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“Lots of people would trade you.”

That’s one response I got to a recent Facebook post about my four-month-old having three diaper “blowouts” in one day. It was a lighthearted post, meant to make friends laugh. And many of them did. Everyone else was amused by my poop-covered misfortune. Most of them were parents and had waded through their share of onesies and pants that were ruined by what a diaper could not contain.

But that one comment, which differed so greatly in tone from the rest, really stuck with me. I didn’t engage. I felt no need to enter into a commenting war with someone I don’t even know very well. But deep down I wanted to defend what I wrote, because surely a Facebook post about my child’s poopy diapers does not imply that a) I want to trade places b) I am ungrateful for my beautiful (albeit sometimes stinky) children or c) I am unaware or unsympathetic to the plight of those who aren’t able to have children. Because I know all too well that plenty of people want babies who can’t have them and would give anything to change their own “pooplosions.”

After thinking about it, though, I was glad that I didn’t engage. Because due to things completely unrelated to the poop, that day had been a particularly hard one. Like, the kind that leaves you lying in a heap on the verge of tears after the kids are in bed. These kinds of days don’t happen often, but when they do, they’re doozies. Over the two and a half years that I’ve been a mother, I have grown to learn that all parents have these days. For a long time, I felt very isolated and thought that I was a horrible human being. But it turns out that all human beings who are raising tiny human beings have their limits, and those limits can be pushed and prodded by tantrum-y toddlers and fussy babies.

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