THE DAY I POOED MYSELF ON PURPOSE

In my first post, Why I Pooed My Pants, I stated that I didn’t deliberately go in my pants.  For the most part this is quite true, but there was one occasion when I did poo myself on purpose, although, as you will see, I was not soiling a pair of clean pants.

                    

I was 8 when this happened and it took place at the home of my maternal grandmother, the only grandparent I ever knew.  She lived in a Victorian terraced house, which has since been converted.  There was no bathroom and only an outside toilet.  The fairly small back garden had no grass, few flowers and mostly consisted of paths leading to the toilet and the outside gate, and areas of soil and rock.  I was playing alone in this garden when I got the familiar feeling in my underwear that told me that my pants were messy.  I ignored it and carried on playing.  Even if I had wanted to go back inside the house where my mother and grandmother were talking I would not now do so, as this would result in my accident being quickly discovered.

I was able to play happily on my own
for hours - which was a good thing
when I was messy and smelly!

Fortunately, I could always entertain myself, and did not need toys or other children or adults to have a fun time playing.  I had a good imagination and don’t ever remember being bored during the whole of my childhood, I could always find something to do.  I loved the long summer holiday from school and did not need my parents to spend large amounts of time or money to keep me entertained.

While I was playing I felt the need to poo again.  I was only a few metres from the toilet, but did not think for one second of using it.  I was already in a crouching position when I felt it, but this time I didn’t withhold, as I still often did when I was away from home.  Instead I pushed and, for the first time in my life, I pooed in my pants on purpose.  It was a good thing there was no-one in the next garden looking over, or they would have seen a strange sight, an 8 year old boy crouching down and deliberately messing himself. For the first time ever I actually felt the poo leaving my bottom and entering my underwear.  I must have known that I was being very naughty doing this, but I did it anyway.  When I had finished I resumed playing in my freshly soiled pants.

It must have been a few days since I had used the toilet because shortly afterwards I felt that I had to go again.  I crouched down and added to the waste in my underwear.  In the same way that you may say that a baby has filled his nappy, some parents refer to a child who has soiled himself as having ‘filled his pants’.  It was not a phrase that was usually used in my house, but it would have been particularly apt on this day.  Indeed, I was treating my underwear like it was a nappy.  It was a good job that I did not also need a wee that afternoon or I probably would have just done that in my pants as well and created an even more horrendous mess.

Not surprisingly, when I was called into the house my mother was quickly alerted to what I had done.  She was used to discovering that her son had pooed himself, but even she was shocked by how badly I stank.  When she looked inside my pants and found out how much I'd pooed in them and how messy I was she was furious with me.

With no bathroom, no hot running water and no spare pants, changing me at my grandmother’s home would have been nearly impossible.  Instead I had to endure an humiliating half-hour bus ride home in my soiled pants, absolutely reeking of poo.  Looking back, I’m surprised the driver allowed such a stinky child on his bus.  We sat near the front, which meant that everyone who got on smelt me, and my mother reprimanded me throughout the journey.

Aged 8, I deliberately pooed my pants
for the first time in my life, behaving
as if I was wearing a nappy.

Cleaning me up that day was going to be no easy task and my mother decided that I would need a bath.  ‘How do you expect me to get these clean?’ she asked me, holding up my pants in front of me.  We were not a rich family and supermarkets did not sell cheap underwear in those days, so throwing out my pants everytime I soiled them was not an option.  Seeing my underwear caked in my poo really brought home to me just what I had done.  I sat in the tub feeling ashamed of myself.

I know I behaved badly that day, and I thoroughly deserved the scolding I received.  Why did I do it?  One mother on Mumsnet whose 9 year old son always withheld his poo at school said that if he came home in dirty underwear he would sometimes just do the rest in his pants.  He knew he would be moaned at for soiling himself anyway, so it was a case of ‘in for the penny, in for the pound.’  Maybe that was the way I was thinking that afternoon.  Or perhaps I disliked the thought of using the toilet when I already had a pooey bottom, and of pulling down my messy pants and pulling them back up again.  But I suspect that the real reason was that it just seemed the easy thing to do at the time.  Once again, I did not think of the consequences of my actions.

It has not been easy to write about this, as it is one of my most painful memories of my childhood, certainly the worst that was a result of my soiling habit.  The only good thing that came out of it was that I was never tempted to do it again.

STAYING IN MESSY PANTS

One of the things which the parents of children with encopresis find most difficult to understand is how their offspring seem quite happy to keep wearing soiled underwear after they have had an accident, and carry on activities as if nothing had happened.  Typical comments include, ‘He’d sit in his own waste for hours if I let him,’ and ‘How can she carry on playing when her knickers are full of poo?’  Like many other children with soiling problems, I never told anyone when I’d had an accident and would sit, walk around or play in messy pants until someone, usually my mother, smelled what I had done, checked my pants and changed me.

Having messy pants didn't stop me
from playing.  I was quite content
to sit in my own poo.

You may think that this is a perfectly disgusting thing to do, carrying on playing with a pooey bottom and dirty pants, but at the time it seemed perfectly natural.  Some children can neither smell nor feel when they have had an accident and therefore do not know that they need changing.  This was not the case with me as, although I couldn’t smell anything, I could feel my waste in my pants and knew that I had soiled myself.

When I was very young I liked to think that if I ignored my pooey pants then they would go away.  As I got older I learnt from experience that, sadly, this was not the case, but, for a number of reasons, I still kept quiet about my accidents until they were discovered by others.

One of the reasons for this was that I nearly always got told off when my mother discovered that I’d had another accident.  Sometimes she would also shout at me or threaten to put me back in nappies.  Like the threat to get my teacher to tell everyone in my class that I messed my pants (see How I Stopped Soiling My Pants), I don’t think she would have ever done this, but I didn’t know this at the time and worried about the prospect of being sent to school wearing a nappy.  I was in no hurry to be scolded and tried to put off the event for as long as possible by keeping quiet about the state of my underwear.

Even if she knows that
she is messy and smelly,

and that she needs changing,
a child may be too frightened
or embarrassed to tell
anyone that she has
pooed her pants. (c)

Another factor was the feelings of embarrassment and shame I felt about what I had done, feelings which got worse as I got older and was still incapable of keeping my pants clean all the time.  There was also the feeling of having let my parents down by soiling myself when I knew that I should have used the toilet. 

There was just no way I was going to go up to my mother and admit that I’d pooed myself yet again, and I certainly wasn’t going to tell an adult I barely knew, such as a friend’s parent on a playdate, that I’d had an accident in my pants and needed changing.  If, as a parent, you’ve felt embarrassed when your child has wet him or herself in a shop, then take that embarrassment and multiply it a few times to get how I felt.

Finally, staying in messy pants was a way of coping with what I increasingly thought of as my babyish habit.  By ignoring my accidents and carrying on with what I was doing, I could pretend that my pants were not dirty and I had not soiled myself again.  For that relatively short period I could be a normal child and enjoy playing or reading or whatever I was doing, and put to the back of my mind the fact that I was smelly and messy and had behaved more like a toddler than an older child.

Unless I was really stinky,
 I would play with other
 children when I knew that
my pants were dirty.

My actions varied if I soiled while playing with other children.  If it felt like a bad accident and I guessed that I was really stinky then I tried not to get too close to them.  On the other hand if it felt like I only had a relatively small amount of poo in my pants then I would carry on playing with them as normal.  Sometimes they would comment on the smell, but usually they didn’t.  If they did say anything they usually accused me of having ‘trumped’ (broken wind), rather than dirtying my pants.

As for physical considerations, I won’t say that I liked the feeling of messy pants, but over time I got used to it and did not find wearing them particularly uncomfortable.

Another activity which encopretic children commonly engage in, to the exasperation of their parents, is to hide their soiled underwear, often under the bed or at the back of a cupboard.  This is something I never did, but I can certainly understand why children do this.  If they are likely to be punished for soiling then by hiding their pants they may be seeking to avoid, or merely delay, their punishment.  

Even if their parents are very understanding about their soiling problems and would not punish them, the child is still likely to feel embarrassed about the situation like I did and feel unable to report their accidents.  Eventually they are given away by the stench produced by the stash of hidden underwear or the fact that the child is running out of clean pants.  But as Dimity Telfer says in her blog The Magic Within Us about why she hid her soiled underwear, 'When your choices are to be yelled at now or yelled at tomorrow, I chose the second option.  I hid them because I wanted to live for an hour (even half an hour) as if it never happened."

SO MANY CHILDREN

Aged 14, I no longer soiled
myself, but the feelings of
shame from my childhood
habit remained.

As I said in my previous post Why I Pooed My Pants, when I was a child I thought I was the only school aged boy in the world who dirtied his pants. This belief stayed with me for a long time after I stopped soiling as I never heard of any other child who did this and it was something that was never mentioned on TV.

This changed when I happened by chance to see a letter in the problem pages of a magazine which began, ‘my son would be a very nice boy but for one thing. He can't be made not to dirty his pants.’ I couldn't believe it, reading the whole of the letter I could have been reading about myself! The advice given was terrible, suggesting they make the boy wear the same soiled pants day after day, but suddenly I realised I might not have been alone.

I started looking at problem pages more regularly, seeing if there were other children who had similar problems and soon came across a 6 year old girl who had had a bout of illness and ‘ever since then she's messed her knickers’ and a 5 year old boy who hated pooing in the toilet and ‘often soils his pants.’ These were all fairly young children, but then I read a letter from a concerned Mum whose 11 year old daughter regularly soiled herself and ‘when I ask her why she does it she says she doesn't know.’  Like me she had some days when she didn't have accidents and others when she did full bowel movements in her pants. I imagine most readers would condemn her as a lazy child who needed a good talking to and a firm hand, but I felt sorry for her, knowing exactly what she was going through. It was almost like I had found a kindred spirit for my younger self.

Of course, I still wasn't proud of what I had done in my pants as a child or what I'd put my parents through, but at last I started to feel that I wasn't a freak, especially when I discovered that the condition had a name: encopresis.  It was an important first step to confronting my past.

Having come across these examples of children who also soiled their pants like I had, I still felt that it was something which very, very few children suffered from, as I had never come across any parents personally who said that their child had this problem or been in the company of an older child who had an accident.

Soiling can be a devastating problem for
any child and their parents. (c)

And then the internet came along and I discovered just how widespread the problem was. So many children having soiling problems, some of them much worse than me, having accidents every day, sometimes several times a day. Children who were still having problems into their teens or even older, and who were having accidents at school or round the houses of their friends or at family gatherings. I felt so sorry for them, it must be so dreadful to stink of poo around your family or peers, and for their parents who were in some cases at the point of despair, unable to understand why their child couldn't just use the toilet like everybody else.

While I will probably never lose the guilt about how many times my mother had to clean me up and the heartache I put her through, I no longer feel disgusted about soiling myself. It may have started through laziness but it was never deliberate and eventually I was able to overcome it. I only hope that other children can do the same.

For a blog about soiling from the point of view of a parent, why not visit Extended Potty Training, written by a mother whose son was still wetting and soiling his pants when he was five, in spite of more than two years of trying to potty train him, and was eventually diagnosed with encopresis.

WHY I POOED MY PANTS

This is a slightly amended version of the post on my first blog, in which I wrote in detail for the first time about my childhood soiling.

Aged 3 and still in nappies.

My toilet troubles began at an early age.  Potty training was a slow process for me and I didn't come out of nappies until I was three and a half years old.  But though I was ‘dry’, I was still not completely ‘clean’ and often messed my pants.  This occurred between the ages of 3 and 11, although it was worst up to the age of 7.  It happened because I often avoided going to the toilet when I felt the need to poo.  Instead I would clench my bottom and breath inwards and wait for the need to pass.  If I felt the urge again I would repeat the process. I freely admit that withholding began as an act of laziness on my part, not wanting to stop playing in order to attend to my bodily needs, but it was never an act of naughtiness.  I didn't deliberately go in my pants, but I would soil myself sometime later because of my failure to use the toilet earlier. I never felt myself actually pooing, I just became aware later that my pants were messy.

It was a long time before I made the connection between avoiding using the toilet and having dirty pants, because the need to poo seemed to go away when I ignored it, making me believe that I had made my poo disappear.  This was different to the feeling of a full bladder which, if I did not go to the toilet straight away, would gradually get stronger until eventually I wet my pants, something which I never did after my toddler years.  Because of the time lapse between avoiding using the bathroom and soiling myself, I really don’t think I made the connection between the two events for a quite a while. 

A typical withholding position for me
when I needed a poo and decided
not to go to the toilet. (c)

For a long time I had wanted to stop soiling myself but didn’t know how to do it. Once I had made the connection I then made more of an effort to start using the toilet when I knew I needed to poo. It wasn’t easy as avoiding going to the toilet had become quite a habit, and there were times when I still did it. However, before my 8th birthday I was mostly clean, other than on trips as I disliked using public toilets for bowel movements.  My very last accident occurred on holiday at the age of 11.  By that stage I had suffered the embarrassment of being messy and smelly, and gone through the humiliation of being changed by my mother, more times than I would wish to remember.  I had put my parents through a lot of worry and heartache, not to mention some horrible laundry and clean-ups, and I had been shouted at and told off on numerous occasions.  But at least the nightmare was over and I could forget about this awful chapter of my childhood.

I thought at the time, and for a long time afterwards, that I was the only child in the world who dirtied his pants.  But I was later to discover that this was not the case...

To read about soiling from the point of view of a girl sufferer, take a look at this blog post from Dimity Telfer: The Story of My Life