Poo! うんち！

When you have a baby, all of a sudden poo takes on a much bigger role in your life than it used to. In the days following M Jr’s birth, her nappy filled with a black, tar-like substance, the technical term for which is meconium, and which contains a mixture of (and I quote) ‘intestinal epithelial cells, lanugo, mucus, amniotic fluid, bile and water’. This eventually settled down into something less sticky and with more of a green tinge to it, and while Mrs M and I both wondered aloud how M Jr’s digestive system contrived to turn milk green, according to a kind of colour swatch given to us at the hospital, white poo is actually a bad thing, and a sign that your baby could be suffering from a medical condition called tan-doh-heisa-shoh (胆道閉鎖症 / biliary atresia).

After this initial period of plentiful poo-ing, however, M Jr was soon exhibiting signs of the dreaded benpi (便秘 / constipation). Many more Japanese are cursed with this condition than the rest of us, and as a consequence, the relative ease and frequency of one’s bowel movements is considered a perfectly respectable topic for dinner party conversation. Some say the epidemic came about after meat and / or dairy products were introduced into the Asian diet, and others that after centuries of eating rice, the Japanese intestine has evolved to be slightly longer than average, and thus more easily blocked. When Mrs M – who is, as the saying goes, benpi-kei (便秘系 / a member of the constipation club) – first moved to London, like most of her fellow countrymen and women, she still ate sticky, white, low-in-fibre rice with every meal including breakfast. But despite experimenting with supposedly bowel-friendly brown rice, wholemeal bread, dried fruit, orange-flavoured fibre drinks and even linseed, it soon became clear that what we were dealing with was a full-blown genetic predisposition.

At just over a week old, and while she and Mrs M were still staying with the in-laws, M Jr went poo-free for over forty-eight hours. I had read online that breast milk contains an ingredient that naturally guards against constipation, and at the time, M Jr was drinking a mixture of breast milk and formula, so we immediately cut out the latter. With the temperature in the thirties, dehydration was another possible factor, and at least once a day we gave her a baby bottle of warm water. In accordance with an NHS Direct-style website I had found, we also massaged her stomach and moved her legs around as if she was jogging or riding a bicycle, but to no avail.

Then one evening I sat in front of the TV with M Jr on my lap, and in her usual fashion, she wriggled about and pulled an array of funny faces. She also farted a couple of times, and I soon became aware of an odd – although not necessarily offensive – smell. Upon investigating further, I was confronted with a veritable number twos tsunami, and before long, the entire family had gathered round to congratulate M Jr on her achievement. More to the point, from that day onwards, sitting on my lap had a kind of laxative effect on M Jr, so that every time I put her there, she would screw up her face until it turned red, wave her arms and legs like a beetle on its back, and endeavour to grant me the gift of poo.

It wasn’t long before she had clammed up again, and this time we were in for the long haul. After three defecation-free days, Mrs M took her to the maternity clinic, where I-sensei said that M Jr was too young to take any medicine or have an enema (rather than a rubber hose and warm water, My First Enema involves sticking a glycerine capsule up your baby’s backside, upon which the capsule dissolves and magically opens the floodgates). The only thing he could suggest instead was the Cotton Bud Method, which I can’t imagine anyone resorts to in the UK, but which is tried and tested over here. For this you dip a cotton bud in baby oil or vaseline, insert it to a depth of about a centimetre (and when I say insert it, I don’t mean into your baby’s ear), and gently move it around in a circular motion, supposedly to stimulate the evacuation response. Even this didn’t work, though, and on Day Six, Mrs M called A-san, who as well as being the mother of one of my students, does home visits as a qualified midwife.

By the time A-san turned up, it had been a full week since M Jr last needed her bottom wiped, and while we weren’t exactly panicking – I had read that a week between poos is nothing out of the ordinary for a newborn – it was disheartening to watch her gurning away of an evening, only to find that no solids were being emitted, just gases.

This time, on the second or third attempt, the Cotton Bud Method worked, and again, the result bore an uncanny resemblance to the contents of a jar of Patak’s. If someone is benpi-kei, one always assumes that their poo has congealed to a diamond-like hardness and would therefore be painful to pass, but this carrot-and-coriander-soup-like mixture looked as if it ought to come out of its own accord, or at least without the sufferer having to pull any funny faces.

And perhaps that was M Jr’s problem all along, in that she hadn’t yet worked out how to push, as it were, in the correct fashion. A few nights ago I was awoken by the sound of another Niagara Falls of faeces, which had burst forth at the exact moment Mrs M was changing M Jr’s nappy. Like me, Mrs M had assumed that it would be a couple more days before the next installment in this scatological saga, but after a few seconds of grunting like a pensioner with a prostate problem, M Jr let rip, and Mrs M almost ran out of baby wipes trying to stem the tide.

What the future holds is anyone’s guess, although I suspect that no matter how much fibre we force her to eat when she moves on to solid food, M Jr’s digestive fate is already sealed, and she is doomed to spend the rest of her life worrying about where the next poo is coming from. Still, at least she’ll have a hundred million fellow Japanese with whom to talk about it over dinner.

(If you fancy reading another poo-related blog post, please make your way to this page at More Things Japanese.)