which is to say, now I take her fears seriously. By the way, it’s something that I’ve noticed in the relationship with my husband as well as in the raising of my daughter: that the most obvious solution—even one rooted in good intentions—is usually wrong and just makes everything worse. When I look deep inside myself for a solution, I find that I’m completely off base when I go to reassure myself with advice from professionals. That’s why I think everyone with a child or a husband or a wife should go to therapy. And if you can’t afford it, at least read a handbook.