Potty training gives me a potty mouth

I don’t have much of a potty mouth, and I never have. Well, I suppose that statement might not be entirely true if you define “potty mouth” as having the maturity of an 8-year-old and finding words like “poot” and “beanie” funny. Guilty as charged. But I rarely swear. I don’t even like to say the word “sucks.” I’d much rather say, “Oh, fiddlesticks!” and endure the eye-roll of my oldest. She insists a lot of kids use the word “sucks.” I told her she will be around people her entire life who make the wrong choice and that in our family “sucks” is blacklisted and if she says it, she owes me a dollar. End of discussion.

But lately a big thought bubble full of all sorts of naughty expletives has been ballooning up above my head, and the reason for this is simple: I have a 3-year-old boy. I am potty training that 3-year-old boy. Actually, that’s all wrong. The only one getting trained is moi – in the art of self-restraint in keeping those lovely expletives that make “sucks” look like part of the vernacular of Downton Abbey floating silently off in the horizon.

This is no easy task, especially when #@!* keeps happening – not in the potty but in the pants. And gone are the days of cute, breastfeeding, mustardy baby poop. People think my 3-year-old is closer to five. He’s a big boy with a big appetite. He eats a cornucopia of deliciousness. Everybody poops but generally the bigger the pooper, the bigger the poop. I’m dealing with some serious excrements and after all that green St. Patrick’s Day food, I’ve been faced with green poop. My 5-year-old eyed Thomas’s most recent gift. “It looks like the panda’s poop!” A recent visit to the zoo left the kids in awe of the gloriously green poop a panda squeezed out in front of us. Do you know how much bamboo a panda bear eats each day? Forty to 50 pounds of the green stalks. Give Thomas a little green smoothie, green bread, and green eggs, and he starts pooping like a panda.

Whereas my girls found the idea of pooping in their pants gross, Thomas doesn’t really see the problem with it. This is the same child who was nicknamed Poopcasso as a baby after I found him finger-painting with his doo-doo during quiet time. Poop in the pants ain’t no big thing, but don’t you dare say something like, “This is gross,” while cleaning him up because that’s when Mr. Sensitive comes out. Tears form in those big, brown eyes. “Don’t say it’s gross, Mommy,” he says.

Oh, but it is.

What’s been odd to me about potty training this boy is the very first time he used the big boy potty, he, in fact, pooped in it. Everyone had told me how hard boys were to potty train, and I was feeling all high and mighty. MY boy isn’t going to be hard at all. Look at him pooping like a big boy without me even putting him on the potty! When will I learn to never, ever self-congratulate myself in the parenting trenches? It always, always backfires and leaves me eating a hefty slice of humble pie or in this case, cleaning what looks like chocolate silk pie but smells like toxic waste from a bare bottom.

Yet, for several days he did his business on the potty, and my mommy hubris swelled. I never had to bribe the girls, but I was popping jelly beans into his mouth let and right. Lots of positive reinforcement going on. Then one day when the rain finally stopped and the sun was dancing in the sky, warm and bright, Thomas headed outside to play – and to poop. Ever since then he’s wanted to take care of nature’s duty in, well, nature.

Now to be fair, he does pee on the potty quite a bit, but he also frequently relieves himself on the floor and sometimes on big sister’s dolls. He doesn’t like the way diapers feel on his bigger-than-a-toddler-body and routinely complains of wedgies, but he also isn’t too fond of underwear. Or clothes. Going naked and commando is how he likes it and also how he seems to have the least amount of accidents. But I can’t bring him to the soccer fields, grocery store, and playground naked. Can I?

Oh, I know this too shall pass. (This too shall pass…the mantra I fervently chant during any difficult parenting period.) He won’t always be dropping huge loads in his pants or walking around commando. (Will he?) And it’s so easy to sugarcoat the potty training phases of my daughters when, in reality, we had our own challenges. My second, Rachel was a breeze, but Madeline, my firstborn, had some major poop issues. No, she never pooped her in pants. She just didn’t poop. The little control freak was master of her bowels and while my husband and the pediatrician told me I had to make sure she tried to poop every day, I learned quickly that you can’t make a feisty child sleep, eat, or go potty. Not that I didn’t try. I would sit in the bathroom for hours with the child, holding her hand, playing all sorts of games. “Ariel is in the cave and wants to go out swimming with her fishy friends! Can you help her get out?” In case you’re really confused here and gave birth to reasonable children who just felt the urge and went to the bathroom, Ariel was her poop and the cave was her bum. I’d read Everybody Poops aloud to her in the bathroom. And Great Expectations. And All’s Well that Ends Well. But it rarely ended well. Usually, Mom and Anti-Pooper both ended up in tears. And still, she held it in. She. Would. Not. Poop. I plied her with smoothies and dried fruit and lots of food that’s good for your inner plumbing. I’d light candles in the bathroom to calm her. I would gently coax her like the most patient poop doula, but she wasn’t ready to bring her baby into the world. On an adult dosage of Miralax she managed to hold her poop in for 15 days. That’s more than two weeks, people. Hello, enema. That finally did the trick.

Then there was my third child. Oh, she potty trained easily enough and thankfully, pooped on the potty without trouble, but when she got angry at me, what did she do? She pulled a Regan a la  The Exorcist on me and stubbornly glared in my direction while she relieved herself on the only rug in our hardwood floor home. I can’t count the times I would tell her no to something and find her peeing on the floor and then feigning it was an “accident.”

Believe you me, there were some big curse word thought bubbles floating above my head back then, too.

But these days none of my girls have accidents or even pretend to have accidents when they’re upset with Mommy. I still have to remind the oldest to listen to her body sometimes because she is such an active, happy kid, she doesn’t like to take time out to do anything as boring as sitting on a potty.

I know Thomas will get there eventually. I recently tried to bribe him with fancy superhero light-up shoes since his friend across the street got a pair when he potty trained. Thomas thought the shoes were pretty cool until duty (or should I say dooty?) called. “I don’t want those shoes,” he told me firmly, and he opened the back door and headed outside like the free-spirited animal he is.

And I sighed and thought, “This suck… errr…this stinks.” Unfortunately, both figuratively and literally.