In August 2022, my mom died. It hasn’t been easy being a mother to young children (ages 6 and 3) through this period of grieving my own mother, and while their memories of my mom are so beautiful, sometimes it was also difficult to answer their questions about what happened to Grandma Gale.
My daughter, age 3, took to drawing lots of pictures of Grandma Gale. Here are some of her pieces.
This is a picture of me holding my mom’s hand in the hospital. A picture of Grandma Gale before she died.
My son really took to books about death, grief, and life. These were very helpful in answering his 6-year-old questions about what happened.
If you’ve lost a loved one, I am so sorry for your loss. Perhaps these books will help you navigate this loss with your young children.
In The Memory Tree by Britta Teckentrup, Fox dies and his animal friends gather around and share happy memories they had with fox as they process their sadness that he is gone. A tree grows in the place where fox laid down to rest and it shelters the animals in their future lives, just as we carry memories of our loved ones forward in our lives.
What Happens When a Loved One Dies by Dr. Jillian Roberts was my son’s most requested book in the months after my mom passed away. He’s very science-minded and likes non-fiction books that explain things. This book was a gentle and accurate way to explain what happens when someone dies. It answers questions like “What does death mean?”, “Do people die too?”, “What is a soul?” “Why do I feel sad?”, “What can I do to feel better?” and words like funeral, heaven, afterlife. Even though it includes words like heaven, it is explained in a broader context – that are are many different ideas and beliefs about what happens after someone dies. Some people believe this, some people believe that. It was a good explanatory read to my son who was encountering a lot of these concepts for the first time.
Tomie de Paola is one of my favourite kids authors. We are loving his autobiographical series (26 Fairmount Avenue) as family read-alouds and Nana Upstairs & Nana Downstairs is in a similar style. It tells the story of Tommy’s love of his great-grandmother and how he feels when she dies. It’s a beautiful story and my kids love it.
The Invisible Web by Patrice Karst is not so much about death but about the interconnectedness of people both past and present. It is a lovely story about how we are still connected to our loved ones even once they’ve passed away.
All the World by Liz Garton Scanlon is similar to The Invisible Web – it is a poem about the interconnectedness of the world and how we come together in community as part of living. My kids and I had conversations about all the people that came to Grandma Gale’s funeral and how she knew them all and how her life connected us to all of them.
Someday by Alison McGhee is more for me than for my kids. I don’t actually think it was written for children, but for adults. It brought me a lot of comfort in losing my mom, reminding me that it is part of the circle of life, and that losing my mom is what is naturally supposed to happen (and not the other way around, a mother losing her daughter). It mentions different kinds of grief and loss through the stages of life – like a daughter going off to college, and a daughter losing her mother when she herself has a child. It’s a real tear-jerker for me.
Hopefully these books are helpful to you if you find yourself in a similar phase of life. If you have any you’d like to recommend to me, please reach out to me!
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I think what I miss is those moments when we are all working together towards a common goal. I miss the hush that falls right before a bride walks down the aisle. I miss the feeling of unity as perfect strangers come together to celebrate the love of their mutual friends. I miss the pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony, the feeling of celebration as parents breathe a collective sigh of relief that they got their kids through their school years. I miss getting dressed up and going to a really fancy restaurant – eating together with others, ordering off the same menu, and navigating all the tiny forks together as one.
I am slowly and tentatively emerging from my pandemic bubble. Omicron is still up in the air, but as Scarlett O’Hara said, “I can’t think about that right now. If I do, I’ll go crazy. I’ll think about that tomorrow.” As I emerge, I find myself grieving a bit for life pre-Covid and the sense of community we’ve all lost.
By community, I don’t mean crowds. I do not miss the busyness of people. I do not miss Christmas shopping line-ups or even Christmas parties with hours of small talk. I don’t miss the atmosphere of everyone having their own agendas and doing their own things side by side.
I also find myself fortunate to have rich friendships and deep connections with others: my kids, my husband, my neighbours, and – with the help of technology (Marco Polo and FaceTime) my friends and family back home. When I speak about grieving a loss of community, I don’t mean intimate relationships. It’s been hard to put my finger on – what do I mean by loss of community?
I think what I miss is those moments when we are all working together towards a common goal. I miss the hush that falls right before a bride walks down the aisle. I miss the feeling of unity as perfect strangers come together to celebrate the love of their mutual friends. I miss the pomp and circumstance of a graduation ceremony, the feeling of celebration as parents breathe a collective sigh of relief that they got their kids through their school years. I miss getting dressed up and going to a really fancy restaurant – eating together with others, ordering off the same menu, and navigating all the tiny forks together as one.
Graduates in Wuhan, China in June 2021, with COVID under control in China
In chatting with my husband about this, he identifies a similar feeling in loss of community through almost two years of remote work. My husband works for a large company with offices all over the world. Before the pandemic, when everyone was working in-person in their respective offices, there was a fair amount of “tribalism” between sites – different sites would oppose one another in coming up with a solution to a common problem. Yet, after almost two years of working remote, that tribalism has completely disintegrated – which is a good thing. People are collaborating across worksites more harmoniously. However, at the same time, he also feels they have lost a team-wide excitement for working on a problem together and a motivation for achieving a common goal together. As humans we are built to be in community and, at times, in healthy competition with one another. We come up with ingenious solutions to problems when we are supported and challenged by our peers in community.
I miss the rituals of community and the feeling of unity that comes when people participate in a ritual that transcends social structures. Anthropology super-nerds, like myself, will recognize this as what anthropologist Victor Turner called communitas. “During the period of the ritual, rank and status are forgotten as members think of themselves as a community. This helps cement unity among community members.”
Our wedding ceremony in 2014
In the weeks before Covid shut everything down, we were busy with our weekly nature walk group, our Mothers of Preschoolers Group (MOPS), and having friends over for dinner. And while none of that seems as inherently ritualistic as say, a wedding, there were elements of ritual there. Take for example, my moms group (MOPS) meetings.
Moms Group Meetings
Every second friday, I would drop my kids off at childcare and go into a theatre space next door to enjoy a hot potluck breakfast with 100 other moms seated at tables. We’d listen to a speaker and eat a hot meal with no kids asking us questions or pulling at our clothes. We didn’t have to cut anyone else’s food, or hop up from the table to fetch someone water or grab a cloth to wipe up a spill.
Stay with me while I get into some nerdy anthropology theory over this. One anthropologist, Arnold Van Gennep wrote about rites of passage, defined as “a ceremony or event marking an important stage in someone’s life, especially birth, puberty, marriage, and death” (Oxford Dictionary). Van Gennep argued that all rites of passage had three phases: separation, the liminal phase, and aggregation. One familiar rite of passage is a graduation ceremony, so I’ll use it as an example. In the separation phase, the ritual-participant is separated from their role in the social structure – they sit apart from their families in special gowns. In the liminal phase, ritual-participants are neither here nor there – they are betwixt and between and form a new kind of community with the other ritual-participants. The students sit together as one and wait for their turn to cross the stage and receive their diploma. In the aggregation phase, students are reunited with their families, the tassel has been pulled to the other side of their hats, they have a diploma in-hand, and they are reunited in the social structure with a new status – that of a graduate.
Graduating from my Master’s in Social Cultural Anthropology in 2011
Graduating in 2011
Victor Turner took this further in his book The Ritual Process. He expands the idea of these phases to other rituals, not just rites of passage. Rituals are “a set of fixed actions and sometimes words performed regularly, especially as part of a ceremony” (Cambridge Dictionary). My moms group meetings were rituals, not rites of passage – but I see the same phases present. First, in the separation phase, we dropped our kids off at childcare. Then, in the liminal phase, we sat together, undefined by the number of children with us or our visible parenting style. We ate together and we learned together listening to a speaker brought in especially for us. Turner writes, “What is interesting about liminal phenomena for our present purposes is the blend they offer of low lines and sacredness, of homogeneity and comradeship. We are presented, in such rites, with a “moment in and out of time,” and in and out of secular social structure, which reveals, however fleetingly, some recognition (in symbol, if not always in language) of a generalized social bond that has ceased to be and has simultaneously yet to be fragmented into a multiplicity of structural ties.”(p. 96) In the liminal phase of our weekly ritual, we were women eating together in communitas – we were not only “Mom of multiples”, “Working mom”, “Stepmom”, “SAHM” or any of the other mom-statuses we ascribe to ourselves. In the third phase, we were reunited with our social status of “mother” as we picked up our children from childcare and continued about our days in this role, inspired through our participation in the ritual.
Victor Turner continued, “There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure, while, in rites de passage [or rituals], men are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas. What is certain is that no society can function adequately without this dialectic.” (p. 129.) Through this ritual, we moms were released from the expectations and constant responsibility of motherhood to eat together in communitas, and then return to pick up the kids and our responsibilities, re-inspired and refueled for the days ahead. Since the pandemic began and many of these sorts of community “rituals” ceased, I’ve noticed how much I miss them.
Recently my husband attended a summit for his work – his first in-person work meetings since the pandemic began. He found the meetings to be incredibly productive. Participants were “released” from the expectations and daily structure of responding to online messages in order to work together on a specific problem in communitas. They left the summit with a clear direction and inspired by a sense of teamwork and accomplishment. When people say they want to continue to work remote even after the pandemic, I don’t know if they realize what they’ll be missing without communitas.
Reverence
As we’ve moved away from so many in-person rituals in favour of two-dimensional online interactions over zoom and through status updates, comments and hashtags, I also feel a loss of reverence. While this pandemic would have been impossible without all the technologies available to us to interact with one another online, I have yet to experience a moment of reverence through them. I’ve missed the awe and wonder, the anticipation, and the deep respect for the moment, the place, or the person that allows a hush to fall over a crowd. The awkward silence at the beginning of a zoom call is not reverence.
While being at home with two young children through this pandemic was life-giving and purposeful and in many ways it saved my sanity – potty-training, whining, and night terrors are also not reverent.
In an attempt to find what was missing, I decided to attend a nearby Presbyterian church. Previously, this church would not have been my style. I used to feel deeply uncomfortable with liturgy. I’ve always felt awkward with call-and-response prayers and with communion. And I treated hymns with derision. I preferred “cool” churches – with contemporary music, dark concert-like venues, coffee, and denim. And yet, in a moment when the entire congregation recited the Lord’s Prayer together, I felt both communitas and reverence for the first time in years.
Our Father, who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come, thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this our daily bread
And forgive us our debts,
as we forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever.
Amen
To me, there was something so moving about a whole group of people reciting the same thing together. It reminded me of going to a Taylor Swift concert with my brother when she stopped singing and fifty thousand fans filled in the gap with a resounding chorus of her lyrics. Except instead of a song that has been around for a few years, we were reciting a prayer that has been prayed by millions of people over thousands of years and translated into hundreds of languages. A prayer people have recited together in community, and in the stillness of the night kneeling alone by their beds. I can’t think of any other collection of words that has connected humanity across time and space as the Lord’s Prayer. Can you?
Right Brain Left Brain
I don’t think reverence has to be religious. A great many secular moments from graduations to Taylor Swift concerts to the carving of the Christmas roast can be reverent too.
Recently, I read My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. The author was a neuroscientist who had a stroke and remembered the experience of having her left brain completely destroyed by the hemorrhage. Several years later, when she had regained her ability to speak and write, she wrote about the experience of living in her right brain – a place where she felt no judgment or self-criticism – she just felt at peace and one with the world. Dr. Bolte Taylor describes the differences between the right brain and the left brain as this – imagine you hike to the top of a mountain. You get to the peak powered solely by your own body and you are surrounded by a beautiful view of a cascade of mountains and a crystal clear sky. Your right brain is in awe of the beauty that surrounds you. Your right brain perceives the majesty and makes you feel like you are one with the universe, whilst at the same time a tiny speck on the enormous planet. Meanwhile, your left brain is assessing whether or not you need to put on a sweater, if you’re hungry, what you should eat, and which angle to take the selfie.
It made me think, maybe reverence, is just something that exercises our right brain, just as talking exercises our left brain. Maybe it’s something our brains need. Maybe there is one true religion or God. Or maybe humanity has sought out God and the supernatural because it’s what our right-brain is wired to do – to perceive the incredible and feel at one with the whole.
However you experience communitas and reverence, whether in a sacred or secular way, I think it’s a fundamental part of the human experience.
I know I’m in a rut because of the pandemic. I could go out and socialize, but I’m happy in my house and it’s so much energy to get back out there again. But I know I need to. I know my kids need to be in community again. My husband is still enjoying remote work, but he knows he needs to get back to the office so he can feel part of something important again, rather than just another cog in the machine.
Community gives us a sense of purpose, belonging and significance. And the love, beauty, and harmony that comes with feeling part of a community is fuel for our right-brains. I have lived much of this pandemic in my left brain – analyzing COVID stats, deciding whether I should wear a mask in this particular case or not, questioning whether I have a tickle in my throat or COVID. I am ready to re-engage with my right-brain. What about you?
Last week we celebrated my daughter’s second birthday. As a pandemic toddler – she really doesn’t have any friends, so we decided to celebrate with two of our vaccinated neighbors who have been surrogate grandmas to her during all these months of Shelter-in-Place. One of these neighbors has a dog who lounges out on his front lawn most mornings and we stop in to see him whenever he is outside. He came to her party dressed in his fancy Hawaiian shirt and V fed him a plateful of milkbone cookies.
Now that the two year old milestone has come and gone, I’m now turning my eyes to that big, scary, horrible, messy parenting task of potty training. She’s very ready, and has already used the potty a few times. It’s more me holding her back, not committing the time and the energy to the training. And so, I’m gearing up and giving myself a pep talk to get it done.
And it needs to be a pretty big pep talk.
With my son, potty training was awful. I decided to wait until after V was born to start because I knew that many kids have regressions after the birth of a new sibling. DK was 2 years, 9 months when V was born, so I figured – what’s a few more months? It would be a good time to train him with a newborn around, right? Newborns sleep so much of the day and we are going to be home so much – potty training will just fit right in there.
Boy was that ever a dumb plan.
Fast forward to 6 weeks after V was born, I decided out of the blue to begin potty training. Remember, I was sleep deprived, I had never potty trained anyone before, or really seen any child be potty trained, and I had half-skimmed “Oh Crap Potty Training”. I had not taught DK how to pull down or pull up his own pants, I had not taught him how to rip toilet paper (and he may have been the first two-year old in the history of toddlers who never tried to unravel the toilet paper), he never played around the house naked, and he was scared of the sound of the toilet flushing, It went as well as you would expect it to go considering these limitations.
I started off trying to follow the advice of the Oh Crap Potty Training lady – just do completely naked potty training, watch your child very closely and try to catch him right before he pees and get him on the potty. Well, with a newborn who also needed near constant attention, that translated to – clean a bunch of pee off the floor and feel like a failure.
Around day 3 of naked potty training, DK had to have a bowel movement. He was crying and pleading with me to give him a diaper and I refused, all in the name of a greater good. He was agitated and running around, clearly uncomfortable. I tried to get him to sit down on the potty but he refused. I put V down safely in her crib, where she began to scream, and I tried to hold DK down on the potty. That did not work. He ran away and as he ran, he pooped – a stream of $h!t spraying on the floor behind him. Everyone was screaming, including me, and then DK ran back around through the mess and tracked poop all over the house at a gallop.
To be honest, I’m not sure how I got us out of that mess. I somehow cleaned everything up on my hands and knees, tears trickling down my face to a soundtrack of V screaming in the background and DK dancing around me with a contented gut.
It was a serious low point for me in parenting and I gave up potty training for several months after that.
I felt like I committed a human rights violation – forcing him to poop in a way he didn’t feel comfortable. There are a lot of reasons why I don’t want to go to jail – but among the top reasons is having to use the toilet in an open room with other people watching. Being forced to soil oneself is one of the most degrading things that could happen to a person. Wasn’t I asking him to do the same thing, but in reverse? He was comfortable in diapers, and here I was demanding he do it differently, against his will.
He wasn’t ready, I wasn’t ready. The whole experience for me was so stressful, I had to have my mom come out 6 months later and help me. She had a bit more experience with potty training a toddler (my brother and I are, after all, potty-trained) and she also was able to be a bit calmer and matter-of-fact about it. Whereas for me, I felt like I had earned a great big F on my parenting report card in the subject “Potty Training”. It was hard to stay relaxed when I felt so much pressure to get it done and get it done right.
When my mom came to visit, we threw out the guidance of the Oh Crap Potty Training lady who said to not use rewards and to not use training underwear. We let DK wear training undies and when he sat still on the potty for 30 seconds on the phone timer, he got a chocolate chip. Over the span of a couple of weeks he earned two chocolate chips for peeing on the potty, three for pooping in the potty – and much later I upped the ante and gave him four chocolate chips if he would poop in the big toilet (so that I didn’t have to clean the potty every time).
The trend these days in my parenting circles is to focus on intrinsic rewards – not extrinsic rewards for motivation. After all, you don’t want your child to only do things for the extrinsic reward (a chocolate chip), you want them to want to do things because of the personal satisfaction it brings (bathroom self-sufficiency and privacy). I do believe in the importance of intrinsic motivation – but when it comes to doing hard things that are out of our comfort zones, or things that we don’t really want to do, extrinsic rewards work very well. This is why we get paid at our jobs. Very few people show up to work every day and give it their all because they are personally satisfied to do it. Maybe there are some children out there who genuinely want to change up the way they’ve had bowel movements their entire lives – but my child was not one of them. At three and a half years old, he was firmly in the “why fix what ain’t broken” camp and needed the promise of a chocolate chip reward to see the “why”.
Another idea my mom brought with her was after every try or potty-related-anything, she would get DK to choose a sticker, have him stick it to a blank piece of paper and then above it she would write what he got the sticker for. It wasn’t a fancy potty training chart, it was just a piece of paper with stickers and writing – but over the course of the day, the paper would get filled with all of his tries – big and little, successful and unsuccessful. At the end of every day when we were reading him his bedtime stories, we would read back over his potty experiences of the day, reminding him of and praising him for all of his efforts.
By the time my mom left, we (she) had mostly potty trained him. When we left the house to go to the playground though, I still felt insecure, so I’d put a diaper on him. This was another one of my mistakes because old habits die hard and as soon as that diaper was on him, his body would relax and release and he’d have a bowel movement – every single time. So after a week of that, I strengthened my resolve and got rid of the diapers once and for all. Surprisingly to me, we didn’t have many accidents.
I learned a lot from potty training DK that I am carrying forward with me as I begin potty training V:
I threw him off the deep end. I didn’t teach him some of the basic things first – like undressing and dressing himself. I didn’t normalize the toilet flushing or let him play with rolls of toilet paper. With V, we switched her to Pampers 360 Fit diapers just after she was a year old. These diapers pull up and down like underwear instead of securing them with the side tabs. We’ve worked with her on dressing herself and pulling up and pulling down her own pants. We’ve taught her to wash her own hands at the sink and how to dry them with the towel. We’ve taught her how to rip toilet paper and flush it down the toilet.
I gave her access to potties earlier than I did with DK. She also had more access to seeing other people use the toilet than he did.
It’s okay to use extrinsic rewards for hard habit changes
When mom is flailing, it’s okay for grandma to step in.
Overly enthusiastic praise is not for every child. DK hates overly enthusiastic praise. He actually preferred to keep potty training a secret. He did not want to tell Daddy, he wanted everyone detached and unconcerned about his progress. It’s amusing now that he ever wanted complete secrecy because nowadays he announces to the entire house that he’s going to the bathroom and precisely what he plans to do in there.
So now it’s time to start potty training V. I’m determined not to completely eff it up this time. I’m taking the best of the advice from my mom, from Oh Crap Potty Training, and from another book that my cousin mailed to me around the time I was potty training DK called “Toilet Training in Less Than a Day” by Nathan H. Azrin and Richard M. Foxx.
But first, A History of Potty-Training
Back before we had washing machines or disposable diapers – babies wore cloth diapers and mothers had to wash them by hand. I get annoyed when I have to carry a dirty diaper down the stairs and put it outside in the garbage – so I can only imagine how much mothers hated the job of hand-washing a poopy piece of cloth. Mothers were motivated to potty train their babies as early as possible to eliminate this extra work and used extreme and harsher methods of potty-training to achieve success.
Two inventions came along that shrunk this housekeeping burden; Disposable diapers and electric washing machines both began making their way into American homes in the 1940s. In 1946, Dr. Benjamin Spock changed the popular narrative on potty-training and encouraged parents to wait to train until the child showed interest and was psychologically ready – an average age of about 18 months old at the time.
As disposable diapers became more accessible, more parents delayed potty-training – waiting for “readiness”. The American Academy of Pediatrics advocated a child-led approach. Pediatrician Dr. T. Berry Brazelton helped popularize this trend to wait for child readiness. However Brazelton held a financial relationship with disposable diaper company Pampers – a company absolutely interested in keeping children in diapers as long as possible. Over the years, disposable diaper companies made their diapers more absorbent, more comfortable, and for bigger bodies. By 2001 the average age for potty training was 35 months for girls and 39 months for boys.
I can’t help but wonder why children in the 1950s were psychologically and physiologically ready at 18 months old and yet children today are not psychologically or physiologically ready until 3 years old (on average).
The parenting trend in 2021 is to wait for “readiness” but I think with DK I honestly missed the signs and procrastinated way too long. By the time I got around to it with him – he had entered the stage of toddlerhood (30 months+) where he realized he is his own person and wanted to exert his will to see what it would take to break me. It made the whole “you will use a potty from now on” thing a real battle of wills. I am determined to potty train V before she stops wanting to please me.
Toilet Training in Less Than a Day
Toilet Training in Less Than a Day was published in 1974. Azrin and Foxx developed and tested the method with 200 children of different sexes, backgrounds, abilities and ages. It is a bit old-school – but we’ve been teaching children how to relieve themselves in a culturally appropriate way for thousands of years, so I don’t see why we need to re-invent the wheel with every generation. It is a kind and firm approach that teaches the potty routine.
While I’m not sure that I will be successful at training V in less than a day (that seems like a really high bar), I am going to try the method in this book. I’ve already laid out the groundwork that they specifically mention as the pre-training steps:
1) Learn to dress and undress herself
2) Allow her to watch you (and others) use the toilet
3) Teach her the words associated with potty-training (e.g. wet, dry, stand up, sit down, potty, toilet etc).
4) Teach her “to cooperate in following your instructions” (“V, can you go get me a club soda please?” is one of our favourite games).
Okay, check, check, check and check. V can do all of that.
I am setting aside Sunday May 30 as the day to begin. My husband is going to take DK out of the house for much of the day. I am going to be prepared with a brand new potty training doll, a selection of toddler-friendly juice boxes and some salty snacks. I am going to put my phone on airplane mode and give her my undivided attention and go through this training program.
Then when it’s all done, I’ll be able to tell you, dear reader, if it worked. Are you ready? Is the anticipation of my success or failure killing you? Well without further ado…
Diary of a Mom, Day 1 of Potty Training the Azrin/Foxx method, Sunday May 30, evening
Well, it actually went pretty well! I had everything prepared the night before – training underwear in a size 4T so that the waist and thighs are quite loose, salty snacks, a selection of toddler juice-boxes, water bottles, M&Ms and Raisinettes. The raisinettes (chocolate covered raisins) were a particularly excellent choice because V loves them so they were highly motivating for her, but also because raisins will help with bowel movements over the next few days.
I also purchased a doll that wets (This one, expensive – yes, but cheaper than 3 months worth of diapers) and I wrapped it up for her as a present. This morning I sent my husband and son out for the day to go on train adventures together and with the house quiet and me able to give V my undivided attention, I gave her the present and we began.
The doll was a huge hit! She loved teaching the doll how to go potty, rewarding the doll for a successful pee, and emptying the potty. I followed the advice in the book and we played with the doll for quite a while, filling the doll and V up with liquids as we played. “Baby drinks! V drinks! Mommy drinks!” “Cheers!” Practicing with the doll helped her enormously and within the first two hours she peed on the potty twice of her own initiative and she also pooped (PRAISE THE TOILETING GODS). We had one accident right before nap time, so I decided to power through and do underwear at nap time. She stayed dry through her nap, but despite our best efforts she had two accidents after her nap. But then, with prompting she used the potty successfully three more times before bed! So all in all a very successful first day. She’s wearing a diaper to bed tonight.
Diary of a Mom, Day 2 of Potty-Training, Monday, May 31
Yesterday was new and exciting. Today V was not as into the potty-training experience. She seemed unsure if she wanted this new way to be her life now. She wasn’t completely opposed, just uncertain and uncommitted. We had a few accidents, but she helped clean herself up and then we did a few practice runs from the spot where the accident happened to the potty as per the Azrin/Foxx method. She LOVED doing these practice runs – running quickly to the potty, quickly pulling down her pants and sitting down. We did it over and over again after an accident and she squealed with delight. DK joined in and we were all running around the house in glee. Since she was in the middle of playing but was far away from the potty when the accident happened, I think the running-to-the-potty practice helped her with some confidence of what she can do differently next time to not have wet pants. Tomorrow I think we will try some running to the potty practice when she still has dry pants.
One part of this method that I like is the use of the question “do you have dry pants?” as opposed to “did you pee your pants?”. The first question just asks the child to reflect on the facts – the pants are wet or they are dry; whereas the second question assigns blame.
Diary of a Mom, Day 3 of Potty Training, Tuesday, June 1st
I decided to cancel our weekly nature walk with friends today in favor of staying home and continuing to practice with the potty. This was a good decision. V was excited to keep potty training and she had many successes and only one accident. She was keen to try and eager to eat chocolate-covered raisins as her reward. I actually had to go to Target to buy more chocolate-covered raisins as now she wants DK to have chocolate-covered raisins with her to celebrate a potty success (which is so sweet I could cry). I am tired but optimistic.
Diary of a Mom, Day 4 of Potty Training, Wednesday, June 2nd
Today was a long day. We had many accidents in the morning. A friend came over to play in the afternoon, which was a fun and much-needed playdate for the kids, but V was pretty distracted with playing and didn’t want to stop to use the potty. I am starting to doubt that this was a good idea and whether I misread the readiness signs.
Diary of a Mom, Day 5 of Potty Training, Thursday, June 3rd
Okay, as a mom, I am the one who struggled with potty training today. We made progress and I know I must focus on the success we had. But it’s taking so long! It’s hard not to feel like with every accident or emotional outburst that it’s a sign that I misjudged her readiness. I think that’s the greatest lie we Millennial parents tell ourselves. I know my child is far more capable than I give her credit for. It’s my own laziness, insecurity, and desire for instant gratification that is holding her back. Personally, I want to give up today. Go back to diapers because it’s easier. Admit defeat.
But to do that would be to tell her that I don’t believe in her, that I don’t believe she can do it. And sometimes believing in your kid is what they need to get themselves across big hurdles.
Tomorrow is a new day.
Diary of a Mom, Day 6 of Potty Training, Friday June 4th
On Fridays I take the kids to the playground and they both needed to get out of the house and climb and swing and slide. I was feeling down about the day before and I was prepared to put V back in a diaper for this excursion. To my surprise when she woke up this morning, she was all about using the potty. She had a potty success and then wanted to wear her undies to the park. I packed our travel potty and showed her how it would work before we left. At the playground she came and asked me for the potty a few times, wanting to try it but wasn’t successful. Yes, I was THAT MOTHER who brought a potty to the playground and had her kid pull down her pants and use it next to the stroller.
Despite our best efforts and V communicating her need for the potty and trying her best, we had an accident. I forgot to pack a spare change of socks, so we had to go home. I thought of spare undies and shorts – but I forgot that when pee dribbles down your leg, it makes your socks wet. Whoops, #momfail. This afternoon we had more success with V initiating using the potty of her own accord while wearing undies. I’m feeling optimistic that we are halfway there.
Update: Of course literally AS I TYPED that last sentence on my laptop at the kitchen counter V pooped in her undies. So getting overly confident is a bad idea.
Further update (end of day): She’s getting it! She’s getting it! We’ve now had three successes where she initiates a bathroom break all by herself, gets herself on the potty and does her business. Hurrah!!! I see a light at the end of this tunnel. I am not giving up.
Diary of a Mom, Day 9 of Potty Training, Monday.
I am now saying “this girl is potty trained”. She has used the potty numerous times of her own initiation over the last couple of days. The final two pieces of the puzzle have fallen into place today. First, she woke up with a dry diaper and got herself on the potty on her own. Second, she initiated bowel movements on the potty. So I think we are trained and I’m personally impressed with the Azrin/Foxx method. It’s possible it was the girl, possible it was the readiness, but I also think their method was clear and made sense to her and to me. It helped me be consistent in training which I think helped complete the training quickly.
To any mom endeavouring to potty train soon – I do recommend checking out this book. While some of the method I adapted to 2021 sensibilities (I didn’t like the phrasing they used for expressing disapproval at having wet pants), I think on the whole, parents in 2021 should not be skeptical of a potty training method used in the 1970s. It is kind and straightforward. It is not child-led, but it is respectful of the child and it gives the child the undivided attention they need from adults when learning something new and challenging.
I’d love to hear from you if you try this method! Did it work? Did it not work? Can I bring you chocolate? If any of my local friends are interested in borrowing my copy of this book and the doll that wets – let me know! I’m happy to lend it out.
With love,
-Heather
*To my children: I realize I am posting about your potty training experiences on the internet, and you may be absolutely horrified of this when you are in jr. high. I promise I will take the post down before you turn 9 years old, unless this post goes viral and becomes the post that launches me into professional writing and pays for your college tuition. In that unlikely event, I promise to pay for your therapy.
Just so you know, the links to the book and the potty doll are Amazon referral links, so if you purchase through my links, I will get a small commission and I am so grateful for your support!
Bibliography:
Azrin, Nathan H., Foxx, Richard M. 1974. Potty Training in Less Than a Day. Pocket Books.
Becoming a mum for the first time is a rocky transition.
When you’re pregnant, you’re sooo looking forward to meeting your little bundle of joy and becoming a parent and you want to punch every well-meaning truth-speaker who tells you to “enjoy life while you can”, “you can’t even understand how much your life is going to change”, and “be selfish now!”
I know I hated people who said that to me. Of course I know life is going to change. Why do you think I signed up for this in the first place? I can’t wait for my life to change. Enjoy life? My life will be even more enjoyable once I welcome my baby into the world. Seriously, I hated those people. But now, 17 months in, with daily 3 am nightwakings, mopping my floor every day from far-flung-food, and listening to the constant frustrated whines of a young toddler – I find myself saying to my pregnant friends, “Congratulations! You’re about to walk off a cliff of delusion. Enjoy your life while you still can.”
Once you become a mom, shit gets HELLA-REAL and you realize very quickly that while you thought of yourself as a pretty selfless person – happy to give your time and energies to others – you didn’t even know how to spell the word before becoming a mother.
In the newborn phases, people say “Oh the newborn phase is the worst, the sleep deprivation is just killer.” But you read Happiest Baby on the Block and you and your newborn are coping just fine. So you start to find your identity as a new mom, deciding to set up camp as an attachment/baby-wearing/co-sleeping/positive discipline/no-screen-time parent and you truck along not realizing that again, the parents who are a year or two ahead of you on the parenting trajectory shake their heads and think, “She just doesn’t understand. Just wait until ___”.
I’ve made some big mistakes this past year in my relationships with some other mothers. And I’ve paid the price and been hurt in retaliation for some poorly chosen words.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately of what I want for RinkydinkMum – do I want it to be a sounding board of my ideas/opinions on parenting (No!), do I want it to be a place where I highlight my parenting achievements and showcase myself as a supermom? (BARF, ABSOLUTELY NOT). I want it to be an honest, authentic account of being a mom. My successes and failures, information I’ve found interesting or helpful, and perspectives I don’t know that I agree with, but can wrestle with in an open and honest way. Lastly, and most importantly for 2018, I want my blog to be a place where I lift up the triumphs and trials of other mothers in the thick of this confusing, exhausting, ever-changing, loving, infuriating journey.
My little guy has been really tough to feed solid foods. He’s all about the boob. Which was fine until he lost weight and his pediatrician said, “He needs more calories. Milestones. Milestones. Milestones. Formula. Milestones. Calories,” or something like that…that’s what my spinning freaked out mom-brain could hear during the visit as my thoughts went to the extremes.
Getting him to eat was a struggle. He wouldn’t drink ANYTHING but water out of a bottle. He’d just spit it out, “What is this POISON?!”
I made him so much food that he wouldn’t touch and I was very frustrated. “He’s so PICKY”, I would vent to my husband. “This is your fault. You’re picky, so he’s picky.” I’ll eat anything that doesn’t eat me first, so it’s definitely not my fault.
In addition to the calorie intake problem, he wasn’t pulling up to stand on his own and I was stressed out about that. I was trying to motivate him, putting toys in front of him, cheering him on – but he wouldn’t do it. He’d just cry and crawl away, finding another toy to play with. “Low muscle tone. Physiotherapy. Calories. Calories. Physiotherapy. Low Muscle Tone,” said the pediatrician. And I freaked out anew.
I try to keep DK away from screens as much as possible, but in a screen-filled world in Silicon Valley, that is a major challenge. DK is transfixed by screens. He loves them and is drawn to them like mosquitoes to a light. One day, I had to work on some things on my laptop. So I put the laptop on the coffee table, I sat on the floor, and I began typing away. Of course, DK wanted to see what I was up to, so I was encouraging him to pull up to stand to the coffee table to see. Again, cheering him on, “C’mon DK, you can do it! Pull up! Pull up!,” and he quickly began whining and lost interest. Oh well. Back to my typing.
I heard him babbling away behind me, I turned around to look – and he was STANDING against the couch, with no help or encouragement from anyone. In fact, he did it when I wasn’t even looking.
And then it dawned on me….DK does not like to be pressured. This should have been obvious to me, because I know someone else who hates pressure-cookers. Me. As soon as I know someone has expectations of me completing something, I lose all interest. If I tell friends about a project idea that I’m working on before I’ve actually finished it – I lose all interest in doing it. It’s like as soon as someone says, “Ooh good idea, I can’t wait to read it! I’m like…”Nahhh, I’d rather work on something else.”
Sure enough, as soon as I stopped encouraging him, pushing him, challenging him, he started standing up and cruising around on everything. So I took this newfound and pretty-obvious-to-probably-everyone-but-me wisdom and I applied it to mealtimes.
If DK thought I wasn’t looking and was busy with something else in the kitchen, he would pick up a tiny piece of chicken and he would eat it. This discovery floored me. Of course he didn’t want to eat when I was shoving food in his face going, “Eat it. Eat it. Eat it.” There’s no way I’d open my mouth either if someone did that to me.
Around this same time, I was reading, “How to Talk so Little Kids Will Listen” by Joanna Faber and Julie King. In it, there’s a chapter on eating (GREAT book by the way). They write,
“There’s actually a scientific explanation for picky eating. Little babies put everything in their mouths, but around age two they become cautious about new tastes. That caution protects the freely moving toddler from the danger of eating poisonous things. In fact, we’re a species of picky eaters, since historically the pickiest of toddlers survive to reproduce. Picky eating is in our DNA!”
I realized that I was pushing so many new tastes and textures on the poor kid, trying to find something that he would eat – that he was just shutting down all food into his mouth probably on instinct.
And so I had to change my attitude.
First, I started by deciding firmly that our son was not a picky eater. That was no longer a label I would give him. People tend to gravitate towards the labels that we give them so that they feel a sense of belonging. I did not want DK to find his identity among the label of picky eaters as he got older.
Second, I had to re-think what I thought of as “baby food”. I thought home-made was best and that I would fail if I gave my son a premade purchased pouch. And when I did give him a pouch once, he just squeezed it everywhere and made a huge mess, so I wasn’t looking forward to trying that again. But I also couldn’t get my son to eat anything off a spoon. He only has 4 teeth, so while he loved eating anything crunchy (crackers, cheerios, teething rice rusks), my husband and I worried at length that he would choke on the food we were eating. I was also concerned that the food I prepared for my husband and I at mealtimes was too sweet or too salty. I was stressing so much on the quality of what I was trying to give my kid that I wasn’t giving him much at all. I kept reverting to breastmilk as the only safe option. I had to change my attitude to accept that an exclusive breast-milk diet at 13 months old wasn’t going to be healthiest for him long-term and that any foodthat he will eat (within reason) is better than high-quality homemade food that he won’t eat.
Third, and on a similar vein, I had to accept that it’s okay that he sucks some of his food out of a pouch instead of eating it off a spoon. I had this ill-conceived notion that my baby should eat purées with a spoon, because otherwise he’s learning to eat food the wrong way. But guess what? He loves sucking Apple Carrot purée out of those pouches while in his stroller. It’s the best way right now to get him to eat fruits and vegetables. I had to change my attitude to accept that first, he needs to get used to the flavours and the textures and then he will get used to a spoon. A few months later, and he eats his purées off of a spoon and even spoon feeds himself.
Fourth, I had to change my attitude and accept that mealtime with a one-year old will mean complete outfit changes for us both and a bath every night. It’s a messy disgusting stage, but he’s learning and I need to let my kid play with textures, and experiment with his food, make a mess and get some food into his mouth. I now accept that my best friend is a steam mop and I am not the only mother who loathes wiping down most of her kitchen three-times per day, but we do it because we love our babies and they need to experiment in order to learn.
Fifth, we had to make enough time for mealtimes. My husband and I are not the kind to lounge over meals. We eat and we move on to other things. But we’ve learned that our son can take an hour or more to eat enough. We thought him throwing food on the floor meant that he’s full…but it really doesn’t. It’s just play and exploring food and he will usually eat more of something else if it’s offered to him. Accepting that mealtime can include some playtime has made it a more enjoyable hour that I spend with my son and he actually eats until he’s full.
Sixth, I had to accept that he’s going to be wasteful while he’s learning textures and flavours and that’s okay. I hate wasting food. I feel so guilty throwing stuff down the garburator or swept off the dustpan into the garbage. But it happens, and I’ve put my energies into making sure that I waste less food when I eat/cook, so that my son can throw a quarter cup of cooked chicken on the ground and I’m no further behind. Soon our city will be delivering our new compost bins, so that will be wonderful in also dealing with the food-waste-guilt.
Last, I shared my worries and dislikes with my husband. I told him that I hated mealtimes. I told him that I dreaded them. Somehow, confessing that out loud to him made me realize that “hated” and “dreaded” were perhaps too strong as words. He sympathized with me and said he disliked it too, but he hadn’t realized that I equally disliked it. Once he realized we were both equal haters, he stepped up to feed DK more often and give me, my clothes and my hair a break so that we were both doing equal time on the front lines of the food fight.
Prior to these attitude changes on my part, mealtimes were a stressful, anxious, dreaded affair. But now, I actually find them to be a fun way to engage with my son over food. So what if I have egg in my hair at suppertime? So what if I had to change my pants three times today? It’s a phase and it too shall pass. And the great development is that my son is gaining weight and is eating a lot more both in quantity and variety without all the added pressure from me to eat enough, eat quickly, eat cleanly, and eat it all.
When I think back to how I did things before I’m like…duhhhhhh of COURSE he wasn’t eating!!!
Rinkydink Mum 