Note: This funny story of potty training was offered by our friend, Meghan, a friend we met through our friends Beth and Eric. She and husband Adam kindly taught the rest of us fumbling fools a thing or two about beautiful ballroom dancing at Beth and Eric's rehearsal dinner. As I've followed her on Facebook I've come to appreciate her sense of humor and zaniness. This story is such an honest and real portrayal of the anguish parents go through (and the lengths we go to!) to end the waiting. Thanks Meghan for sharing this fun and ultimately triumphant waiting story.
My daughter has been five years old for a year-and-a-half. My husband, Adam and I have set up two fake birthday parties for Lily, lied to her numerous times, and have had to frantically communicate these lies to strangers. The reason for all of this deceit? Potty training.
There are many books about how to potty train your child. I could have written a book about what not to do. Yes, Lily’s stubbornness and fear of the unknown assisted the hell that was our experience. But I take full responsibility for our bumpy journey because of my own mistakes. I pushed when I should have listened, was too enthusiastic when I should have played it cool and bribed when I never should have. (In my defense, I have always said there is a fine line between bribery and reward.)
It all started when Lily was two years old. Since she has always been very independent and smart, I thought, naïvely, that potty training would be a breeze. She is, of course, exceptional in every way! In fact, she peed and pooped in the potty chair on her first try. See? Exceptional.
Here comes my Mistake #1: I completely overreacted. There were tight hugs and kisses, many loud cries of “Yay, Lily!” that included the “Yay Lily” dance around the living room and ecstatic phone calls to all the grandparents. That, however, was the end of the celebrating. I should have known something was amiss, since Adam and I were the only ones doing the celebrating. Lily stood back, taking in all the excitement. That was the moment she decided that she didn’t want the pressure of potty training.
I got the hint when we tried again after her first success. She refused to take her diaper off or even sit on the potty chair. Okay, that’s fine, I thought. I’ll do what the books say: wait for the cues that she’s ready.
I waited for those cues patiently for six months. Lily turned three and adjusted well to preschool which, luckily, takes kids in diapers. (Interesting first day of school recollection: Lily insisted on taking her favorite stuffed cat and dog, which she’d named “Pee Pee” and “Ca Ca.” You just can’t make this stuff up.)
Shortly after she started preschool (again following advice from the books), I decided to try “Count Down to No More Diapers.” After counting down the days for a week, we got Lily’s blessing to give all her diapers away and put her in big girl underwear.
Mistake #2: Then we went to the Mall of America. Of all my mistakes, this might be the most unexplainable. Over the next five hours, I asked every ten minutes if she had to go. An increasingly uncomfortable Lily said, “NO.” We came home from the mall and here comes my Mistake #3, my biggest one: I sat her on the toilet and got angry that she didn’t go. I knew she had to pee, of course, and was I worried about her. But mostly I thought, “Why won’t she just go?!”
I sat there with her, getting more and more upset and frustrated. My intense desire to be in charge, and not backtrack on the little potty training progress we’d made so far, distorted my vision of our scared little girl. After 20 minutes of both of us fighting and crying, I caved. She peed in the emergency diaper I had kept and didn’t speak to me for a full day.
I gave us a couple of months to recover, and then mentioned it again. By this time I’d learned many lessons about my girl. Apply no pressure and give only understated praise—basically I had to pretend I didn’t care. One day I said in an oh-so-casual voice, “So, Lil, how do you feel about going pee on the toilet?” Mistake #4: Saying “on” instead of “in.”
For six months, when Lily needed to pee, she took off her underwear and put on a diaper. Then she placed the child-seat on the toilet, sat on it, did her business into the diaper, took it off and threw it away, and put her underwear back on. (For poop I still needed to help.) This was her routine everywhere she went—stores, restaurants, even school. I don’t think I ever got used to the quizzical stares I got from the parents of Lily’s friends when I dropped her off for a play date. We even tried to transition her away from this by duct-taping a diaper across the toilet seat to “catch the pee”, but Lily was not fooled. I gave all my potty training books to friends who had babies, since I knew I was in uncharted territory.
Mistake #5: Every time we went to Target, I’d peruse the Groovy Girl aisle looking for things to bribe my daughter with. She’d lose interest in every single thing once she learned that there were strings attached. Out of desperation one time, sitting in the bathroom, I said to Lily, “I’ll buy you anything you want. Just name it. Do you want a pony? Every girl wants a pony. I’ll go get you a pony right now if you just pee in the toilet.” I’m not proud of myself for saying this, but I am happy that my daughter isn’t as materialistic as I apparently am. Plus, Lily reminded me that we didn’t have room for a pony in our house.
By this time my barely two-year-old son, Ian, had been totally potty trained. The irony that I needed to buy the size five diapers but not the size three ones was not lost on me. Lily was Ian’s biggest pee pee cheerleader. She’d patiently sit on the bathroom floor singing songs and reading books to him. She wanted to be the one to give him his “Smarsh-smello” (marshmallow) when he was done. After success, she even reminded him to “Shake, shake, shake your penis!”
The spring before her fourth birthday, Lily informed us that she’d pee in the toilet when she turned four. Adam and I were thrilled by this comment since we had finally learned that this has to happen on her time. But here’s where we lose the Best Parents of the Year award, not that we were ever in the running. We decided to move her August birthday up two months. The rationalization that she needed transition time before she went back to school covered up my impatience. Her birthday party was in June and all our friends and family were in on it.
We were worried when she didn’t want to pee in the toilet the day of the fake party. I knew that if this didn’t work, my bag of parenting tricks was empty. But the next day, Lily banished me and Ian to the living room so she could have privacy. My two-year-old sensed what a big deal this moment was. We waited, barely daring to move or breathe. Then we heard the strangely sweet noise of pee falling into the toilet. Ian and I did a silent “Yay Lily” dance and were careful to stop before she came back into the room. Through my hidden happy tears, I gave Lily a hug and a calm “Good job, honey.”
I called Adam and all the grandparents, but quietly and upstairs. At the time, I didn’t know I’d be calling them all back, brokenhearted, to tell them we were not out of the woods. Lily announced that she was not going to poop in the toilet until she turned five. She won, we lost. Defeated, I told her if she wanted to poop in a diaper, she had to do the whole process all by herself. I was done.
For the next six months that’s what she did. Every day Lily would choose a diaper from the pile next to the toilet. Then she’d put it on, sit on the toilet (she was so big now that she didn’t need the child seat). She’d go, wipe herself, put the soiled diaper in a plastic bag, and throw it away. I think she was happy to have me out of her bathroom experiences.
Meanwhile, despite our best efforts of parenting Lily through well-placed lies, she still refused to pee in the toilet at school. I don’t know why she chose this battle. Mistake #6: I told the very patient teachers not to put a diaper on her. I thought I needed to be consistent. Plus I figured that when she needed to go badly enough, she’d eventually try the school toilet. This was certainly not the first time—and probably won’t be the last—that I underestimated my daughter’s stubbornness.
Less than a week into this wretched experiment, I picked Lily up when they were all playing outside. The teachers hadn’t yet discovered that she was hiding under the slide, choking back tears and sitting in her wet pants because she just couldn’t hold it any longer. Feeling like the worst mother in the world, and clinging to my miserable daughter, I told the relieved teachers to put her in diapers.
She never did pee in the school toilet. Lily was the only child in her class still in diapers, but she refused to bow to the peer pressure. I knew Lily’s strong personal convictions would be a comfort to us when she gets to high school, but I was honestly worried that she’d still be in diapers.
In February we were looking ahead to Kindergarten. Adam and I went on school tours with principals and met with teachers. I’ll bet we were the only parents silently worrying that their child would want to put on a diaper before sitting on the school toilet. Our fears were put to rest when Lily peed in the toilet during a school tour. To Lily, this was no big deal. But Adam and I looked at each other, breathed a huge sigh of relief, and decided this was the school for Lily.
By the time she was four-and-a-half, Lily was getting sick of her diapers too, but she didn’t want to go back on her decision to wait until she was five. Even at four years old, Lily’s pride was more important than her physical comfort. So Adam and I decided to take another drastic step, even more extreme than the last one. We told Lily it was her birthday, even though it was March. We had her August birthday party while there was snow on the ground. Luckily, a four-year-old’s sense of time hasn’t yet fully developed. Otherwise Lily would have noticed that she had been four years old for less than six months.
Lily tried to fulfill her promise, but she was still fearful. To help her, we fed Lily prunes at every meal and I brushed up on my infant tummy massage. Excitement and anxiety in the air rose with each passing day. Finally, three days after her “birthday”, Lily walked out of the bathroom with a quietly proud expression on her face. I knew this time was different. We had sweet (but not sweet-smelling) success. Lily looked up at me, relief shining through her big, green eyes, and asked if Ian can give her a smarsh-smello. She was out of diapers… and it only took close to three years.
Thanks to our deceit, however, the work was far from done. Now we needed to keep it from her that she was still only four years old. Since she knew her birthday was August 19th, I couldn’t let her hear that it was actually March. Her preschool couldn’t do calendar time that month. I’m pretty sure they thought I was crazy.
I relaxed when April finally came. Then I realized that we would have to eventually keep August from her too, otherwise she would wonder why she wasn’t having another birthday. Lies and secrecy—those are the cornerstones of every parent/child relationship, right?
There were really only a few close calls. Both her dentist and doctor saw in her file that her August 19th birthday was coming up. I had to interrupt them, distract her, and then explain the situation to the puzzled health care professional later in private. When we went to Lily’s kindergarten screening, the tester asked her how old she was. Of course, she replied, “Five.” From behind Lily’s back, I had to wave my arms in the air at the confused tester and mouth the words, “She thinks she’s five! Don’t tell her she’s not!” Her age was the only question Lily got wrong on the test.
Whenever I told anyone the story, I always got the same response, “I’ve never heard of anything like that!” I’d respond with a tired, “I know.”
Now we are coming up on Lily’s sixth birthday. She has blossomed into a confident, brave, mature little girl, ready for first grade. The horrible potty training memories have faded for both of us. The other day, my girl with the super human memory asked me “Mom, how come my last birthday I was in school, but this birthday it’s summer?”
Busted.
I was done lying. I sat Lily down and said, “I have to tell you something, and I hope you aren’t too upset with me and Daddy. We moved up your birthday a few months because you didn’t want to poop in the toilet until you were five.”
Lily coyly smiled and asked, “Why?”
“I don’t know, baby. Maybe you were scared.”
She giggled and said, “What was I so scared of?”
