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During last July’s 5.8 earthquake, 3-year-old Bronwyn told her 1-year-old sister, “We’re going for a wiggle.” READ MORE
Early Years
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The mother gull shrieks at her molting juvenile, a tenacious young bird still demanding the regurgitated baitfish mom has been delivering since birth. The baby is shooed away, but following its cruel rejection, finally soars off on its own, hunting and diving and making Mrs. Gull so proud. From a distance, everything looks like science. Or nature, or maybe just one of these perfectly choreographed public television nature program moments. Except that the brief, perfect close-up shot of the wild animal going off on its own life journey has required that the photo crew perform a hundred hours of shooting, sitting hidden behind blinds, downwind, waiting, watching in the cold, rain or sun. Which is how we feel today, with our “big boy” 3-year-old son, a recent and now nearly full-time undergraduate in the School of Elimination. I say nearly. We’re in fact 90% there, which is to say that the cautious parental optimism of a few weeks ago has been replaced with giddy relief. Because we don’t want to either jinx it or call attention, celebrating has been limited to knowing glances with my Mr. Gull and lots of encouragement (“Do you need to go?”) for our young acolyte. I’d anticipated more of a challenge, with plenty of accidents and struggle but, as it happens, through serendipity and the hard work of the Discovery Channel nature program photographer variety (“Did he go yet?”), toilet training or toilet learning as some now call it, arrived. Ultimately, it was, finally, as we’d been warned, HIS idea. Encouraged by others and anxious as many parents are to make the transition, we had introduced the concept and kept it in the forefront for many months with discussion and experimentation. We read books with helpfully honest illustrations and narrative. We, his parents, were reminded that so much of this involved our child learning how to listen to and control his bodily functions. We even gave in and watched a video with a pleasingly funny theme song refrain, “We’re going to a potty party.” Then there was our trip to purchase real “big boy” underwear, where mom was pleased to discover exciting shark, dinosaur and rocket all-cotton briefs instead of the omnipresent superhero versions that seemed a bit too aggressive. We weren’t looking to leap tall buildings here, just make it to the toilet in time. Finally, we tried test runs, staying around the house for short periods, an hour or two at a time, building toward practice efforts in the bathroom. Still, for months it all seemed more like games than skills learning perhaps on both sides. Mom and dad had to learn and re-learn our primary responsibility in this process; we needed to remember not just to remind our child and ask gently, but to insist. It’s a reversal of that old adage of being able to take a horse to water but not being able to make him drink. We discovered that you can take a child to the potty and “make” him or her produce and that indeed, you must. The great leap forward occurred when, after attending an evening open house at his preschool wearing his underwear in place of diapers, he announced his intention the next morning to attend school in underwear sans Tushies. We’ve never looked back (despite a few so-called “accidents”), though we pad our confidence (and his) with diapers at night. For our family, it was all about timing. For others, it’s something else. A friend has already introduced the concept to her 1 1/2-year-old Mika with, she brags, terrific results. Another confides that his 5-year-old, Elijah, still wears pull-ups at night. “We’re not pushing it,” he says, confident that when the boy is ready, the boy will be ready. My friends and I talk plenty about what happens when we catch ourselves trying to “force” our children to embrace something that they are not ready for that sense of tension and conflict that invades our relationships, the child’s own sense of failure, frustration. We try to remember that not every child is alike and neither is every family. Nature and good luck and discipline (ours) remind us of all those other developmental stages: rolling over, sitting, standing, walking, talking, weaning. Now it all kind of makes sense to him and to us. Becoming a big boy, an independent, increasingly autonomous child, seems to have been the goal of using first the plastic potty, then stepping up on the little folding step and then using the actual commode. And flushing and, yes, announcing. Has anybody ever heard sweeter words, hollered from the WC, than, “Look what I did, mama”? Lisa Alvarez, an English professor at Irvine Valley College, lives in Modjeska Canyon with her husband and 3-year-old son. |
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