So, if none of this bothers me now, none of the thousands of boogers wiped on my pant leg or blowout diapers in my lap or sour spit up down my shirt or vomit in my eye (true story), then am I even still human? When I had children and lost my \u201cyuck face,\u201d did I lose my humanity too? Daniel Kelly, a professor of philosophy at Purdue University and author of the book, \u201cYuck!: The Nature and Moral Significance of Disgust<\/a>,\u201d would argue no. I\u2019m simply evolving.<\/p>\n Despite the fact that most of us have, as Kelly puts it, \u201ca base layer of core disgusting things, and a lot of them don\u2019t seem like they\u2019re learned,\u201d we can still unlearn a great deal. Medical students do it all the time. You don\u2019t see a seasoned professional retching over the sight of a severed thumb because by the time he gets to the real deal, he\u2019s seen a million. He\u2019s dissected cadavers and stitched up trauma patients until one bloody limb looks like any other. Just another day in the office. According to Kelly, \u201cpeople don\u2019t exactly know how this works, but acute exposure to something can have the effect of decreasing our feeling of disgust toward it.\u201d Apparently, my kids have immunized me from the gag-reflex.<\/p>\n Disgust is a natural reaction, and evolutionarily necessary to keep us away from disease and tainted food. According to Kelly, it\u2019s also why we make the \u201cyuck face,\u201d the scrunched-up \u201ceww\u201d face. It\u2019s the danger sign to keep others away and safe from harm. I\u2019ve stopped making that face three thousand dirty diapers ago (because I\u2019m a genius and evolving at a greater rate than my spouse). I don\u2019t want to keep people away from that. I want to lure them in, bring them into the mess and stink of it so they too might experience the joys of babyhood and, perhaps, if I\u2019m lucky, change the next diaper.<\/p>\n You know that quick taste of bile you get in your throat when somebody vomits and you know that if you hang around any longer, you\u2019ll be next? I lost that one too on another ill-fated trip home from the zoo when my three-year-old puked up all the contents of her stomach, including zoo hot dog, zoo applesauce, and zoo cookies. It was all over herself, her car seat, and, eventually, me. After that, I could watch the vomit-fest from the pie-eating competition in \u201cStand by Me\u201d without so much as a pause. If, as Kelly puts it<\/a>, \u201c[d]isgust is a psychological component to this arsenal of protective weaponry,\u201d then I\u2019ve had a psychotic break. My armor has all the chinks in it. It\u2019s the second-hand weaponry you\u2019d pick up at Goodwill.<\/p>\n You know what? I\u2019m okay with it. My lack of a \u201cyuck face\u201d has carried me through mountains of poo and snot and bloody noses and refluxed curdled milk. It has kept the family going despite itself. I consider it a progressive step forward to be able to deal with the not-so-niceties and move on, like a seasoned professional. Now that I\u2019ve lost my \u201cyuck face,\u201d I can enjoy it all the more on others. You go ahead and fight down that wave of nausea. I\u2019ll just carry this extra gooey booger to the trashcan and be on my way.<\/p>\n *This article originally appeared in Parent.co<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n My son gently placed a booger in my hand at the zoo the other day, and I thanked him. On the way to the trash can, he analyzed the size, shape, and viscosity. I nodded in agreement. We were examining his ecosystem. When did this happen? When did I cross over to the other side of gross? How did I lose the \u201cick\u201d factor? I\u2019ve never been squeamish. Cuts don\u2019t bother me. I\u2019ve never fainted …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3688,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[86,26],"tags":[97,321,46,74,209,55,136,63,54,84,100,58,320],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/surprised-1327192_1280.jpg?fit=1280%2C853&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8ca5p-Pg","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3178"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3689,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3178\/revisions\/3689"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mom-gene.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mom-gene.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/07\/motherhoos.jpg?resize=617%2C432\")
<\/p>\nWhat grosses you out? What doesn’t?<\/strong><\/h2>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"