The Great Potty War

Don't go head-to-head with a toddler. This is advice I frequently fail to remember. Like yesterday, when I spent the afternooon engaged in a protracted, ultimately unsuccessful campaign to convince Eliot to pee.

For an insentient organ, a two-year-old's bladder has a remarkable facility for demoralizing a grown woman. The child even slept for two hours in the midst of battle, woke dry, and managed to continue to hold back long into the evening. I called upon every weapon in my arsenal. Cookies, temporary tattoos, verses of "Darling Clementine" repeated ad nauseum, organic lollipops, juice/water cocktails, stickers, threats, a promise of a mall excursion to procure big-boy underpants. Even pulling up a stool alongside the potty so my son could nurse failed to elicit even one squirt of urine. This kid's determination rivals that of Tibetan hunger strikers and Earth Firsters u-locked to giant redwoods. How does he manage to keep in all of his day's accumulated beverages for ELEVEN HOURS?

As for me, I kept plunging ever deeper into my well of patience and creativity. Until about 8:00pm, when I could dredge up nothing but sludge and dead crayfish. The kid kept returning to the potty -- this in itself was incredible -- and just sitting there. Dry. I have to assume the myopic attention his mommy is paying his bodily functions is too delicious to resist. I sidled up next to him on the floor, entertained him endlessly, and offered him copious amounts of sugar. Occasionally, I stared with longing out the living room windows at the spring sun, the impatiens wininking pinkly from the garden, the soft brown path into the woods undulating its call to my hiking boots. But I tore my gaze away and settled in for the long wait.

I am nothing if not an agent in my own undoing. I understand how parties to a conflict become more deeply entrenched in their positions the longer the face-off lasts, no matter how irrational and ultimately self-destructive that entrenchment. Yet there I sat, sore-assed and growling, on the hardwood floor while my son hummed and sucked juice boxes and held gleefully onto his excrement. Did I win by keeping Eliot out of the sun? Did anyone? He wet a diaper just before bed. Today, his tush is cusioned once again and we are ambulatory. I need to re-think my strategy.

So, what's the urgency here? Wouldn't it make more sense just to let this whole potty process unfold in its own time, to let Eliot have a vote in his own development? Sure, I like to believe my son will simply learn what he needs to know through osmosis. But I also know some skills require a parent's unwavering decision and consistent follow-through. Eliot would still be sleeping in our bed, biting us at his leisure, and regularly unpacking the contents of the refrigerator if we, his frazzled but ultimately better-resourced parents, had not directed a change in behavior.

Let me add that this kid is ready. He has gone in his potty enough to show us he can. He understands when he is doing it, and he can even sometimes let us know before it happens. But you know what else? I'm ready. The loosey-goosey approach to potty learning does not take into account a kid whose laundry list of food sensitivities inspires bowel movements of epic proportion and monstrous consistency. I love this child, everything from his flirty eye-cutting to his unstoppable compulsion to scale my back every time I squat down to remove a wad of lint from the rug. But I don't have to love rinsing diapers whose contents resemble a masticated carnival hot dog. With an orange julius mixed in.