I am about to disclose a dirty little secret. I have had time to ruminate on whether or not to share this with the world, and I am thinking that I cannot possibly be the only one out there who has been stressed to the core about the ways and means by which we teach our progeny the proper procedures to relieve themselves. Since my diaper-bag days are now a memory, I feel ready to share, and cast caution to the wind. After all, this is a hurdle for every human being, is it not? And as a mother, responsible for this task, I have had enough of the insecurities to last a lifetime, and would seek to liberate parents everywhere from same.
We have all heard the boasts from somewhere in the ranks about the child who was potty trained five minutes after they were born, and the various methods out there for getting the job done, and done right. Hmph. Well, goody for you. Then there are the rest of us.
My poor firstborn child – guinea pig to the last. Maybe I just up and had that kid too young, because between his age and my immaturity, what a pair we made! While introducing him to his only living set of Great-Grandparents, I begin to make conversations with Grandma about diapers. She is beholding the plastic tapes and “new” elastic legs, and insisting that there is nothing better than the good old cloth diapers and rubber pants. Wanting to make a good impression, I spout some foolishness about how, yes, these plastic menaces are ruining not only the baby’s bottoms, but destroying Mother Earth by failing to biodegrade in landfills. To my credit, I made a very good impression on Grandma. To my chagrin, she visits a few days later bearing gifts….six packages of cloth diapers and enough rubber pants for all of the above, pins for the packaging, and a nice, big, white, shiny diaper pail. Gee. Thanks……I think.
Dressie Bessie proved to be a patient victim of my attempts at learning to apply these ecologically correct items to the strategic areas successfully. Or so I hoped. No matter. They still leak. Oh, yes….they do. Do not tell me I did it wrong, because over the years that I stuck with my newly adopted (albeit contrived) conviction, I learned about 10 different ways to fold them, as many ways to pin them, with two, three and even one pin. I became familiar with every type of diaper cover known to man, from plastic, to rubber, to flannel, to wool (bad idea, by the way). I learned the intricacies of rinsing, and soaking, and washing, and bleaching (or not), of line drying, of machine drying, of lint filters, of cotton and polyester and the absorbency factor (or lack thereof). I learned about the life expectancy of the diaper, and the amount of diapers you can keep putting in the pail without having to fumigate the house when it is finally time to empty what is now a sewage bin. I learned how to kick myself in the butt for leaving one in the toilet and finding it in the middle of the night, when all I wanted to do was use the toilet and not play “rinsy-rinsy-rinsy” at 3:00 am. I learned what will get the smell off your hands, and how to erase all the training mother gave me about playing in the toilet. I learned how to pack extra clothes because they WILL leak. And if you are at church, it will not only leak fluids, but most likely solids on that fine day. I learned about the economics of it all, and I finally had a long talk with Ma Nature, and how she could talk so smart because she had all kinds of ways of dealing with this stuff, and diapers were not on HER list. After just over six years, I won the debate, and the diapers were retired to burp clothes and dust rags.
Now…..one would think this experience would have pushed me into the potty training camp early on, wanting to rid myself of this hassle, right? Well, it did! Why, my little guy would be the first in his play group at church to be found with a skinny, normal sized butt, I vowed. However, as per the course of life for most Mothers, the rubber of my quest failed to meet the road of reality. Like pregnancy and birth, there was just no rushing these things. But don’t get me wrong…we had training, all right. But just who was training who?
In my obsession to get the child to use the toilet, I first approached it from “The Book”. Scheduled times. Right before eating. Right after eating. Right before drinking. Right after drinking. Right before playing. Right after playing. Right before napping. Right after napping. Before we leave home. When we get home. Right before bed. Right when we wake up. (This, in case you missed it, meant the child spent most of his waking hours in the john.) Why, I had not had this much fun since training the dog!
Lesson learned? As for me, I became a woman obsessed. Potty, potty, potty….it was all about the potty. And Junior? Well, he learned that his mother had some psychotic thing about that porcelain chair with the scary hole of water in it, and learned to freeze up every time I removed his pants and plunked his tiny butt on that cold precipice.
The less he used the pot, the more obsessed I became. My social life dwindled. And why? Because no conversation could be completed before I had to run baby to the bathroom. And he learned that if he wanted my sole attention, all he had to do was say, “Potty!” and I would drop everything, and off I would run, just baby and me for some quality time in the nearest commode. Of course, he never did his business on the pot, so this resulted in some REAL quality time, changing the diaper (and of course, the whole outfit, because the damn cloth diapers leaked…). Wasn’t this fun??
No…not fun. Not fun at all. I have read all the books. They do not work. I am frustrated, now. It seems everyone else’s child has been using the toilet independently for at least a year now, and then there is MY kid. Oh, the shame of it all! And, I confess, it was not too long before I was heaping that shame upon him, too. I had big expectations, here, pal, and YOU are not picking up your end of the deal! Shame on you!!
Memo, gals….this is not a great idea. The poor kid! I look back and cringe. What was the tyke to think? Let’s see. “Every day from the day I was born, nature has taken its course. Mommy comes and cuddles me and changes me and makes me all clean while she croons about, ‘what a wittle stinky wabbit skin I’m in’, and we laugh and she tickles my tummy and powders my bottom. Then one day, she went crazy! She takes off my diaper and sets me on the ledge of a very, scary well. My butt is cold and exposed to heaven knows what down there. She has me under the arms, and is talking about poopie. I have no idea what she is thinking, but I know poopie is the stuff I have been leaving in the diaper, and why doesn’t she just go and get this morning’s contribution, which I can smell is still in the diaper pail?”
Poor child. Things go from bad and confusing to worse: “Mom has become the Evil Toilet Troll! Every time I get relaxed enough to let nature do its thing, Mom gets that look on her face, and I know she is about to interrupt my ‘movement’ and grab me up, pulling down my pants while running me to the toilet and slam-dunking my butt into the hole therein.”
The child, I do believe, vowed never to poop again. And so he did not. Not the first day. Nor the second. Nor the third, nor the fourth. By the fifth day of eating with no return, the child has a tummy ache. This was no isolated bad cookie. Nope. This was a colon full up to the cecum. So what does Mom do now? Oh, yeah….Intervention.
This is potty training’s day in court. This is the day of reckoning for teaching this child of mine what the toilet is for. And this time I seem to have the experts on my side. They suggest: An enema. (Was I the only woman who feared this more than childbirth? The very idea! And how is it I forgot that just now?)
Off to the drugstore, and I leave with the Pharmacists blessing and a Fleets Pediatric disposable enema.
I will spare you the details of the administration, but I will say that the mother who used to giggle and coo over the baby’s mess and clean up was in attendance. She remembered that little smiling baby, whose place had suddenly been taken by a little boy who was about to have the crap scared out of him, literally. As I placed his tearful form on the pot, the Toilet Troll slunk out the back door. To this day, I have never seen a human being hold an enema in for that long. That little guy struggled, and cried, and writhed and fought the pressures within, until we were both sobbing wrecks in front of the toilet. Shame on whom??
Well, let’s head for that happy ending, shall we? (I never like to do more than pass my regrets in the hall and move right along…) With Mommy back at the helm, and Nature and Fleets joining forces, the job ultimately got done, and I never looked back. The diapers were back on. The child took to standing in front of the piano tapping on the lowest keys to get the job done. I purposely ignored him while he did what he had to do, and gave him the same look you give your husband when he farts at the table, before asking if he wanted some help into clean pants. Then while we cleaned up we talked about supper, and toys and spiders and the new baby. No stress, no condemnation, just a little fact of life that we deal with.
It was not long before he made peace with his colon, and just moving things along was no longer a threat. I bought a cushioned toilet seat insert for him, so that he would not feel like the toilet was the gaping mouth of hell trying to suck his guts out, but rather a place where he could sit comfortably and read a book for bit.
And then, Grandma bought him brand new sheets for Christmas!! Wow! And thank you, Mom, for suggesting that he try and keep those sheets clean, because just a few weeks before his baby sister arrived, at the tender age of three-and-a-half, he came to the conclusion that not only did he not want to pee in his new sheets from Grandma, but the toilet was not such a bad place to eliminate Mr. Stinky.
Yep. That was it. It was all over. He never wet the bed after that, and never used another diaper. How cool was that? For all the time and stress and effort I had put into the “project”, it happened when I stopped trying to force the issue. Ain’t life like that, though?
The benefactors in all this? The other eight kids. Never again did I make such an issue out of the social graces of the toilet. Aesthetics grow, too, and in no time they will decide that this is not a good feeling. And as long as you have shown them the cleaner alternative, trust me, they will exercise that option!
And think of the benefit to you, too. No more “misses”. No more “accidents”. No more unexpected laundry. No more “jump and run because Junior has to go”. Forget that. My other kids would try that. I would simply pause my activity or conversation long enough to tell them, “If you have to go that bad, go in your pants. You’re wearing diaper. Otherwise wait until I am finished here and then I will help you. ” Coup de Gras….they do NOT want to hear that for long. And they train themselves! How much easier can it get?
Now that I have divulged my quick and dirty guide to potty training, I suppose you are wondering what ever became of the diaper debacle. Well, as I said, six years of diaper wringing and washing wore me out. There is now a landfill named in my honor in an undisclosed location, wherein lie some 16 years worth of disposable diapers – mute testimony to my endeavor. I have faithfully been changing diapers – continuously - for 20 years, and only recently retired when my youngest child gave it up for good. I have honorary stock in Kimberly Clark for single handedly keeping one branch of their operation in business. Once I was rid of the burden of The Diaper Bag, I felt a profound burden had been lifted. My chiropractor has adjusted that side of my body back to where it belongs, but to this day, I still cannot bring myself to carry a purse bigger than a fanny pack.
And what of my son? Had the toileting trauma maimed him for life? Did he grow up with “issues”? Somebody needs to call the Freud, because my parental blunder did not result in an anal retentive social misfit. Rather, I will be welcoming him and his new bride home from their honeymoon in Jamaica next week, and helping them settle into their first house.
So, my stressed out friend reading this, take my advice and RELAX! You are doing fine, and children, despite warnings to the contrary, are a very forgiving bunch, and your love will be more than enough to cover the debts left from any shortcomings while doing what is in us to do, to give our kids the best we’ve got.
