The Rear End

A Tale of Lost Lunch

a shining moment for my wife in an otherwise not-so-shiny situation

Mike Paulus |

It's a stomach.
 
It's a stomach.

So my wife, myself, and our two kids had just finished eating a delightful meal at an Eau Claire restaurant whose name rhymes with Oodles and Oh.*

“Wow,” I thought, “What a great day we’re having!”

We were getting ready to leave as I picked up our one-year-old son to go change his diaper. Right as I turned to walk to the bathroom, I heard the soul- clenching sound of my young daughter shrieking in fear.

“That’s odd,” I thought.

I turned around to see my wife rushing to help our little girl, kneeling beside her, speaking in hurried-yet-reassuring tones, pushing an empty pasta bowl across the table to rest below her chin. As our daughter shrieked on, I noticed that much of the table was slathered in a weird goo.

“That’s odd,” I thought again, studying the scene. “This wasn’t here a second ago.”

Ah! My little girl just puked all over the table – that’s what happened! “Whew,” I thought, “I knew I could figure it out.”

And then, like a trench coat-clad kung fu fighter from The Matrix** bursting into real time after a slow-motion bullet glides past their face, the whole world came rushing back to me, and I realized I should probably do something other than just stand there like a sedated donkey.

I wheeled around to the counter to see if I could get a rag or something, but all the employees were busy. The lady at the cash register was taking an order, but she took enough time to give me a sideways glance that was less than amused.

Behind me, I heard my wife say, “Mike, can you do something here?” Right! Doing something! Great idea!

For some reason, I thought the whole “getting a rag” thing had hit a dead end, so I stepped over to the table where my wife had grabbed every napkin in sight to stem the flood of kid barf. Since there was nothing left to wipe with, I wasn’t sure what to do. Eventually, I moved a few dishes to the other side of the table and out of the flood plane.

My wife mumbled something and stood up, hurrying over to the counter. Since our kid was still emitting a scream every few breaths, I figured I should probably comfort her.

Hey, side note – vomiting is pretty freaky. All you college graduates out there are probably pretty used to regurgitating a night’s worth of Miller products, so you’ve been desensitized to it. As astute readers of this column*** may recall, I, myself, have thrown ‘er into reverse on numerous occasions.

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*The events documented here have absolutely nothing to do with the food at restaurants whose names rhyme with “Oodles & Oh.”
**The first one, as I’m denying a second and third were ever made.
***As well as a few minimum wagers tasked with cleaning the Water Street Taco John’s bathroom in the late 1990s.

    But most 4 year-olds have not yet acquired this level of experience, and don’t really understand what’s happening. To a child (gentle souls as they are), they’ve just finished eating a whole bunch of something they probably really like, only to have an invisible hand reach down their throat and yank it all back out, sloshing it all over the place, including the front of their new dress from grandma. It’s like a scene from a Japanese horror movie only more confusing and you need to mop up afterwards.

OK, enough side-noting. My wife returned to the table with a wet rag and a dish bin, which I assume she conjured out of thin air or maybe got from some other restaurant because my own considerable efforts proved so fruitless.

Did I mention that our kid was still screaming? Totally still kind of screaming. So my wife starts cleaning up the puke pool and I go back to nudging dishes around the table when she says, “Maybe you could put him down.”

Oh snap, guess what! I’ve been holding a tiny human being under my right arm this entire time! So I put our (thoroughly amused) baby son back into his highchair, but he keeps trying to crawl out, leaving me only one arm to awkwardly pat the back of my daughter, who is screaming slightly less now that her mama is back.

“Try strapping him in,” my wife says, still cleaning up child spew. Hey! Look! the highchair has straps! So I strap the little guy down and take over rag duty, which means walking it to the men’s bathroom to rinse it out for a second go.

Finally, we get the puke cleaned off the table and the chairs and the floor, and we start to clean up our beautiful daughter who suddenly quotes one of her favorite books by saying, “This kitty doesn’t feel so fancy anymore.”

Aw, man. I know she was just regurgitating stuff we’ve read to her (and a small bowl of Mac & Cheese), but it melted my heart. My wife was too busy washing chunks off her own hands to have her heart melted. We got out to the car, put on a set of spare clothes, and moved on with our life.

I know my wife has a tough job, and I know she’s really good at it. But it’s easy to forget just how hard it is to be a mom until you see them cleaning up vomit in a public restaurant while taking care of two children and her (handsome) husband. So my hat goes off to you, yak-removers of the Chippewa Valley and beyond. You people are awesome.