I remember my mother once proudly telling me that she toilet trained me in a week. I wouldn’t learn, so she just kept me in my soiled diapers without changing them for six or seven days and she laughed, a strangely wicked laugh, and said, “Believe me, you got it. You begged to have those diapers taken off you.”
Have I told you my mother was obsessed with giving me enemas as a child?
I don’t remember being constipated. I don’t think that is why she gave them to me. I think it was about cleaning me out, getting this thing out of me, this badness. I was born dark and Jewish and she was a Wasp. Well, kind of. She was part Wasp and part other things. Poor white kinds of things. Whereabouts and origins unknown. No one ever thought she was my mother, including me. I was convinced for a long time that I was adopted. When they discovered the hundreds of thousands of orphans in Romania after Nicolae Ceausecu’s twenty-five-year reign of terror, I was sure I had come from there. Enemas were my mother’s way of making me something else. Perfect, French twist wrapped up tight—elegant, no mess. Enemas were about making me something that wouldn’t embarrass her.
For years I was terrified of shit. I was plagued with dreams of shit, oceans of shit, swallowing and consuming me. Now I really was swimming in a sea of shit, shit I could no longer control. Now I was wearing a bag of shit, a swampy pouch of my unexpressed feelings pouring out at their discretion. This made leaving the house treacherous. Sometimes the bag just exploded. When I was anxious, my stomach swelled. The stoma glue couldn’t hold and it was a mess. The bag could not be trusted if I ran into a person on the street speaking to me in the way that people speak to a person with cancer. You know? That sanctimonious pity that makes it horrifyingly evident that they have written you off. I smile that bald-headed smile and take care of them, tell them not to worry, I’m fine. Cancer free. Not going to die. But my bag is pissed off. By the time I’ve finished my bullshit sentence, the stoma is already beginning to swell, the bag filling up. Or, at a reading of a new play a producer I am having serious doubts about comes up to me, and as I go to shake his hand, I look down and realize my hand is covered in shit.
It was shit. Unpredictable shit. My shit and it was out there. There was no more hiding it or keeping it in.