YO MAMA: The week my son didn’t poop
OPINION
“Do you have to poop?!” I squealed, hardly able to contain my excitement. My seven-month-old son hadn’t gone Number Two in a week. To say I was elated at the prospect of a potential bowel movement was an understatement.
The kid had paused his playtime activity — which usually meant pooping time — and appeared to be lost in deep, philosophical thoughts, another giveaway. But after a brief moment of head-tilted consideration, he picked up his work with the stacking blocks and left his diaper dry, and my hopes in the toilet. It was a false alarm.
A lot of parents will share that around the time their children start taking in larger volumes of solid food — typically around six months — their pooping patterns change dramatically. For a lot of kids, the switch from a solely liquid diet to a solid one can bring on every parent’s worst nightmare: constipation. You’d think it would be a gift, right? No diaper changes! Wrong. It’s totally crappy.
Pretty soon, after about the second or third day, all you can think about is your child’s bowels. You check their diaper constantly. It’s like opening a present. You are filled with hopeful anticipation, but there’s nothing in the box. It’s just wrapping paper. Psychologically, it’s quite distressing.
A depression sinks in. You mope about, wondering, will your kid ever poop again? You begin to worry about blockages, ruptured intestines and ripped rectums. You Google ‘how long a baby can go without pooping?’ (a surprisingly long time) and make an awkward call to your family doctor (who says the child will be fine).
Fortunately, my son seemed perfectly happy and completely unphazed by the whole thing. The crisis was obviously affecting me way more than it was affecting him.
Around the third day, armed with vast quantities of Internet research, I made a prune juice proposal to my husband (very romantic).
“I know you’re not supposed to give them juice until they’re older,” I said. We were trying to introduce vegetables and other non-sugary foods to our son before exposing his virgin taste buds to sweet things like fruits and berries. “But these are extenuating circumstances.”
We injected some of the poop-juice into his mouth with a baby Tylenol syringe (he wasn’t interested in a bottle or sippy cup). He didn’t poop, but in a sugar-high burst of energy, he did figure out how to roll over from back to front. Hey, I needed some of that stuff.
When the prune juice didn’t work, I fell into a real funk. I simply couldn’t believe how stressed out I was over my son’s digestive issues. I never thought I would invest so much mental energy into another human being’s poop.
I tried baby yoga. I gave him warm baths and rubbed his tummy. I did bicycle legs. I took him for a car ride on a gravel road, hoping the bumps might get things moving. Nothing worked.
I had read some articles about an apparently effective strategy involving a thermometer. A rectal thermometer to be exact. By Day Six I was ready to try anything. After the kid’s nap, I warmed up the tip of the thermometer, dunked it in Vaseline, and went for it. I was mildly afraid that it would be like puncturing a water balloon.
But nothing happened. The thermometer came out clean as a whistle, and the kid seemed oblivious.
By now, I was all out of ideas.
“Let’s go play,” I sighed, exhausted and defeated.
And then, suddenly, pbbbttttt. A fart. It was like music to my ears.
“That’s it!” I cried triumphantly.
He couldn’t squat or stand yet so he just rocked on all fours for a bit, then rolled onto his back and let out a long sigh.
“Did you really go?” I said.
Mentally and emotionally, I didn’t think I could handle another fake poop.
I laid him down on the change table and opened up his diaper. There sat the most beautiful log a mother has ever seen. A real, grown up looking poop. None of that runny breastmilk poop. I’m talking solid, textured, formed.
I showered the kid with compliments. I was literally singing some made up jingle that went “you pooped doop-doop-doo-doop” to the tune of Baby Shark.
And then, BOOM, out shot more poop, right there on the change table. I am not kidding when I say that it blew right off the change pad, landed on the carpeted floor, and kept on coming.
A foot-long log of poop. Two inches for every day he hadn’t gone.
I am not going to lie and say I didn’t take a photo of that magnificent poop and sent it to my husband. By now, he was used to unsolicited poop pics.
“Wow! Best news!” my husband wrote back.
Unsurprisingly, the kid seemed pretty happy too. It was poophoria. A weight had been lifted — emotionally for me, physically for the kid.
I’ll never know if it was the thermometer or all the fruits and fibre we’d been feeding him. Maybe nothing we did made an iota of difference. Maybe, just maybe, nature ran its course and he simply went when he was ready.
— Charlotte Helston gave birth to her first child, a rambunctious little boy, in the spring of 2021. Yo Mama is her weekly reflection on the wild, exhilarating, beautiful, messy, awe-inspiring journey of parenthood.
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