Puke, Snot and Other Reasons Women are Prepared to Save the World

As I was picking my son’s nose tonight, I had an epiphany. I suddenly realized why women are indeed the more capable sex. It’s not simply our patience, our innate nurturing or our ability to multi-task. It’s that we deal with the disgusting. Even the most squeamish among us rise to the occasion when confronted with the truly gross. It’s no wonder why Nancy Pelosi, mother of five and grandmother of a bunch is now Speaker of the House. Yes, apparently she’s sharp as a tack even if she recently took a congressional trip to Syria, which frankly was really dumb. But I bet she knows her way around the really yucky which is probably why she’s fared so well in Congress. She holds her nose to it all, kicks ass and prevails. God Bless America.

So back to my son’s nose. Tonight as Michael was putting my five-year-old son Jonah to bed, Jonah got a terrific nosebleed – the tissue soaking kind. My kid, who is known for his dramatic, blood curdling screams if he even gets a scratch on his pinky finger, was surprisingly brave given the pints of blood spurting from his nostrils. And for the record, as soon as the blood started pouring, Michael ran to find me and then conveniently disappeared.

So after ten minutes of my pinching, Jonah’s nosebleed slowed and he began complaining about something lodged in his right nostril. It was a stubborn piece of snot and he needed help. I don’t regularly help pick my kids’ noses, but feeling sorry for the trauma Jonah just endured, I gingerly tried to extricate the boogie. This, of course, aggravated his tender nose and the bleeding began again. After some starts and stops I convinced Jonah to live with the snot and I promised to get it out if it still presented when he woke up in the morning.

But the nosebleed/snot episode frankly pales in comparison to catching my daughter’s vomit in my bare hands as I stood in the check out line at Costco last spring. After inhaling a Costco size crate of blueberries while she sat in the shopping cart, Lexi, 3, then began to violently barf up blueberries. I am still bewildered by why my instinct was to shoot out my bare hands to literally catch the throw up. The whole scene was so vile that I think I was in a state of shock – but being a mom – I rallied. As New Jersey, bulk, discount shoppers stood aghast, I stripped Lexi down to her panties, opened the 50-pack of paper towels I was about to purchase and cleaned up.

Subconsciously, I was probably equipped to deal with the Costco crisis after years of becoming somewhat numb to all of the poop that I’ve had to handle. It starts at birth with the meconium – that foul, tar colored first dump that a newborn takes. That, of course, is followed by the familiar explosive diarrhea that somehow shoots up the back, behind the ears, into the folds of the neck and into every baby crevice and crease. We as moms, use the term, “poopie” because it’s a cuter euphemism to the reality of cleaning up another person’s shit.

I am famously known for my sensitive nose, distaste for odors, easy nausea and general squeamishness. But I’ve realized that all of the tushes I’ve wiped and unpleasant episodes I’ve experienced must have had a higher purpose. I say, if women can boldly and adeptly clean up all of those really nasty messes, damn it, we can clean up the world.