"It’s literally piss, but I'm here for it," or, on potty training my toddler sober

This weekend, my husband and I attempted (with pretty decent success, I have to say) to potty train our daughter. At just over age two, she is the youngest of the children we have potty trained, despite having potty trained our 7 other children.

We might have waited longer, but this little girl wants to be just like her siblings, who all, obviously, use the potty.

“Pee, pee!” she stands outside the bathroom. She is obsessed with the potty.

It’s been a bit of a challenge to understand if she is actually knowing that what “pee, pee” means, or if the other kids just say it. But, she is usually not wrong that she has, in fact, peed in her diaper. And truly, she does exactly what everyone else does.

When we’re yelling to the boys to get their shoes on, she knows each color and shoe and the corresponding boy it belongs to.

“Shoos,” she says, carrying each pair to each boy. And sometimes, when the boys don’t put their tablets down quickly enough for her liking, she’ll let out a little nonsensical shriek, “Ehnnn!!” she’ll say, pointing at their socks, sometimes pushing the boys.

She’ll follow me to the bottom of the stairs when I shout up to the other kids to come down for dinner.

“Boys! Come down,” I shout.

“Bahbahgahhhh!” she shouts, cupping her hands around her mouth, as I do.

What she loves most of all is to join in.

My boys were born in 2017 and 2019, and I vaguely remember attempting to potty train them sometime around Covid era.

I don’t really remember potty training them, I say. I mean, I know I did it.

But how?

I am trying to remember what it was like back then. Did I order the Thomas the Train potty chair from Amazon? Or did I pick it up at Target or Walmart, along with a bota box?

I remember one time that I took them to Walmart for something, all three of them small enough to be sitting inside the cart.

And I also got 3 cans of champagne, those little half bottles in a can, which seemed like so much less than a whole bottle, clanking out to the trash.

There were also a lot of times after my ex-husband moved out that I would take them to the store. That I would say, “Boys! Let’s load up — who wants goldfish?!” and I would take them to the store to get goldfish, or whatever I promised them, and you know, a Bota Box or a few bottles of champagne or a twelve-pack, maybe.

Or Kinder Eggs. They loved Kinder Eggs.

But something about those 3 cans of champagne stands out to me. I don’t know why. It must have been the middle of the day. I must have been breaking a rule.

I had rules that ensured I was not an actual alcoholic, rules like not drinking before naptime.

I once heard someone on a meeting say they used to put socks over their bottles so they didn’t have to hear the clanking, to soften the reality of what was.

In our tiny powder room, I sit on the stepstool that my sons used all those years ago to climb up to the toilet, to reach the sink to wash their hands. I hold my daughter’s hand while she sits on the potty.

I am reading and re-reading Daniel’s Thank-You Day, and while I may have preferred to be reading Daniel Tiger Goes to the Potty!, this is what she has chosen.

She’s peed on the floor about 4 times already, and it’s not quite 9am. We’ve grabbed her each time and carried her to the potty. The pee goes in the potty, we say.

“Flush?” she says, pulling on the handle of the Big Girl toilet.

I’ve been essentially encouraging her to drink nonstop, so she can need to potty a lot, so we can get lots of practice.

Her ADHD Girl Toddler Beverage Station:

In the bathroom, she kicks her little legs. I turn the faucet on to see if that helps.

How is it, I think, that I have raised this many children, and I don’t really remember potty training them. I do, vaguely, maybe, remember sitting in this very powder room with my boys, singing the Daniel Tiger song then, too, “If you have to go potty, stop, and go right away!”

I suppose the daycare did the lion’s share of the work. But maybe, while I think back on that time, maybe I was just kind of fucked up.

There was a time, right around that time, that I was trying to do the Keto diet, which was going great, eating all bacon and butter and salami and not drinking at all (which was a subtle benefit I was hoping to be a side effect of dedicating myself to this diet), until I read somewhere that vodka has zero carbs.

And so I would eat my bacon and salami and butter and almond flour-egg-butter-cheese concoctions, and then when it started getting dark, I would drink a fifth of vodka. When I drank this fifth of vodka, I might add, I would also tend to eat a loaf of bread.

Maybe that was when I was potty training the boys? In a blind hangover.

I loved them, so much. I still love my boys. That’s the thing about drinking or any destructive behavior like that. I truly, genuinely, with my whole heart, loved them more than anything in the world.

But today, I am the mother that I want to be.

Today, I am comfortable with my mothering, all morning, all afternoon, all evening. I don’t catch myself thinking, god, I’m no good in the afternoons, or planning or thinking or giving any thought at all to if I’ll be hungover.

The thing is, I thought I was a good mother during those hangovers. And I think I probably did just fine-ish on the outside. But I was dying inside. My brain was like a filing cabinet, trying to pull up the memories from the night before. What did I forget? Did I text anyone I shouldn’t have? How much did I actually drink? Is there anything left?

The hangover itself was like a challenge. God, I have to get through this, I would think. If I can get through this, then I don’t have a problem. And there I sat, teetering on the edge, hands shaking, slamming coffee, trying to find my footing, to catch my balance, looking below me, about to fall.

In Daniel Tiger’s “Thank You Day,” there is a moment where the wind picks up and all the Thank-You notes fly off the Thank You tree.

I have read this book about fifteen times today. “Oh no, the notes flew away!” I read.

“Oh nooo,” she says, overly animated. And then, the sound of a little trickle.

She gasps a little, scared and excited and just really did not know what to think that she was peeing on the potty.

Her eyes say, “I did it! I really did it!”

What a brilliantly human moment.

“Done,” she says, shaking her hands as they have taught her at daycare. “All done,” she says, shaking her hands.

“Let’s get your Frozen sticker,” I say, and she points to a trio of Anna, Elsa, and Kristof that I peel off the sticker pack. She points again, this time at Olaf, and so I peel another one, handing it to her: “Of course, Olaf, too.”

I am bone-tired by the time she is down for her nap and by the time she goes to bed.

To be fully here. For everything.

If even just for piss.

She presses the sticker onto her shirt.

Such are the gifts of sobriety.