Pavlov's Boy

Adorable, isn't he? Don't you just want to squeeze those sweet chubby cheeks? Pick him up and cover his face in kisses so you can hear the angelic peals of laughter emanate from that baby face?

Well, don't let the face fool you. Underneath that lovable countenance lies a ruthless stubborn streak and the iron will of a KGB general circa 1985. I know you're thinking , "Huh? Oh, c'mon, Angela! You're exaggerating! That sweet little angel could melt the cold, dead heart of Dick Cheney even. Ruthless? Please!" Well, you don't live with him. You don't know. I do.

My adorable son has been going pee pee in his potty pretty well this week. Earning and eating so many M&M's, I'm surprised his pants still fit. But pooping in the potty? Not so much. He's got it all figured out, see. Killian's bowel movements are about as regular and predictable as a Lindsay Lohan coke binge. Every day, near noonish, he's got to go. But he refuses to go in the potty. This plays out one of three ways. The first is that he hides and poops in his big boy pants, and when we discover that this has occurred, he then stares at us with woeful brown eyes that say "please don't be mad." We react the same way every time he does it: we gently walk him to the bathroom, speaking softly and telling him that we all have accidents but he really needs to tell us when he's got to go. We clean him up, while he whimpers remorsefully, which tears at the heart like nothing else. Sometimes we are able to salvage the underpants, sometimes not. And as soon as we're finished, his mood brightens instantly. An outsider would never suspect that mere seconds earlier, he was crying as if the world were ending or Sesame Street was canceled. No, the giggles that bubble up as he runs out of the bathroom and back to playing would never suggest anything at all had happened. It's very suspicious.

If he doesn't poop his big boy pants, it's because he still has pull-ups on. The same basic scene is played out, with us reminding him that he needs to alert us before going, but minus the crying because hey, pull-ups are like diapers and he's pooped in diapers his whole life, so why should he feel bad? The third option is that the moment of poop occurs while we're letting him run around sans pants of any sort; I read somewhere that if you let your toddler go without pants that they'll be more aware of their need to go and act accordingly. This has worked well with urination. But with pooping, he either poops on the floor, after which a scene similar to the one where he poops in his big boy pants occurs, or he grabs a pair of pull-ups and insists we put them on him and then soils them within 5 short minutes, or he holds out as long as possible and just refuses to go.

Yesterday came and went with no poop. There were stray escapes of gassiness, but that was it. So we figured at bedtime that he must be holding it in. And the problem was that we only had one pull-up left, and no way of getting more until today when the unemployment money arrives. If we put the last pull-up on him and he pooped in it, then he would have to wear big boy pants to bed, and he hasn't mastered overnight dryness yet. That meant he would invariably wet the bed in the middle of the night, waking everyone up and creating a large mess to clean up. Being the optimists that we are, we figured we could once and for all trick him into using the toilet. We're adults, we can outlast a 2 year old, right?

Ha ha ha ha ha ha.

We went through the usual bedtime rituals of picking up toys, teeth brushing, bathing, etc. Interspersed in the activity were several trips to the toilet to urinate. No poo. After a particularly noxious passage of gas, we put him on the toilet thinking this was it. We did everything we could to entertain him and thus keep him there. We read him books. We watched Sprout. We sang songs. He got back up leaving only urine. It was 10:30 P.M., his usual bedtime (we're night owls and not working, whaddya want? Early birds we are not). We calmly played with puzzles until another gas bubble. Rushing to the toilet, we again did our best to keep him there. I read Dr. Seuss while Danny hugged him. He got up leaving nothing. It was 11:30 P.M. now. We decided to roughhouse, thinking the activity would force his sphincter to let go, at which point we would place him on the nearby toilet. This only resulted in my glasses almost being broken along with Danny's nose (Killian is much stronger than he looks). Now it was 12:30. I was starting to tire. Killian was not. I thought, "I can do this...I have the blood of Celtic warrior queens running through my veins, along with strong Native chieftains and German tenacity. I got this."

At 1 A.M. it occurred to me that Killian gets half of his genetic material from me and that he, too, is full of the blood of Irish warrior queens, etc. He also has the whole French charm thing working for him. Then I knew I was beat. But rather than admit defeat, we decided to place Killian on the big potty with his stepstool supporting his feet while Danny held him there. Maybe the change in position would help him along? He looked rather unsure, but he didn't protest. He made a couple of his "I'm pooping" noises, and we thought we had won. He started to get off the toilet so we hastily grabbed another Dr. Seuss and I started reading. All to no avail. Nada. And it was 1:45 A.M. It had been over three hours, 12 books, 2 bouts of roughhousing, 3 Sprout productions, and countless opportunities. We had lost the battle. We put him in his pull-ups and then to bed. He never did poo.

I'm not exactly sure what this all means. I thought I was learning patience when we had to wait almost two years and file endless stacks of paper with thousands of dollars just so Danny and I could get married. I thought all my wacky health problems were teaching me to let go, that I couldn't be in control all the time. I've always encouraged my kids to express themselves, so I don't think that's it. All I know is that my entire life is now centered around the toilet...day after day of laundering big boy pants, clothing, towels, crib sheets, and stuffed animals all covered in urine. Hours of asking "do you need to potty?" while rushing to the toilet and cheerfully reminding him "you'll get candy!" Sometimes we even have to bathe Killian more than once a day, and we probably have spent hundreds of dollars on bubble bath and body wash for kids. Oh, and the pull-ups and wipes? Another small fortune. Worse than that, I recently found myself telling another adult "I need to go pee pee. I'll be right back." I'm not sure I'll ever be able to regain my dignity. I will persevere though. That's what parents do. But he better learn soon because I'm sure as hell not explaining to his future wife why he needs to go to the restroom every time he sees M&M's.

Toilet Training, aka How the Universe Puts Even the Cockiest Parent in His/Her Place

Toilet training. A rite of passage as old as time itself, spanning space, culture, and gender...a rite that ultimately helps both child and parents embrace his/her newfound independence...a rite that anyone with even a rudimentary understanding of psychology knows can make or break a child's mental health FOR A LIFETIME. No pressure, right?

Crack open an introductory psychology book, read a parenting manual, or watch an episode or two of Jerry Springer, and the importance of proper toilet training becomes quite clear. Luckily for me and my daughter, Shelby, I was attending school full time during her initial toilet training and had planned ahead so that I would be taking Psychology of Personality and Abnormal Psychology to coincide with this timeless rite of passage. I took the process very seriously, for fear of being too lenient or too rigid. Too lenient, and my daughter would be doomed to a life of inconsiderate and lazy behavior that would only qualify her for employment as a smacked-out prostitute. Too rigid, and she might be too successful and become an alcoholic with bizarre sexual fetishes involving leather. Like Goldilocks with psychological poo poo instead of porridge, it had to be juuuuust right.

The process was surprisingly easy. It took only a couple of days and a sticker chart to ensure proper urination; evacuation was more difficult. It took about two weeks to reassure Shelby that it was a good thing that her poops disappeared out of sight, never to return. Nevertheless, she was fairly easy to train and even though there were frequent episodes of nighttime enuresis, I was pleased with her performance as well as mine. I suspected the nighttime enuresis was hereditary, as I too had been a bed wetter regardless of how little I drank after 6 PM. A medical exam confirmed my suspicions and her bladder finally caught up with her maturity. Overall, toilet training was not particularly stressful and I thought it successful.

By the time Killian came along, I had grown more relaxed as both a parent and a person. For example, pretend you've informed me that my child has just stuck their hands into a poopy diaper, then into their mouth. When Shelby was little, that would've elicited an immediate bath in whatever cleaning substance was the closest to bleach in formulation, but legal to apply to human skin, along with approximately 50 teeth brushings, followed by a trip to the emergency room to ensure that no tropical disease had been contracted, and later on, a bedtime story featuring little poo monsters that tie your intestines into knots for fun and that is why we never, under any circumstances, ingest poop. Now if you were to tell me my kid ate poop? Meh, whatever...I'd give him some water to drink, wash his hands, and change the poopy pull-ups. I'd tell him "dude, don't eat your poop, that's gross", before helping him to brush his teeth. And that would be that.

When Killian started exhibiting some of the signs for toilet training readiness, I was overjoyed. I had recently figured out that between toilet paper, cat litter, Pull-Ups and diapers, our household was spending close to $100 a month just on waste. And that made me feel...well, wasteful.

The first few days of training Killian, I let him just sit on his potty. You know, get a feel for it and all. He responded by sitting there for all of 20 seconds before disappearing out of the room, only to return with a handful of Hot Wheels that he would promptly stack into neat combinations in his toilet. After several days of redirection, he stopped placing items into the toilet and began to sit there for progressively longer periods of time. After a couple of weeks, he surprised us all by urinating into the toilet! I think he was as surprised as we were for when the urination started, he opened his legs and watched incredulously as liquid came out his penis, which he inspected thoroughly, like he suspected it was broken.

He made even more progress in the following weeks: he began depositing feces into the toilet along with urine, and he needed less prompting to use the toilet. I thought we were well on the way to independent toileting. Then The Stomach Flu happened. We all got sick with it, which meant no one did laundry for about four days. No big deal, we had pull-ups as a back-up. We noticed he was using the toilet less frequently while wearing the pull-ups, then on the fifth day, when we attempted to put newly laundered big boy pants on Killian, he let out a screech so horrific I thought the neighbors would call the police to report a domestic disturbance.

Our domecile was disturbed all right...three months of hard work disappeared after only four days of illness! All of it!!! Now we couldn't even put regular undies on him without severe decompensation. He showed absolutely no interest in his potty books or DVD's. What about the fabulous sticker chart, you ask? He couldn't give a shit. Literally. No, he had decided that life was more comfortable when other people wiped his ass for him. 'Stop playing and run into another room in time to use the toilet? But why? It's so much easier for Mom and Dad to clean me up'. The ramifications were horrifying: my son was going to be a lazy, inconsiderate man who expected women to clean up after him. And it was all my fault. I had failed!

My husband, ever the philosopher, took it in stride. "Maybe he's just not ready. He'll let us know when he's ready." My response to that was, "Easy for you to say. No one is going to blame you when he goes off to college in diapers. It will be my fault, because I'm the mom. It's ALWAYS our fault. We're too cold AND too affectionate. Too overbearing yet disinterested. Whether he picks his nose or grows up to strangle hookers, it will be my fault, not yours!"

I talked about it with a friend, Laura, whose son is three months younger than ours. Her son, Grant, was toilet training rapidly; I had thought he would be the opposite. Killian is supremely laid back, will eat just about anything, or go to just about anyone. Grant, on the other hand, is the definition of picky. He only eats boiled eggs and Cheerios, and excepting his mother and me, does not enjoy the company of women. I just knew he would be difficult to toilet train, and Killian would be easy. Except that wasn't happening. Was I competing with Laura through our kids? She suggested using M&M's as a reward for sitting on the toilet. I resisted, saying that I didn't like to use food as a reward or punishment as that sometimes plants the seeds for future eating disorders.

After the realization that it was my issues interfering in the toilet training, I decided that leniency was preferable to rigidity and laid off for a couple of months. After all, his mental health and my physical health depended on it as autoimmune disorders are made much worse by stress. Eventually, we got out the big boy pants and presented them as an option to the pull-ups, and Killian eventually chose them. Eventually, he showed interest in his potty again as something other than a step-stool. Eventually, he peed in the potty. And yes, I ended up breaking my own rule about using food as a bribe. Guess what? The M&M's work beautifully! He gets one for sitting on the potty, two if he pees in the potty, and three if he poops in the potty. He's still skittish about defecation, but we're working on it. I am learning a great lesson in patience and flexibility, if anything. Only one thing: I noticed today that he is parsing out the pee in order to maximize M&M receipt. He'll sit on the toilet, getting one M&M just for sitting there. Then he'll urinate, but only a tiny amount that in no way matches prior consumption of liquid. I'll give him another M&M since I promised that was the deal. He'll get up, wipe himself, then run off for a few minutes, at which point we begin again. What should've been two trips to the potty resulting in four M&M's ended up being nine trips resulting in eighteen M&M's! I'm scared that he has a future in Wall Street...help???