US Edition
The bottom line: do you scrunch or fold?
“Daddy!”
The wail is as piercing as it is unwanted. Like clockwork, the 4-year-old pays a visit to the loo halfway through Saturday lunch. Just as I am enjoying the full, soul-enhancing joy of my second glass of Gruner Veltliner, he demands an audience for the denouement of man’s most primordial act. Freud would have a field day.
By the time I’ve finally trudged to see his performance, he has finished. “Let me help you,” I say.
“No. I can wipe my bottom,” he says firmly, as he tells me not to interfere
This self-reliance is a new emergency measure. It was instituted last week when it emerged that the teachers at nursery do not answer to his regal demands for his bottom to be wiped. We only realised this at bath time, when a horror of medieval proportions was discovered upon the removal of his trousers.
But as I watch him undertake his newly learnt life skill, I become baffled.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I am scrunching,” he answers as he - with some force - tears of a strip of loo roll and tries to squeeze it into as small a ball of paper as possible, about the size of an origami dormouse. He then proceeds to wipe. Unsurprisingly, with mixed results.
“You should fold the paper like this,” I try to show him.
But he’s having none of it and quite forcefully tells me scrunching is key. “Mummy told me to scrunch,” he insists.
We return to the lunch table (yes, we washed our hands). “Did you tell him he needs to scrunch?” I ask my wife.
She looks surprised at this question. “Yes. Why, what’s wrong with that?”
“It’s a method used only by madmen,” I insist. And replicate his tiny bolus of paper with my napkin.
My wife concedes that he may have taken her advice one step too far, but stands her ground.
I then appeal to the other children to back me up, aware that I don’t actually know the inner details of their toilet habits. For all I know, they too practice the strange customs that surely are tolerated only in Chipping Sudbury and North Korea.
I then discover that my wife is not a lone prophetess in the wiping wilderness. She is one side of a debate. The briefest of Google searches shows that there are thousands of message boards and online forums dedicated to whether you are a scruncher of a folder.
How is it possible that humans can disagree on something so fundamental?
Parenting is all about lurching from one disaster to another, but for it to work, you have to lurch jointly. I am slightly dazed that we may have stumbled on our first major disagreement - apart from the odd petty disagreement over the 8-year-old wearing leggings.
The three eldest children confirm that they are, indeed, folders.
My wife looks crestfallen.
I am triumphant, but also troubled: “How have I been married to you for 15 years and not known this?”
“There has to be some mystery in our marriage,” she says.
Dad of Four is a weekly column by feature writer Harry Wallop. To read more from the series, try one of the below:
– My daughter knows about my affair