Poo... when will I not care about you?

I don't want to say this, but I will.

I am sick of caring about poo. Especially poo that is not my own. And not belonging to the dog or the other tall person in the house.

I don't want to mention names, to protect the innocent, who may read this sometime around his 21st birthday and come hunting me with a blunt weapon. So I won't. I'll just lament my attachment to his poo.

There's the general 'how healthy is my child?' parental interest in poo. I can accept that. It's just that autism brings along with it a truly unnatural interest in the frequency, consistency, colour and control of poo.

There's poo vocab, I have, that I do not want to have. I don't want to know what mega-colon is, but I do, and so does the shortest human in our house (at least my understanding is intellectual, poor old short one knows it from the inside out, literally).

I'm bored with asking 'do you need to poo?' 'did you poo today?', 'what did his poo look like?', 'was it big poo/too much poo/tiny poo/yucky poo/poo like a grown up/mr whippy poo/poo in the bath/poo in the undies/the dreaded poo under the fingernails/spontaneous poo/stinky poo/blah blah blah poo...

If we track back from the poo itself, we get to general gut health. What is he metabolising, and what is he shunting straight through? What is flat out toxic? What can he handle?

And of course, that takes us to diet... gluten free, dairy free, soy free, organic, low salicylate, no preservatives, no colours, no sugar, raw food, super food, all freaking McDonalds... I feel like throwing up just thinking about it.

It's one of the oddities of this game. Hyper-focus on individual parts of your child and its life... knowing all of them need to be working in sync to have a healthy child, but not really being able to assess what's going wobbly or why.

You read stories of people who have spent years researching and working with biomed doctors, or people who have hit on seriously helpful strategies or who stick hard to diet and supplement regimes that definitely work for them. I know lots of people who have seen huge changes with diet and biomedical interventions. I see lots of physically healthier kids, with bodies and brains working better together.

It seems exhausting, and it is exhausting... at least to me, but it also seems incredibly worthwhile.

The one thing that stick in my craw (or is it my nose?) is the prospect of even more time analysing poo.

I know I have to know, but I don't want to know.

And for those of you who are as sick of poo as me... here's some info about poo. Because poo is us, whether we like it or not.

What poo should look like (a document your doctor will show you if you ask nicely)