All I Have and More
By Adrienne Garrison
@adrie.garrison
If you are nearing the stage of potty training your child and you are in need of advice, I am not your girl.
My husband and I recently read a book that promised to help us potty train our child in three days. We read it cover-to-cover. I cleared my schedule, filled glass jars with colorful candy treats, and printed a sticker chart. One might assume I’m new to parenting toddlers based on all this prep—but I’ve been here before. By the third time around, I simply couldn’t deny the fact that I needed help. Out of respect for my older two children, I won’t get into how long I delayed, how inconsistently I followed through, or the general timeline in which they decided to essentially figure it out themselves. Let’s just say they won’t be calling me for advice when they have toddlers of their own.
By four in the afternoon on the very first day, I was already breaking “the rules.” The book insisted on using a regular toilet with a child-sized seat—little potties, she warned, were for suckers. Suckers who train their child once, and then (because it was so much fun the first time) train them all over again on a regular toilet. Suckers willing to dump and rinse a plastic bowl multiple times a day. Suckers who haul that little blue potty to Grandma’s house because their child refuses to go anywhere else.
Suckers, apparently, like me.
By the second day, I’d tossed the rule book aside and was basically leaving a Hansel and Gretel-style candy trail, luring him into the bathroom to “just try one more time for Mommy.” Even with my own 0% success rate, it seemed to me that by the third time around, if I put my mind to it I could figure it out. I wasn’t prepared for how much it would take me back to the earliest days of parenting—the hyper-vigilance, the anxiety, the obsessive reading of cues. My attention span was whittled down to exactly ninety seconds before I stopped whatever I was doing or thinking to scan the child for a tell-tale wiggle. It was humbling, to say the least.
I never imagined I’d write an entire essay about potty training, especially with my track record. But the truth is, it’s hard. Really hard. And maybe we don’t acknowledge that enough. Like so many parenting fails, potty training left me feeling inadequate, convinced that others were doing it better (and, honestly, in this case they probably were) or raising more compliant children. The silence around the struggle only made me feel more pathetically inept.
There wasn’t much advice in that book that worked, and I chalk that up entirely to user error. But dedicating three full days to my two-year-old was excellent training for me. Sitting across from him—him on his forbidden plastic potty, me on my wooden stool—I found myself seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time in a long time. Face-to-face for what felt like hours, I rediscovered everything I already knew about him with a new depth and tenderness. The constant interruptions from other tasks, the long stretches of patience, the small victories—I was able to experience the joy of being with him, not just parenting him. Several weeks into this journey, I'm grateful to report that he’s navigating undie-life with relative ease (emphasis on relative.)
I have such a long way to go in learning to parent a toddler, especially as I also learn to care for a kindergartner and a tween. I’ll make some progress and before I know it they’ll be off to a new phase—a new and unknown terrain of needs and strengths. By the time the next child enters that same territory, I’ll have forgotten much of what I learned. The things I do manage to remember won’t matter with the entirely different kid in front of me, who needs a completely different kind of support.
Each day is a challenge, from lifting my son out of the crib in the morning, to coaching my Kindergartener through vowel sounds, to snuggling with my nine-year-old at the end of the day to read The Care and Keeping of You. It’s the hardest job I’ve ever done, and it’s easy to feel—more than ever on round three—as though I’m not getting any better at parenting, even as I pour in more energy and more time.
Is it possible that growing as a mother isn’t about having all the answers, but about being willing to admit you don’t have any? Maybe the sum total of all this experience simply makes me more willing to read a book, read my child, and admit that I am making this up as I go. One day, I hope I get to gently lean toward a mother in the thick of it and say: I remember how hard it is to do what you’re doing, and I see how much tenacity and grace it requires.
So, if you are nearing the stage of potty-training your child, navigating the emotional swings of a six-year-old boy, or discipling your tween into womanhood and are in need of advice, I offer you this: The ferocious, insistent, transformative work of motherhood will demand everything you have—and everything you don’t.
Alongside you, at kitchen sinks, and drop-off lines and doctor’s appointments, are other women just like you and me.
Learning as they go.
Learning to let go.
Adrienne Garrison lives in Bloomington, Indiana with her husband and their two little ones. Her essays have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and New Millennium Writings, and her short story “No Longer Mine” was recently featured in LETTERS Journal. Adrienne believes magic takes the form of heart-to-heart conversations, petit-fours, and walks in the woods. You can find more of her writing on her website and Substack.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.