21. Learn Waste Management

Everyone is allowed 2-3 Paris clichés and loving Victor Hugo is mine.

This is the shittiest time of my life, literally. My daughter is still potty training, and that means accidents and cleaning a little plastic potty multiple times a day. My son is still in diapers, and when it's time to change them, I refer to this as "Wrestlemania" because he does everything in his power to stop us, including kicking, flipping over, and grabbing at anything lethal within reach.

Since my day-to-day life is so full of shit, I turn to literature for inspiration. Sometimes I'm embarrassed to say that Victor Hugo is my favorite French writer. It's like saying your favorite American writer is Mark Twain — it's a bit basic, no?

But Les Misérables is my all-time favorite novel. After another day spent among piss and shit, I decided to re-read the sewer section. Everyone complains about this section as a meandering digression, but have you even read Hugo? All of his books are meandering digressions. That's what makes them timeless: he had ADHD before it was cool to have ADHD.

Hugo writes, "The sincerity of uncleanness pleases us, and is a relief to the soul." In case you missed it, by "uncleanness," he's referring to shit. When I'm cleaning shit day in and out and then (after washing my hands) scrolling through Instagram and seeing people's idyllic, beautiful photos of Paris, I feel like I'm living on a different planet. But I'm glad Hugo reminds me that at its core, Paris is shitty (again, literally).

It's kind of a well-known historical tidbit that centuries ago, wealthy Parisians would toss human waste out the window and into the street — because they didn't have anywhere else to empty their chamber pots. The resulting stench was so putrid and foul that the city was known around the globe as being hella stinky.

I like to think about this when I'm strolling along the Seine or on the bus going through an expensive neighborhood like Saint-Germain-des-Prés — that it all used to reek of shit. It does, as Hugo wrote, bring relief to my soul knowing that I'm not that disconnected from the city, even though this part of my life/motherhood seems endless. My metaphorical modern sewer system is on its way, and hopefully, my days of cleaning piss and shit will come to an end. And when they do, maybe Paris will be beautiful to me again.