Just Plain Nasty

        As every mother knows babies are just plain nasty. There's no getting around it or sugar coating it or putting a positive spin on it, babies are just plain nasty and if you are going to be a mother, nanny, or any kind of caregiver you had best get used to it. Let's face it babies like nasty. They revel in nasty. So to be a successful mother you have to be able to ignore the nasty that follows your child around the way a pilot fish follows a shark. Luckily, we seem to be programmed for getting used to nasty. It's in our genes. Millions of years of evolutionary pressure have forged the modern mother into a natural wonder of nasty ignoring perfection. If this were not the case the species would have died out long ago. Cro-Magnon woman would have thrown her hands up in outraged disgust and stormed out of the cave leaving Cro-Magnon man to deal with the nasty. We all know how that would have turned out.

The nasty begins right at birth. (There are those who would contend that the nasty begins with conception but that's strictly personal opinion). The whole birth process is nasty. "Water", blood, sweat, tears, - good lord did you think you would ever feel clean again? And that was just to get the ball rolling. The next few years are more or less dominated by the three "P's" – poop, and her little sisters pee and puke – and it is amazing how quickly we become accustomed to being pooped, peed and puked on. In a matter of weeks what should repel any normal human being becomes routine. The nasty evolves from repellent, to bearable, to normal in no time at all and what used to be intolerable has become more or less unobjectionable. Have you ever caught yourself humming a pleasant tune or planning dinner or even whistling while wiping a babies butt? It becomes just that effortless. No big deal.

I suppose it is the same for every unpleasant task that people are required to perform. I'm sure it must be pretty gross at first when you're a rookie in the morgue but after a while you're eating your lunch down there with the clientele. Still, when I was young and innocent I never imagined that I would one day be picking the crust out of someone else's nose and that they would be the one complaining about it rather than me. In the final analysis, however, motherhood is really just a wake up call, a lesson in the changes that we all have to go through as we live out our lives. It's sort of like practice for the truly unpleasant things that most of us have to get used to somewhere along the line because, let's face it, life in general can be nasty in more ways than one. It's best if we learn early how to cope with the unpleasant aspects of life for we never know when we will be called upon to grab the dirty end of the stick and get knee deep in the nasty whatever form it may take. And if the hardest thing we have to become accustomed to in life is seeing to the unpleasant needs of the ones we love the most then I guess we can say we're getting off pretty easy.

Nan