It's my potty and I'll cry if I want to
That’s because I feel compelled to relate my experience in going on a family vacation last week with my son Tim, who turned 3 on the trip and began potty training just last month. I realize this was asking for trouble; family vacations are challenging enough without throwing potty training into the mix. It’s like those people in the IMAX movies who insist on climbing Mt. Everest without oxygen tanks.
After all, think about it: Thanks to the miracle of diapers, for almost three years a child’s potty schedule is dictated by mere whim. Then, suddenly, we expect them to recognize a potty emergency in the offing, relay that information in a coherent way — typically by declaring “I have to go on the potty!” with the approximate urgency of John Paul Jones saying “I have not yet begun to fight!” — and then keep things in check until such potty is located. It’s amazing adults can even do it.
I was mercifully spared much of this experience with my daughter, thanks to my claim that viewing the inside of a men’s room could cause her untold psychological scarring. (I know it certainly hasn’t done me any good.) No such luck with my son, though: His journey into the potty wilderness is taking place with me as his primary guide. And let me tell you, if potty sherpas had a union, I’d probably have filed a grievance by now.
But over the course of our trip to Storyland, Santa’s Village and Six-Gun City, not to mention more than a few restaurants and stores, I ran into an unexpected development: Tim, being new to the potty, found the rest rooms equally if not more fascinating than the water slides and the giant plastic Humpty Dumptys. After all, he had never before experienced an automated hand dryer, the exotic hot-air-blowing device that, as he quickly discovered, also works on your head. If it happens to be wet.
He also got introduced to the concept of the urinal; upon first sighting one he stopped, pointed and exclaimed “WHAT’S THAT?,” like Ponce de Leon stumbling across the Fountain of Youth. His desire to utilize this new technology was fine in parks like Santa’s Village, where the urinals are suitably elfin, but not so much in restaurants and other places where they’re at a more typical height. And this is not a fight you want to have with your 3-year-old after he has just consumed an entire carafe of apple juice.
But I’m happy to report that in the end, there were no major potty incidents. This despite the fact that I spent a large portion of our vacation darting to the closest previously scoped-out men’s room, Tim under one arm and my other arm extended fully outward for optimum door-opening. I looked like the Heisman Trophy.
Ironically, in fact, I didn’t run into any real potty problems until a trip to the mall after we returned home. I was lifting Tim onto the potty for what was probably the 100th time that week, when I somehow managed to throw out my back. But as I practically collapsed, my son — now a potty expert — went about his business on his own, right up through the automated hand-drying. And you know what? It was the proudest moment a father could have while on the floor of a Brigham’s men’s room.
No matter what that lady from Newburyport says.