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It was late. Maybe 10 P.M. Maybe 11. Time starts to run together when you’re trying to put a child to bed in a dark room. It’s like being in a casino. When you finally leave, your eyes squint at the light, wondering how much time you lost. My daughter, Grace was 3 years old and loved being a big sister to her newborn brother, Mason. What she didn’t love was getting less attention from Mommy.
I love my daughter, and she loves me, but going from a 50/50 attention share between my wife and me to 95 percent Dad-time was a deal killer. She chose the location and time for the battle to enact her resistance. Her bedroom. Bedtime.
There is no reasoning with an overtired child.
They don’t care that sleep helps them grow up big and strong. Or that dreams are like a movie they can watch while they sleep. Or that when they wake up, they get to go to school and see their friends.
As Grace bounced off the walls in a manic fit, all I could do was keep my back to the door and repeat calmly that it was bedtime.
Grace is used to getting her way. For all intents and purposes, I’ll do whatever she says. Some might say I am a pushover. I like to think that I am water. Instead of banging against a rock in a river, I flow around it. I keep things moving. But tonight this water was wearing her down like the Colorado River wore down the Grand Canyon. There were long sobs. Tears rolled down her face. After spending all her energy, eventually she gave in. Grace walked over to me, prepared to accept the inevitable sleep with which we all indulge.
I sensed that victory was within my grasp.
I imagined returning to my own bed and watching an episode of Game of Thrones as I dozed off. But as Grace approached, she did something I couldn’t have anticipated. She wiped the tears out of her eyes, and with that wet hand, slapped me across the face.
I don’t know if you’ve ever been slapped in the face, but it is the most disrespectful way to get attacked. If you get punched, they say, “That guy can take a punch!” But if you get slapped, they say, “That guy got slapped like a chump!” The only thing worse than getting slapped in the face is getting slapped in the face with a wet hand. Like a wet towel rolled up and snapped, stinging nerds in a locker room shower. That pain can last for years.
Up to the moment Grace struck, I didn’t know there was something worse than a wet slap to the face. Then I found out the secret ingredient to total disrespect: when the moisture comes from a child’s tears.
As a parent, you would do anything to stop your child from feeling pain.
And the psychological turmoil of knowing that you are the reason they are crying is a burden I wish on no one. But to have that turmoil manifest into the physical world as tears wetting a hand, a hand delivering a slap, that is the eye of newt that brings this spell of disrespect to a frothing bubble.
As my face heated up, red from the imprint of a tiny hand, I immediately felt sympathy for anyone who has been pushed past their limit. Any mere mortal who couldn’t resist the caveman urges to retaliate against a less powerful instigator. I once heard the author, George Saunders talk about writing a villain. He proposed that all villains start out too generic and only when you rewrite them closer to yourself, with problems that you can understand, do you have a compelling bad guy. In the immediate moment after “the slap heard round the bedroom” I knew the evil that lies in men’s hearts.
I thank the Gods that I had the wherewithal to remember my daughter is a little angel who was overtired and frustrated. She didn’t have the words to express herself, so she used her hand.
The flash of emotion and confusion came and went. It led to laughter and then to me cradling my daughter and rocking her to sleep. This wasn’t the last time my daughter would own me in her third year.
Chekhov’s Gun is my best analogy for teaching a child to use the bathroom.
Yes, the old playwriting trope in which any mundane scene becomes more dramatic if the audience knows there is a loaded gun in the room. When you know at any point you could be cleaning up piss and poop from your child, her clothes and the floor, furniture, God knows what else, it can make you insane.
A child doesn’t have control over much. They do control when and where they go to the bathroom. At Grace’s school they say the majority of kids learn how to use the toilet around 2 years old. With this assurance, we had a Laissez-faire attitude to potty training, or as her school called it, toilet learning. We would let the invisible hand of Montessori teaching usher our child to the bathroom. And it started to work. Grace saw other kids using the toilet and started to use it herself.
Then, Grace just decided she would rather pee in her pants.
Functionally, she knew how to use the toilet; she just didn’t want to. This presented its first complication just before the start of summer. We had booked a summer camp months in advance where she had to be out of diapers. My wife and I are optimists, so, when the first day of camp started, we sent her in underwear and hoped for the best.
The first week of camp included multiple accidents at camp and at home. We were politely told the camp wasn’t equipped to handle Grace, but looked forward to her coming back the next year. The resistance was strong.
A sidenote on this story, the second day of camp when I dropped Grace off, the head counselor told me that a little boy followed her around like a puppy dog that first day. When the kid got home he would not stop talking about her to his Mom. I can only imagine the emotional trauma caused by Grace not returning to camp. One day, that kid will be on a psychiatrist’s couch and will pinpoint all of his relationship struggles to the girl that never came back when he was 3 years old.
Summer came and went and Grace was still not using the toilet.
The start of school was 2 weeks away, and Grace had to be potty trained to go back. We drew the final line in the sand. Two straight weeks of Chekhov’s gun to our head.
Grace became a maestro of where and when she would have an accident to prove her control. The most egregious came before bedtime one night. I repeatedly suggested Grace sit on the toilet. She repeatedly told me “No.” I sat on the floor of her room as she stood next to her bed.
Grace started singing one of her favorite songs from the movie, Moana. The words rang out, “I’ve been staring at the edge of the water / For as long as I can remember / Never really knowing why.” For a brief moment, Chekhov’s gun was gone and I reveled in the joy of my perfect singing daughter.
Then, her eyes locked on mine as she started the next verse.
“I wish I could be the perfect daughter.” Simultaneous to her singing the line, a stream of pee went down her leg to pool on the carpet. Never dropping eye contact with me she continued “But I come back to the water / No matter how hard I try.”
It was an epic power move. A last ditch shot at familial dominance. School started and again we sent Grace in underwear with our fingers crossed. This time the familiar setting and being surrounded by old friends let Grace relax. Accidents happened here and there, but we made it through the worst of it. Chekhov’s gun has been replaced by a fatherly shotgun ready for the next summer camp boy that professes his love for my daughter.
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