The Longest Shortest Time
Drawing Obsession: Flushing
When we left off, I was about to pick up Sasha after her first day of wearing underpants to school. Here’s how that went.
I arrived to find Sasha in a different outfit than the one I’d dropped her off in (I’d expected an accident on the first day, so I wasn’t surprised), and was greeted by an assistant teacher and the director of the school.
“Mommy needs to know that she has to also pack you a change of socks,” the director informed me, pointing at Sasha’s sockless feet inside her sneakers.
“Sasha peed three times in half an hour,” the assistant teacher said, with a sort of scolding look on her face, as if to tell me that Sasha wasn’t ready for underpants. “I put her in a pull-up,” she went on, “but she screamed that she didn’t want a pull-up, so I gave her underpants with a pull-up on top.”
Okay, a word on pull-ups. I made a decision as we started this potty-training process that we were going to skip them. I know lots of people find them useful, but to me, they’re just glorified diapers (aside from being super expensive) and I wanted Sasha to either be in a diaper or underpants. Sasha had heard some of her friends talking about pull-ups, and she seemed to want them even though she didn’t know what they were. The first time she encountered a pull-up was when the teacher put one on her. Sasha explained to me later that she was upset about the pull-up because “a pull-up is a diaper!” To top it off, it wasn’t even her diaper. And, she reminded me, “Mommy says, No more diapers.”
I will explain in a moment what I think was going on with the constant peeing in the pants, but first a pictorial exploration Sasha made that night of pee and poo in the potty:
That last one, to the right, is what she drew when I asked her to show me how angry she was about the pull-up.
Back to the scolding look from the assistant teacher. I got the sense that the teachers were not on board with my cold turkey approach to potty training. I mean, they told me with their words that they would support anything I wanted to do, but I used to work at a nursery school, and I know the pained look and placating tone of a teacher who is trying to humor a parent that they think is doing something crazy. I totally get that they can’t have a kid peeing her pants every ten minutes, and that definitely had to stop — but by no means was I going to go back on my No More Diapers ordinance.
But, boy, was I tempted.
Sasha was doing this thing where she would hold her pee in as long as she possibly could. Until she couldn’t. And then she would have an “accident.” In quotes, because is it really an accident when you are purposely not trying to get to the toilet? After a lot of talking with her, I have come to believe that Sasha thought it would be possible to make herself not ever have to use the potty again if she just held it in forever. She even stopped drinking for half a day, which is what tipped me off. It took some convincing, and peeing all over her friend’s floor, but one day, miraculously, Sasha just started telling me every time she needed to go. Perhaps not coincidentally, the day this kicked in was the day before she was to return to school. I told her that I agreed that I didn’t want her teachers putting her in a diaper, but that if she didn’t tell them when she needed to go, they were going to have to. She said, “But I don’t want a diaper.” And I think that was the moment she made her decision: she was now a toilet-user.
Since then, we have had maybe one or two accidents. True accidents. And she rarely goes in her sleep. In fact, my husband and I heard her one night traipsing off to the bathroom by herself — flushing, and even washing her hands with no help!
A few days later—only a week after the pull-up incident at school—I felt so confident in Sasha’s potty-going abilities that I took her on the train with me to NYC to visit Daddy at work. It was a leap of faith, but I am pleased to report: there were no accidents. I think it’s safe to say that potty training is over. Cold turkey did us well.
On a side note, the swimming class after potty training clicked, I was watching Sasha through the window. She was being held in a back float by the teacher, and suddenly the teacher locked eyes with me and moved her hands above the water and wiggled her fingers. It took a second to understand what I was seeing. That Sasha was back-floating all by herself. Sometimes she seems so big to me, like when she’s screaming her head off (which at this age happens a few times a day for us), or when she lies in the grass munching chives she picked from the garden (always an onion-lover). But other times, she still looks like such a baby. Like when she’s floating in the pool, round cheeks and belly bobbing in the water. That is a floating baby, I told myself, watching her.
Next thing I knew, she was jumping in without holding anyone’s hands, her entire head plunging underwater.
Who’s got stories of children passing from babyhood to big-kidhood?
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