I've started introducing the three-year-old as the love of my life in three-year-old form. Sometimes I forget to add the second part of that sentence. When I announce that he's the love of my life, some adults glance at me with eyes that tell me I need psychiatric assistance. Others eyeball me like I'm a pedophile. Coach, the head of Mini Titans, stared me down with a mad dog expression.
"Nice to meet you, too," I smiled, holding the three-year-old's hand.
I waved to Coach's back as he walked away. We were in the athletic complex's parking lot and I was bribing the kid with chocolate so he wouldn't shout and awaken the eight-month-old sleeping in the car. The last time the baby fell asleep in the car, the three-year-old bashed in his head with a hardcover book. When I demanded to know why he was trying to brain damage his little brother, he replied, "So my baby will be strong."
Mini Titans constituted twenty two- to four-year-old males in a warehouse room carpeted in synthetic turf. Little girls weren't allowed to register. Six punching bags beautified the back wall, with a stage on the left and a basketball hoop without the net on the right wall. The mutilated hoop belonged in an L.A. ghetto. Balls, baskets, and torture devices for young children were scattered around the room.
For the first activity, the boys threw balls at each other. Every mom sitting near me on the spectator bench mentioned her husband's influence in Mini Titans enrollment. Coach hollered at the two-year-olds, referring to them as pussies and wimps when they chucked balls with the force of two-week-old girls. Sentimental memories surfaced in my brain as I recalled my club soccer coach in high school. His grandma could kick better than us, and his overweight son could run faster. Every practice, someone would cry. I missed that coach.
Halfway through the second activity, one of the moms walked into the room, broadcasting that someone's baby was screaming in a car. As I ran into the parking lot, I contemplated inquiring after her career. She'd be a magnificent public speaker.
The baby was crying like someone was drilling into his testicles. I retrieved him from the car and reentered the room to judging mom eyes. I was a bad mother.
The third activity was tackling each other. The baby sat on my lap playing with the car key and my cell phone. Translate this as, he smashed the key and phone onto the floor at five second intervals. As I retrieved my brick of a phone from the floor, the three-year-old sprinted to me. He placed both hands on my knees and declared, "I have to do sick poos."
I didn't know what sick poos were, but it couldn't be good. The toilet was on the other side of the parking lot. I chucked the baby onto the floor, seized the three-year-old's hand, and raced towards the exit. We advanced three steps from the bench before he cried. Mid-stride, I glanced at the back of his jeans. A dark discharge oozed through his pants. Excrement odor ruptured my nostrils.
Diarrhea had exploded through his rectum and anal cavity. Butt juice leaked down his legs and onto Mini Titan's turfed floor. I picked him up, swung him through the next few steps and the exit, and frisbeed him onto the parking lot concrete. I stripped him of his pants and underwear like a professional. Within seconds the three-year-old stood, butt drool streaming down his legs, and his pants and underwear a shit volcano. We held hands as we walked across the parking lot to the bathroom. He was naked from the waist down, and drizzling excrement like a soft serve. Only one person observed us.
In efforts to cleanse the three-year-old of his poop mudslide, liquid diarrhea got monkey-tossed everywhere. It was on his shirt, my shirt, his hands, my hands. It was on my face.
I left the three-year-old by the car, his little uncircumcised penis poking out, under strict instructions not to touch anything. I recovered the car key, phone, and baby. The baby was sitting on the floor, stabbing his finger into his brother's poop smoothie trail to the exit. He put his finger in his mouth seconds before I got to him.