OCD Chronicles: The Beat-"Save It For Later"

You have to understand that music is a constant companion in our home. Sometimes it’s played in solitude through the earbuds of an Ipod. Sometimes that Ipod is patched through car speakers or through a docking station in the kitchen.
Sometimes it’s merely a song sung from memory and sometimes that memory becomes clouded with a juvenile urge to add inappropriate lyrics.
The kids tend to like these versions, often more than the original.
And there are those songs in which they’ve never heard the original and I can’t wait until they do. There’s some deviant feeling inside of me that wants to witness the lightbulb go off as they recognize the song they’re hearing was completely dismantled by their father and rebuilt with new meaning.
That song currently is “Save It For Later” by the English Beat.
I Just Can’t Stop It, the first album by the English Beat, was always on my radar growing up. It wasn’t until college when I first heard it. I was drawn to the album’s artwork-it’s New Wave pink looked fetching, but I never invested the money to actually buy it. I’d been burned in the past by buying an album based on artwork alone and it wasn’t a good feeling.
A few years later, the English Beat shortened their name to The Beat and they released Special Beat Service. A co-worker at the local pool had a copy on cassette and it became synonymous with the summer. “Save It For Later” was an obvious hit, and it also received some airplay on the video channel.
More recently, my daughter has successfully completed potty training-albeit with a few missteps-but for the most part, she’s done a splendid job.
She has yet to actually poop her pants, but her success rate has a lot to do with the fact that the moment she feels like she has to poop, she announces it and can spend quite a long time “making stuff brown.”
She also confuses going poop with going pee, but since we’ve incorporated the color coding system into her bathroom habits, she’s starting to catch on.
What does all of this talk about bowel movements have to do with the English Beat?
Well, on some occasions, our daughter is so obsessed about not having an accident that we actually have to convince her that she has enough willpower that she can wait the five minutes or so until we get home. Understand that we’re not jeapordizing her bladder or anything; there have been times in which she’s gone to the bathroom and then announced “I have to go to the bathroom!” a mere ten-minutes later.
When we tell her to “Hold it. We’re almost home!” she resorts to more dramatic tactics.
“Daddy, I have to go poop!”
You see, “making brown” is a more urgent situation and she’s smart enough to know that when she says the word “poop” that Mommy and Daddy move a bit quicker.
We’ve gotten smart to this, and one day I implemented a diversionary tactic to counter hers.
I began singing the English Beat’s “Save It For Later,” but with different lyrics.

“Save it for later
We know you’ve got to poop”

She thought that was pretty funny.

The boy thought that it was pretty funny too.

It worked, but it came at a price. The boy remembered the song and began singing it randomly. It caused me to laugh, which he took notice of and then proceeded to sing it at the most inappropriate times.
Then his mother caught wind and tried in vain to put a stop to it.
But you can’t stop it-it’s lyrical GOLD I tell you!
Say it with me, and feel free to add your own twist (and crawl) to it. Our more recent version puts a sense of ownership to it:

“Save it for later
You know you’ve got to poop”


The song-regardless of whether it’s the great original version or our family’s toilet version-is a lot better than any of the turds that General Public gave us after the English Beat split up.