Oh Crap! Potty Training

resistance to actually sitting on the potty. Some children will say a
variation of, “my bum hurts.” Or she may say nothing, and there’s
just no poop.
The trick here to remember, right from the get-go, is that poop is
personal, in a very primal way. I think we as adults understand that
when it comes to ourselves, but somehow we forget it when it comes
to kids. Poop is one of the few things we can truly call our own.
Here’s another way to look at it: it’s said that the mouth and teeth
are highly emotional, which is why so many people panic at a trip to
the dentist. It’s an orifice. It’s mine. Don’t go in there. Right? Well
that’s an orifice everyone can see, for gawd’s sake! The butt hole was
not meant for scrutiny. And yet, here we are all up in our kids’
business and what they keep up there. This whole process was kept
tucked away in a diaper—of course, you did change the diaper, but
you had no part in how the poop came out, right? You had no idea
how the process worked for your kid. You probably saw a “poop face,”
but that’s just when it got pushed out. We have no idea how long it
took to “park itself on the off ramp.” So now you start potty training
and it’s like this glaring spotlight has now been put on your kid’s butt
and what it produces.
Let’s take another minute to talk about that glaring spotlight on
an otherwise, private function. The anus is a sphincter muscle. It
opens and closes with emotion. [This is one of my favorite lines in
this book—I’m even thinking of getting T-shirts made. Because I am
not well.]
I’ll give you an example by way of another big sphincter muscle:
the cervix. The cervix is one of the major muscles responsible for a
baby’s journey out into the world. Ina May Gaskin, a world-renowned