Zoe is sick with a stomach flu today, puking her little guts out. I set up a little couch cushion camp for her on the family room floor in front of the TV and she’s spent the day there watching Nickelodeon, sipping Sprite, and puking into a bowl.

(What is it with me and people puking around me this month?)

At one point Zoe was retching into the bowl I was holding and her hair dipped into the bowl and the watery goodness within. I tracked down a hair tie for her (and had a depressing flashback as it occurred to me that I didn’t need to look in my bathroom drawers for one because it’s been a good ten years since I wore my hair in a ponytail), and then I tied her wet, puke-dripping hair back and rubbed her back while she heaved.

And I reflected on how parenthood completely obliterates your barriers to other people’s bodily… excretions. Poopy diapers, drool, wet beds, vomit; it’s all part of having a kid. You can’t be a real, involved parent if you aren’t getting upclose and personal with the excretions. You learn to live with it, you learn to not let it gross you out. Hell, Zoe’s even pooped in my hand when she was an infant, and I just sat there holding a handful of warm shit for another minute or so until the rectal thermometer I had crammed up her butt had registered its reading.

Dating, romance, love, sex, whatever you want to call it, that’ll knock down your barriers too, but at least then you get something out of it. Sex is all about the exchange of bodily fluids (and some people mix the piss and blood and shit in with that, but that’s just fucking weird). As a general rule, sex is the one time in life when you actually want to go dabbling around in another person’s excretions.

Or at least the promise of sex. Because as I was holding Zoe and rubbing her back while she dry-heaved into the bowl, I had a flashback to a drunken evening I enjoyed somewhere around age 19 or 20, circa 1980-something. I was out with Rhonda from across the street, and Rhonda had had a bit too much to drink. I had a huge crush on Rhonda and wanted to get into her pants in a MAJOR way and so I held her hair away from her face and rubbed her back as she puked into the gutter and all over my brand new Kangaroo high tops. I have the age and experience now to know that all holding a girl’s hair while she’s puking will get you is puke on your shoes, but I had the best of bad intentions then and it seemed like the thing to do.

So I remembered that while I was holding Zoe and I noticed the similarities between parenthood and dating. But there’s one critical difference, at least for me: I love Beth and I married her and I’ve been with her for more than 10 years now — but Zoe’s the only girl I will ever let shit in my hand.

And no guy had better ever let me catch him holding Zoe’s head while she’s puking in a gutter.