Pickin' and grinnin'

When I was a perfect child and later a rebellious teenager, my mother — like all mothers before her — often began sentences with "just wait until you're a mother, then..."

The second part of the sentence was often "you'll understand", "you'll feel bad for what you did", "you'll see, and I hope your child is as mean to you as you are to me." But never, in all the iterations of that phrase, did I hear "Just wait until you're a mother and dig crusty crap out of your own child's nose and don't even think twice about it." Had I heard those words, perhaps I would have thought twice about the path that lay before me and upon which I now walk.

For weeks now, both kids have woken up with various levels of sticky nose effluence in and around their noses and occasionally on their chins and up to their eyebrows. Poor Madelena, whose hair falls forward when she sleeps face down on the panda, has at times had to have her hair ripped from her face and nose in the morning, so glued to her skin is it by her nightly nasal secretions. In the beginning, I used a warm towel and gentle probing with a nasal aspirator or a towel-swathed hand to clean her and her brother up before sending them on their way. Tissue boxes were in all bags, cars and levels of the house. But a dearth of laundry, the constant appearance of crustiness just seconds before walking into class, a party, someone's house or a restaurant has led me to lower my standards and raise my tolerance level.

Today I found myself putting Madelena in her car seat and, without batting an eyelash, shoved my pinky finger into her nose to clean it out and remove a particularly distended and disgusted "bug", as Shawn Joaquin calls it. No revulsion welled up in me as I wiped my finger on a newspaper fluttering by, no chill on my spine as I crinkled it up to dig under my nail to ensure it was clean and then followed up with a baby wipe. No. My only thought was "I wonder if we have milk at home?" followed by "I'm hungry."

WTF.

Perhaps this is why I have unconsciously become a compulsive hand washer, carry hand sanitizer in all bags and have skin that's beginning to resemble that of a worn milk-maid, chapped from my efforts to cleanse my hands and perhaps my very soul. Perhaps this is also one of the many reasons why, according to Suave, 89% of mothers feel they have let themselves go. Because honestly, who can be concerned about ones hips, thighs, hair, teeth or attire when no matter what you're wearing or how taut your abs, you have sunk to the level of a primate picking bugs off of one and other. The only thing that stand between us and them is that they eat their finds, while we at least have the decorum to discard our bounty, even if the wipe ends up on the floor of the car we said we'd never own - the one filled with the detritus of child-rearing and multiple Peet's cups, and the shadow of our former hygienic and stylish selves.

So let me close with this, one of my favorite poems from childhood:

You can pick your nose.
You can pick your friends.
But you can't pick your friend's nose.

Though perhaps, if one has lost all shame, you can pick your child's nose.