As a mom, I tend to lean into self-recrimination. When I realize I’ve screwed something up, I usually beat myself up about it. So much so, that if I’m not careful I can actually miss the really important lessons – and latent gifts – that come from being a less than perfect mom. 

Take, for example, my first foray into potty-training. My oldest, Scout (I change names to protect myself from dying alone), is twenty-eight and, I’m proud to say, fully competent and comfortable with the whole potty thing. But even now, twenty-five years after the fact, I still remember what it took to get her there.

My first three years as a mom, I had been pretty self-contained. I had my own goals and agendas (getting kids to sleep was a top priority) and didn’t really stress too much about other people’s expectations. Frankly, I was too busy. By the time Scout was two and a half I’d had two more kids. Our house was like a diaper dispensary. Potty training wasn’t exactly a top priority.I’d done all the reading, of course. Back then it was books not blogs, but the landscape was pretty similar: enough advice and how-to’s that you could pretty much find an expert to back up whatever you wanted to do. I liked the don’t-stress-about-it-because-they-all-end-up-potty-trained-anyway expert.

I Wasn’t Concerned When My Three-Year-Old Still Wasn’t Potty-Trained

So there I was, second week of September, limping into Scout’s three-year-old preschool class for the first time, a two-year-old holding my right hand and a six-month-old in a car seat crooked in my left elbow and I thought everything was going great. Scout wore big kid underwear every day and never had accidents. We had a little potty in the bathroom and Scout would sit on it, happily reading Everyone Poops and The Gas We Pass with me. The only glitch was she didn’t actually use the potty.

She didn’t have anything against it. She just seriously preferred a diaper. When she felt like she had to go, she would ask me for a diaper, disappear into the corner of another room – not the bathroom, which by this point, she may have mistook for a library – do her business and ask to be changed. If there was no mess involved, sometimes she’d just whip off the diaper herself, throw it into the Diaper Genie, grab her underwear and get on with her day. I congratulated myself on her self-reliance and independence.

. . . Until I learned that Every Other Child in her Class Was.

The three-year-old teacher was not so congratulatory. A week or two into the school year Mrs. Blank pulled me aside at drop-off, looking very serious. 

“Scout’s not potty-trained?” It was only a part time preschool, and I guess Scout had been able to hold it for two and a half hours up til then. But the day before she had apparently asked Mrs. Blank for a diaper and refused to use the bathroom without one, so the gig was up.

Mrs. Blank kindly but firmly explained that students in the three-year-old class were required to be potty trained. She suggested that I address this right away. She suggested that a child of her age who refused to use the bathroom might have a phobia or something and maybe I should find a therapist to help with that. (Soon I’ll write a post on how to respond when perfectly well-intentioned people give you bad advice. I didn’t know how to do that back then.)

As soon as I got to the car, of course, I burst out crying. My daughter was broken. She already needed therapy. Apparently she couldn’t keep up with the other kids. And she was one of the oldest, so she must be way, way behind. And now her education was on the line!?!Once I’d cried myself out, I resolved on a course of action. No more loosey-goosey everyone-ends-up-potty-trained-anyway crap. And no therapy either. I was going to be all over this thing like white on rice. 

I Decided to Lay Down the Law, Which Failed Utterly

It was obvious to me that Scout was physically ready to use the potty. She knew when to ask for a diaper, after all. So all I needed to do was make it clear to her that the potty was the only game in town.

I moved her diapers out of reach and when she got home that day I told her in a very no-nonsense way that there were no more diapers and that she needed to use the potty like all the other kids in her class. What followed was a days-long clash of the titans, if titans clashed in tiny kitchen-side powder rooms. When I saw that Scout needed to go, I rushed her to the potty. She insisted she needed a diaper. I refused, convinced that if she just used the toilet one time she would be fine. She insisted. I refused. She held it until I, fearful for her little bladder, caved. Both of us were left crying and wrung out. 

Finally, I had to admit defeat. My first effort to teach my child something really big and important had been an epic fail. If Scout hadn’t needed a therapist before, she certainly did now. I should probably just give the other kids up for adoption, I thought. But not before I apologized to my daughter for screwing up so badly.

“Scout,” I said, over a couple of cookies and an apple juice chaser, “I’m so sorry. The truth is that it’s my job to teach you how to use the potty. Your only job is to learn. I’m the one who messed up, not you.” Scout forgave me instantly and hugged me and was so sincerely sweet about the whole thing that I thought I might give the project one more try. 

So I Tried Something Different

“How about this? How ‘bout we make a deal? I’m going to bring back the diapers. You can have a diaper any time you want. And you don’t have to use the potty at all. Just forget about the potty. All you have to do is go into the bathroom with your diaper and stay there until you go. Would you be willing to do that?”

Scout weighed it for a minute and, possibly considering it the lesser of several recently demonstrated evils, agreed.

She was as good as her word. After a week or so, and lots of praise and treats, I told her that she could still use her diaper, but once it was on, I wanted her to sit on top of the potty, lid closed, to go. A week or so later, I told her to go in her diaper while sitting on the potty, lid up. 

Then I began cutting slits in her diapers. Bigger and bigger slits until the bottom of the diaper was completely gone. All that was left was a kind of Pampers Pullup belt that she wrapped around her waist before using the potty. She was totally potty trained. Still, she insisted on the “diaper.”

One day, three or four weeks after we’d struck our deal, I heard Scout running toward the kitchen. She hated stopping whatever she was doing to go to the bathroom, so always left it to the very last minute. I quickly pulled her “diaper” of the drawer and presented her with a ridiculous looking circle of plastic held together by two strips of Velcro. As Scout ran toward me, hand outstretched, she looked at the feeble circle dangling from my finger as if she was only just seeing it for the first time. Then she looked at me for a second before we both burst out laughing. And, with that, the whole potty-training debacle was over.

And Learned Unexpected Things About My Daughter and Myself

To be clear, I still consider this a real low point in my parenting, and I hope you won’t judge me too harshly for it. But I have to say I learned a lot from that particular screw up, lessons that continue to serve me to this day. 

For one, I learned, yet again, that every kid is different. This seems to have been something I needed to learn over and over until it finally sunk in. Expert and other advice is great – and plentiful – but what works like magic for one kid might be a total disaster for another. The goal is to find what works for you and your particular child and ignore everything else. 

I also learned something important about myself. No matter how impervious I thought I was to them, grade and age norms are powerful, powerful things. Just the idea that my child might fall outside of one had set my hair on fire and made me completely lose sight of rule one: that every kid is different. I realized that getting too wrapped up in what the rest of the class is doing isn’t a good look for me, that I would need to find a balance between engaged and self-contained so that even if every other kid her age was going in one direction, I could be sincerely ok with my daughter going in another.

Finally, I learned some really essential things about my daughter. I learned that she likes to take her change in increments. I learned that when she’s rushed or anxious, she digs in and when she digs in she’s got some serious staying power. Most importantly, I learned that I had something to learn from three-year-old Scout. She wasn’t stuck on recrimination. She forgave me instantly and completely, then moved on to learn what she needed to learn. 

It’s a lesson I’ve been trying to master ever since.