Potty Training: The Actual Worst

I am of the general belief that babies are easier than toddlers, or at least a very different kind of hard. The first few months of parenting are a special kind of terrifying hell, but once you get through that, babies aren't too awfully difficult. They require most of your time and energy, but they are basically fussy, wiggly potatoes. Babies don't argue with you, throw things at you, tell you what to wear, and refuse to eat anything but Goldfish and apple sauce. Teething and sleep regression are a nightmare, but they pass after a couple weeks (hopefully). Snuggle that baby while you can, because soon it will be a talking, walking little ball of emotion. Picture a teenager trapped in tiny body with limited language. My daughter is bright and funny, and about the most pig headed little thing you ever saw, just like her Daddy. Fortunately, like him, she's generally charming enough to get away with it.

Enter Potty Training. My daughter has always been ahead of the curve, so I was pretty sure once she "got it," we would have this potty training thing down in days. That was SIX MONTHS ago. She acted excited and fully on board, so I took this as a sign of readiness. That first day, we broke out the stickers and sat on the potty over and over, she even peed in it. Half way through Day 2, she announced "I don't want to use the potty. Don't give me stickers. I want a diaper" and stuck to that with all her will. We put it off until after moving and getting settled in the new house. Time to try again. After a couple of days,  she was once again over it. The kid happily pees in her new panties, refuses any matter of treats, and could care less whether or not Big Girls, Elsa, or anyone else uses the potty. She will simply say "Elsa uses the potty, I wear diapers. I WANT A DIAPER! An actual diaper, Mom." (My daughter for real talks like this).

I decided not to make it a thing, but I kind of did anyway. Between nannying for 5 years then having a baby, I have been cleaning up poop that isn't my own for 7 years. If there will be a baby #2, I kind of need a break from shit before I commit to another 3+ years of it. Since my daughter and I are home most of the day, I put her in panties and told her she could sit on the potty if she wanted to. After a couple days of peeing herself, she figured out her signals and would ask for a diaper when she needed to pee. Instead, we sat on the potty, she didn't pee, and went happily back to playing. What didn't occur to me was that after a few days of not peeing all day, she could get a freaking UTI. Mother. Of. The Year. 

Before having kids, and even in the early days, I was one of those intolerable parenting experts. Now I get it. The Toddler Years have broken me down. (And we haven't hit three yet!) Sometimes as a parent you have no idea what the actual fuck you are doing. Your kid doesn't care about your preparations and research.  Then, once you get your kid figured out, they go and grow on you and turn in to a different person. You have to teach a tiny person how to do Person Things, like use a fork, zip a jacket, and poop in a receptacle. That tiny person will have their own ideas about how every bit of that will go. Since my daughter is clearly willing to hold pee to the point of pain for 8 hours, she can pee in the potty whenever she damn well chooses, or not...ever. I'll sit back and laugh when she explains her Depends to her boyfriend one day.

When I Need Forgiveness from My Kid

It started out with good intentions. On a rainy fall day, I thought it would be fun to bake and decorate sugar cookies with my three-year-old. Sure, they would be a little messy and have lots of rainbow sprinkles, but it would be charming and fun.

I have OCD and Anxiety Disorder.
(And even without those things, general parenting is super freaking hard.)
She's a strong-willed three-year-old.
You can see where this is going.

I really try to cook with her and let her help me with chores, I feel like it's important to let her learn these skills. But she's three, so she does things wrong. Like, a LOT. And she takes forever. Like toddlers do. Right, learning to be a person is hard. I get that. Most of the time I can keep my cool.

Today was NOT one of those days. It started out that way. She wanted to make her own crazy creation, and I let her play around. Then it came to that magical moment I pictured, when we would decorate the lovely, charming little cookies together. We could deliver them to friends, and I could Instagram it.

Of course, all my three year old wanted to do was eat cookies, lick the frosting, and down handfuls of sprinkles. Things were straying from the plan. After she ate a couple cookies and too many sprinkles, it was time for our serious fun decorating. After asking her to stop eating everything over and over, then insisting that she stop or she couldn't help, I started to lose my shit.

She got sick of it, saying "No! No, Mommy! Stop, or you will have a time out!"
I didn't stop. I kept on saying over and over loudly "You don't get to help if you can't listen. Stop eating it all!"
To which she kept saying "Mommy, I said stop or you will have a time out! Stop, stop, stop!"
Switch tactics, then. I lowered my voice and kept saying the same thing, but I still didn't just stop.
She got kicked out of the kitchen, tears streaming down her face, and I stood there decorating cookies alone, which was super depressing.

I started thinking... maybe she wasn't wrong. Here she was, telling me to do exactly what I tell her to do when she loses control: stop talking and take a time out. So I did. I gave us each a break.

While eating cookies by myself, I realized that I was the one who ruined cookie time with expectations that weren't appropriate for a toddler who had a 7:30AM doctor appointment and no nap. I probably couldn't expect a toddler who is learning self-control to stand in front of cookies, frosting, and sprinkles and just decorate. I mean, I was sneaking eating dough, licking the frosting, and had already had a few cookies, too. Could I salvage this? If I really believe that kids learn best by modeling behavior, I should start there. I certainly hadn't listed or respected her.

So, I sat down with her, tears forming in my eyes, and said "baby, I am sorry I yelled at you and didn't listen to you."  Yes, she had made my frustrated, and part of me wanted to add "but you...," I stopped myself. I didn't try to justify what I did to make myself feel better.

"Do you forgive me?"
"I forgive you, Mommy."

I asked if she wanted to try decorating cookies again. This resulted in her trying to eat more cookies. I still stood firm to my boundary that she had had enough, but I didn't expect her to perform the way I wanted her to and I didn't lose it, She didn't freaking care about decorating cookies and happily went and played while I finished.

Did my daughter learn how to decorate cookies? No. But maybe she learned how to apologize. Little kids seem amazingly good at forgiveness on their own. What I learned may have been even more important.

Let me tell you, there are few things more humbling than admitting to my own tiny little child that I did something wrong, and admitting to myself that I hurt her feelings. But afterwards, I think both our hearts felt a lot better.

Secret's Out: Marriage Can Suck

Alright guys, I am going to write about marriage. Not because I am an expert, because I have the remotest advice, or because I have any answers. I am going to write about marriage because I am married, marriage is hard, and we need to talk about the fact that it is harder than we all expected it to be. We don't have to wait until we are old and our marriage is a "success," or until we have been divorced and our marriage has "failed" to talk about marriage. One of my favorite authors Glennon Doyle Melton says we need to talk about things "during the during." So, I am going to go balls out and do that.

"During the during" is probably the hardest time to open up. During when we are most vulnerable and, in the case of marriage or relationships, there are other people to protect. But here's what' I've noticed. My husband and I and most people we hang out with are 4-8ish years in to a marriage or committed relationship, have small kids, and talk about how hard it is to have kids, only touching on a recent fight we may have had with our spouse in a funny story. The kids are easy to talk about. We are all struggling with parenting and there's not that sense of betrayal when talking about the kids. Writing about parenting is easy. Writing about the hard days of parenting is harder. Writing about marriage feels terrifying. I am not here to betray my spouse or throw him under the bus. I'm not here to air our dirty laundry.

What I am here to do is tell the truth, because it's happened multiple times now. We hang out with other couples, joke about the kids, have a few drinks and talk about parenting and home improvement. Suddenly, one of those couples is divorced and we are all like "what the hell?" Then my husband and I have another fight a few days later, and we kind of know what could get us there. We wonder if someday that will be us. Divorce isn't something we want,  but it's something that is happening to a LOT of our friends who don't want it, either. My husband and I know that just like getting hit by a bus, we aren't immune. If we don't want hit by a bus too, it's time to start looking both ways before we cross the street.

I am not here to vilify marriage OR divorce.  If you are and older Millenial (late 20-early 30s) then you parents are Baby Boomers and they grew up in a time when divorce was riddled with shame, secrecy and blame. Divorce was more common among our Boomer parents, but was often still an indicator of "failure" and surrounded by shame. We are living in a time when the divorce rate is sitting comfortably at 50%. It sounds about right since at 32, I can name about half of my friends who are divorced. I am my husband's second wife. Many of my friends are on second marriages. An increasing number of my friends are choosing not to get married, and while their parents don't get it, their friends totally get it. Marriages and relationships end, each for different reasons, and I don't have the secret for a lasting marriage. What I do know is that divorce does not equate failure, and some marriages and relationships need to end, to be complete and final so both people can  move on. Some marriages don't have to end, there's things that can be worked out. Each couple has to decide that for themselves.

Everyone told us that marriage was going to be hard. And we were like "yeah, we TOTALLY see why it was hard for YOU. But look how much WE LOVE EACH OTHER!" HA! What young idiots we were. There is a reason that marriage vows say "for better or worse...until death do you part." The people who wrote it knew that shit was NECESSARY. I could pretty much write a book on all the things that we have been through that we weren't prepared for: deployment, moving, infertility, a kid, jobs, stress, money. Through it all, we have fought and cried, made love and thrown things, held hands and slammed doors, held each other tight and wanted out.

In a committed relationship, you are doing life with another person, a person who knows every bit of you. I mean KNOWS YOU. My husband knows what I look like when I REALLY cry, he has cleaned my diarrhea and vomit off the entire bathroom when I was sick, he's seen my body push out a bloody little human, he knows what my farts smell like, he knows my secrets. He's the one I go to. I'm the one he goes to. I've watched my husband brush his teeth, sleep, seen his anger and heart ache, his smiles and tears. I know when he's not telling me things and why that's okay. We have had the hardest conversations we have ever had with another person with each other. My husband and I are also both super passionate people. We each have two states: calm and losing our shit. He gets mad, I act like the world is ending. When you put two firecrackers together with that level of intimacy, it can be amazingly exciting or a flat out shit storm.

And here we are, DURING THE DURING. In the midst of a marriage. But is it a "hard marriage" or just "marriage?" Honestly, my friends and I don't talk about how HARD marriage is, so I don't have any way to gauge it. I think that's one big reason we should talk about it with other people we love and trust. We should share with others without blame, without vilifying, without throwing each other under the bus. Our partners are our partners. That means we keep each other's secrets and we tell each other how we are feeling. But that doesn't mean we need to pretend to our best friends or family that it's all fine, like we don't feel really lonely sometimes despite having someone to share it all with. There will be fights, there will be make-ups. For some, there will be divorce, for others not. I do think if we pretend like everything is fine, it will all be a lot less fine.

Marriage is hard, guys. Parenting is hard. This shit is sometimes absolutely terrible. Let's not just pretend like it's all sunshine and fucking roses. Let's be real with those we love and who care about our relationships and start talking about it during the during instead of just the before or the after.

THAT Woman at the Gym

In the last year I have put on some weight. We all do, it happens. I'm trying not to let it stress me out. I started exercising and stopped eating entire boxes of Triscuits. Since we moved to a new town and I am a social little butterfly, I joined our county's little YMCA so I can do Zumba and make friends. I also started doing Jillian Michael's DVDs. I've always leaned towards the fun dancey classes or extreme scary classes. If I am going to work out, I either need to be having lots of fun with a group for accountability, or have someone yelling at me and trying to kill me. It's one extreme or the other or I will just quit. Put me on a treadmill and I will promptly get off out of boredom and lack of discipline.

The first few weeks of Zumba were awkward trying to get the steps down. I've never been great at shaking my ass (not for lack of ass but for lack of coordination). My old gym in the burbs was huge with tiny people in expensive outfits, so I love our Y where everyone seems to be my age or older and about my pace. There's usually less than 20 in my class and everyone is super sweet.

After a month in Zumba, I am pretty sure I am killing it. I have the moves down, I can shake and do the turns, and I'm rocking my neon Danskin work out clothes from Walmart. The year I spent in junior varsity show choir is clearly paying off. I have even moved out of the back row.

Then, she shows up. We all know who SHE is. Beautiful, wearing tiny shorts, skinny and toned. Cellulite takes one look at her and runs. She can jump higher, shake it better, squat lower, and looks sexy when she sweats. What does she do to look like that? Clearly I am not working hard enough. There must be secret rooms in gyms where the really fit people can nap, drink energy drinks and protein shakes and just never have to leave. How can I gain access to this room?. I start messing up moves, I am aware of every jiggle, I avoid my reflection, and I can only think about her.

Just like that, she stole my Zumba vibe. I'm not having fun, I keep tripping because I am glancing at her. I'm thinking about what she must be doing.

Of course, she wasn't the problem. I am pretty sure she wasn't like "hey, I am going to go be awesome in here for a while to make people feel bad about themselves." The problem was me. I was having an awesome time until I gave in to MY insecurities. She's probably a lovely person. It doesn't matter that she looks different than me. Comparing myself to this stranger, I allowed myself to ruin my own night. I stole my own confidence. I stole my own Zumba vibe.

When a new woman walks in to the room, she is the enemy until we can find something wrong with her. The skinnier, prettier, and more she appears to have her shit together, the worse she must be. After focusing on how much better she was than me, my next instinct was to speculate what could be wrong with her to make her less intimidating. Let me tell you, this is bullshit. This hurts us all, this keeps us down. This keeps us separate.

I decided I wasn't going to let my own issues with my weight, body and post-pixie mullet stop me. Comparing myself to her did NOTHING for me but make me hate her and hate myself for the entire class. It was completely pointless. Comparison and self doubt take an enormous amount of energy and time commitment. So what is she is not only pretty and fit but also happens to be successful AND nice? Good for her.

I decided my future Zumba classes were going to be for me. I wasn't going to look at anyone else. I moved myself to the front row so I could focus on getting the steps down and not be able to see anyone else. There was just me, cha-cha-ing to Pit Bull. Putting on a smile, I thought only about feeling good and dancing. I talked to other people after. It was an amazing time and left feeling exhilarated.

There's always going to be someone better than me. There are better writers, better Zumba-ers, usually better dressers. Who cares? I do not need to be them, I don't need to hate them or compare myself to them for motivation.

Someone else being themselves doesn't make me less me.
One thing I know I can do well is rock the shit out of being myself.