My Son’s Preschool Teacher Literally Handed Me A Bag Of Sh*t

I’m a little over five years into my time as a mother, and yesterday I experienced another first — I unknowingly carried around a turd in a plastic bag. That’s right, a ball of shit in a plastic sack. I carried it around like a kitten in a basket.

You may be asking yourself how something so absurd could have happened. Well, allow me to enlighten you. Let’s start with the facts: My youngest child is potty-training. I don’t have a strong handle on how to teach a child to use the toilet, so my method is mostly just swearing and cleaning up messes.

My son insists on wearing underwear, all the time, which is fine. I’m cool dumping a loose turd in the toilet when things go down. Until yesterday, I thought that was protocol — when a kid poops in his clothes, you remove the poop from the clothes. You liberate the turd. You don’t leave the turd to marinate in the cotton underwear like some sort of turd-collecting barbarian. You. Dump. The. Turd.

However, I’ve discovered what I once thought was an unspoken rule is not standard practice, but more of a personal preference among turd handlers. You see, friends, my little man-cub took a bear-sized dump in his pants yesterday while he was at preschool. His teacher sent me a sweet text to alert me to the accident and assured me he was all cleaned-up and doing well.

What she didn’t tell me was that she put everything in a plastic bag. There was no courtesy turd-dump — it all went in the bag. That’s right — bear turd, wrapped in Paw Patrol toddler-britches, into the bag — knotted shut.

When I arrived to pick him up, the telltale plastic shopping bag hung on the hook below his cubby. I grabbed it, assuming it was his soiled underwear, and didn’t think much more about it. Accidents happen, and my washing machine has a toddler setting, so it’s cool.

I collected my son, who insisted on carrying the bag. I declined because putting a toddler in charge of a bag containing poopy underwear just seemed like a bad plan. But after five minutes of screaming and his overwhelming insistence that he be allowed to hold “his bag,” I caved. He cradled it in his lap the whole drive home.

When we arrived home, I unloaded the car and decided to handle the shituation before starting dinner. I untied the sack and began to extract what I thought was merely soiled underwear, ready to toss them into the waiting washer. But, sweet mother of all things holy, there it was…an enormous turd that had fused itself to the cotton Paw Patrol underwear.

My eyes were burning as I rushed outside to the dumpster and discarded the entire thing. There was no way I was going to chisel an old turd out of a $2 pair of pants — hell to the no.

So, because this is obviously a thing that needs to be said, dump the turd. Or at the very least, let a lady know before you give her a bag of crap. “Hey, by the way, there’s a turd in there.” It’s just common courtesy. I couldn’t have been anymore caught-off-guard if I found that thing flaming on my front porch.

Dump it. Always.

The end.

Note: Since writing this, I’ve learned that daycare providers and preschool teachers are mandated to send the nugget home, no dumping allowed. It’s a sanitation issue, which I can completely understand. That being said, my stance is now pro turd-tossing, underwear and all.