Potty training is a big subject in our house these days.
Not because Mike or I have decided it’s time — Jake’s just 25 months old, after all. But because Jake has shown an interest in it. At least, he’s shown an interest in: getting our hopes up, testing my theory that all I have to do to raise him is follow his cues, and making his very pregnant mommy sit down on the floor to check the diaper he says needs changing many, many, many more times a day than a very, very pregnant mommy should have to do. (It’s not the getting down on the floor that’s the problem, of course. It’s the getting up off the floor again — which requires the help of the tub, a sink, the washing machine, and any other solid, immovable object I can use to hoist myself vertical-ward.)
What I find most interesting — and even of possible interest to those of you who have absolutely no interest in the subject of potty training — is that it’s turning out to be the greatest lesson in surrendering control Jake’s given me yet.
Potty training does not, for example, involve utter and crushing-depression-inducing exhaustion like the sleep thing. It does not wrap me up in a deluge of hormones so great that often the only choice I had was curling up on the green armchair in a puddle of my own failure as a mother, the way breastfeeding did. And the whole toddler tantrum experience — I sure like to turn the incidents into stories that become more amusing to me as I write about them, but Mike reminded me the other day just how trying they are when he said, “It’s hard for me to read about Jake’s tantrums. I just want to let them go once they’re over. You need to process them.”
Yep, processing is what I do, and the potty training process, while still a challenge, is proving to be a bit of an adventure as well. I have no preconceived notions of how it will go — possibly because Jake’s is the first diaper I ever changed and so perhaps I was, until a couple of years ago, completely uninitiated in the scatological functions of young children. It is not too exhausting (other than the hauling myself up off the floor part) because it generally does not take place while I am trying to sleep. And hormones, well, they’re all about the next baby at this point.
Instead, I can remind myself to take a step back, stop wondering why two kids in Jake’s class are potty trained but he’s not (okay, I do attribute it to them having older brothers), and let Jake lead me through the changes that will take place in his life no matter how I might try to bend them to my will. Which, in this case, is not even so much as an impulse.
A few episodes to illustrate:
Bad Mommy, Bad Mommy, um … Not So Upset Any Longer
Yesterday morning was one of the good ones, where Jake slept through the night and all the way until 7:30. The sun was up. I was already awake. I gave him a big hug and a lot of compliments about sleeping in his own bed all night, as he assured me that his bed was “cozy” and had “pillow” and “Bubbes” (his blankets, of which we have acquired five, in part to ensure that should he awaken in the middle of the night one will be close at hand so he doesn’t have to start yelling for one of us to fill the void).
He decided he wanted to be changed on the changing table, which is a disconcerting bit of reversion, both because I would like to give it over to the soon-to-arrive infant and because I can’t quite remember what the weight limit on it is. Thirty-five pounds? Or Jake’s thirty? We may soon find out.
But we were both in good moods, so I acquiesced, and we played on the changing table. Jake decided to lie down, even though he’s about six inches too long to fit and must contort himself in ways not entirely amenable to diaper changing. And I tried to rush things along, as I felt the considerable weight of my uterus (“You look like you have a basketball under there!” said a mom at Jake’s school the other day in what she meant — and, sadly, I took — as a compliment) pressing down on my just-awakened bowels.
Finding my own bathroom needs growing in urgency by the second, I reached for a diaper.
“No! NO DIAPER!” Jake announced, both to me and to his father sleeping in the next room. And — who knows? — maybe to the sleeping neighbors as well.
“Okay,” I said reasonably. Mike told me that the previous night as he was putting Jake to bed he had allowed Jake to walk about naked for 10 minutes before suggesting that he put on a diaper less he poop in his sheets. (Way to get him right into a diaper when it was time.) He said Jake seemed to enjoy his airing-out, so I figured I’d give him a second dose of it.
“Come to the bathroom with me,” I suggested, starting to put him on the floor with his privates unburdened by Pampers.
“NOOOO!” he wailed in that I’m-two-years-old-and-therefore-everything-you-do-is-so-wrong-it-induces-tears way of his. He grabbed at his pajama bottoms.
“Okay,” I said, a bit less sunnily. I pulled them up over his diaperless bottom and tried once again to put him on the floor.
“NOOOOOOOOOO!” he screamed.
At this point, I had run out of ideas of what I was doing wrong, and the clock had run out on my standing there trying to figure it out. I dropped him on the floor and yelled over my shoulder, “You can come with me to the bathroom, but I can NOT stay here while you are on the changing table!”
His wails followed me into the bathroom. They continued, not abating in intensity, as I sat there hardening my heart to yet another morning tantrum.
By the time I could make it back to Jake’s room, Mike was already standing in the doorway, framing one of the saddest things I have ever seen in my life: my son with his pajama bottoms pulled halfway down standing in a puddle of his own urine.
Bad Mommy, Bad Mommy …
Only Jake forgave me. And although my first instinct was to conclude that I have set potty training back even further than my overly enthusiastic response to the Poop in the Tub Incident, I didn’t let myself go there.
Jake was, after all, letting me know that a little trauma is part of the process of potty training and that I was not, as I so often think in matters of his growth, the one responsible for it.
When “Poop on Potty” Is Really Code for “I’d Don’t Feel Like Going to Sleep”
Things took another unexpected and rather fascinating turn last night.
Jake had elected me to “Mommy read books” at bedtime. He had been a little joy going through the rituals without complaint: brush teeth, change diaper, put on Football Player jammies, choose a couple of books, and “get cozy” in my bed.
Plainly, he was tired. We read one book and he decided he didn’t want to read the other. “Do you want to go to sleep?” I asked.
I never tire of the thrill when he says, “Yes, sleep,” all on his own.
So he nestled into the comforter for a few minutes as I settled back against a pillow with my Entertainment Weekly. (I’ve considered canceling my subscription but have decided I should do nothing so rash when the mindless days of infant-care are just around the corner.)
Within a few minutes, he sat up and declared, “Go potty.”
“You want to go potty?” I asked, trying to stay calm and all oh-that’s-totally-normal despite the rising excitement I felt. Best not to scare my boy off the idea when he was about to, just, you know, go on the potty.
We walked together to the bathroom.
“Do you want to take off your diaper and jammies?” I asked, knowing that it is all about making your own choices when you are 25 months old.
“Mmm, no,” Jake declared thoughtfully. “Change diaper.”
I checked his diaper. No poop.
“Your diaper’s dry, honey,” I informed him. “Do you not want to go potty?”
“Nope,” Jake said. “Go downstairs.”
“Um, no,” I said. “Back to bed.”
He came without complaint. And, after reading half of a book, insisted that he was ready to go to sleep again.
Once again, he nestled in, I opened my magazine, and before I’d finished reading the review of Dollhouse (a latecomer to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I am inexplicably way excited about this new Joss Whedon show, even though I didn’t much enjoy nor watch more than a few episodes of either Angel or Firefly), he said, “Go potty.”
I was a bit more skeptical this time around, but I figured if he asks it is up to me to reward him. Off we trotted to the bathroom.
“Do you want to take off your jammie bottoms?” I asked.
“Nooo,” he said with a teasing grin. This was not looking good.
“Do you want me to hold you on the big potty with your jammies on?”
This suggestion and demonstration were met with some distress.
“Go downstairs,” he demanded instead.
“No. Absolutely not,” I said. And repeated when he asked to read another book. I said some worse things when he tried to climb out of bed, it now being 9:30 and way past his bedtime.
“Diaper wet,” he explained rather tearfully as I hauled him back into bed.
And I said what first came to mind after being tricked into doing something more interesting than trying to fall asleep twice already. I said, “That’s okay. You can pee in your diaper at night time.”
I’m still not sure he will make the distinction. I may have convinced him that I prefer he pee in his diaper for all time. But I do know he fell asleep about two minutes later.
And so, once again, I find myself missing the angst that seems to accompany every other major parenting move I make.
The Joys of Peer Pressure
Potty training has also introduced me to perhaps the very best reason for having my child in preschool. Peer pressure.
As I mentioned, two of his friends go on the potty. Which, conveniently enough, is located directly across the hall from Jake’s classroom. This means that, at the end of the day, when we are clearing out his cubby, we have a front row seat if one of his potty-trained friends sits on the toilet.
It has become a point of great admiration on my part. “Remember how Mattie sat on the potty?” I ask him several times a day. “Remember how Loren sits on the potty?”
Jake seems to find these reminders of interest, though I’m not certain he is making the connection between my admiration for his friends and my wishes for him.
Still, it gives me hope. Both that he will be spurred to action one day himself — that, when I come to pick him up and casually suggest he try the potty at school he will say, “Sure,” and plop himself down like a pro — and, more to the point, that I have learned to admire kids for being more advanced than he rather than, let’s be honest here, resenting them just a little bit. I can’t help it. I had a very competitive upbringing.
The Joys of Letting Go Easily
Which brings me to the lesson I’ve learned. Sometimes you get a gift and it turns out to be easy to let go and not even want to be in control.
Hmm. The kernel of wisdom I thought I had hatched when I started writing this post now seems to have popped into a fluffy piece of not-very-filling popcorn. So I’m not in control. So what else is new?
But knowing you’re not in control — surrendering to that fact — is, it turns out, just one step toward actually surrendering the concept of control entirely. Of course, you never really do. Not in every situation. Because life is a practice, just like a yoga practice is a practice. You get it sometimes. Sometimes you don’t.
But rarely do you get it with such clarity as potty training has provided for me thus far. I mean, it’s a big issue, a big piece of parenting, getting your child out of diapers. Much ink has been spilled over it, many methods for accomplishing it suggested to me. And how many of us still harbor potty-related horrors from our misty past? (Mine is of my mother breaking down and crying to my father that she couldn’t take it any more as he left for work and I sat on the toilet — sad and lonely and feeling responsible even though I didn’t quite know why.)
If it’s a big deal — whatever “it” is — we tend to want to take control of it. After all, if the outcome is important, doesn’t that mean we should take over and ensure it is the outcome we want?
The thing about potty training, though, is that I have been able to take a step back and not only tell myself but really believe that … guess what. Jake will get it one day. Really. I can guarantee that he will not be wearing diapers for the rest of his life. So the outcome is assured, no matter how big and important it is.
Bigger, even, than letting go of the sense that I alone control the outcome of Jake’s potty training is the fact that it’s so easy for me to do so in this realm of events that usually aren’t easy for me at all. How many times have I cried and then laughed and then written about sleep training, feeding my child, tantrums, bath time, school, Mommy guilt? I swear, I haven’t cried about my potty training choices since the unfortunate — and therefore still much recalled — Poop in the Tub Incident.
Which, perhaps, is the greatest revelation at all. Now that I have, for whatever reason, found myself truly prepared to let go — enjoying the decisions Jake makes all on his own — I just don’t feel responsible or guilty or any regret for any decision I make in response. I don’t come to the table with an outcome in mind or a set of rules for How I Will Go About Potty Training. Instead, I sit back and watch Jake’s performance. I let him lead me down the path only he can set for himself.
And I think to myself that maybe, just maybe, I will be able to translate this feeling to other parts of my life as well. Let go, enjoy the ride, and find that there’s just no reason for regrets.
Enjoying the Ride of Surya Namaskar B (Sun Salute B)
For those of us smitten by vinyasa, or flow, there is a joy to being on a ride of yoga movement. Certainly, I face the challenge of finding each new sun salute to be a new experience, despite having gone through the motions hundreds (thousands? eegads!) of times before. And yet, once I melt into the movement — coordinated by deep, lovely breaths — I truly do let it go.
Surya Namaskar B Is the most challenging of the sun salutes because it incorporates two likewise challenging poses: utkatasana (awkward, or, as I prefer to call it, chair pose) and Virabhadrasana I (Warrior I). Which, of course, makes it ideal for working through the concepts I’m writing about here. You’ve got to work with something challenging to truly experience letting go.
So try this one as a warm-up or as an entire practice. See if you can repeat it at least three and up to five times, knowing that each time will be a greater challenge to your physical body but a concurrently greater opportunity for your mind to let go of any ideas you might have of the outcome.
Strive for the beauty in truly surrendering to a truly beautiful sequence. On and off your mat.