Forever and Ever?
My three-year-old won’t poop on the potty.
“I’ll do that when I am five,” she says. Feet plunged to the floor,
she conjures what-ifs and fishes for guarantees.
She is afraid of the splash, the mouth-pipe’s black hole,
of how matter, just, disappears. What happens “after?”
She does not want to be Big.
I want her to stay Small too.
We both want assurances—
me, to spoon feed her certainty like cashew butter
or wholegrain oats with honey.
She poops in her diaper at naptime, under a magic fairy tent—
a flimsy, four-sided promise she is safe.
Zipped in, she controls our dance:
I knock. She giggles. I wipe. “One more hug?” she asks
under a smattering of glow-in-the-dark ceiling stars.
When I was young, at the top of Salinger’s hill,
my mother showed me the Milky Way.
“You can’t outgrow God,” she said, arms in an up-stretched Y.
“He is always here.” She pointed to the night sky.
I wondered where, exactly, and How. Did. She. KNOW?
“Will you still be my mommy?”
my daughter asks before the No Diaper Countdown.
Of course, I tell her, forever and ever.
She rips toilet paper into tiny constellations,
watches them swirl around and around in the toilet bowl.
________________________________
My three-year-old refused to poop on the potty for a year. It started out as a preference (“I’ll just poop in my diaper at nap time”) and – as the habit cemented into a control mechanism and therefore, a security system—it turned into a phobia: “No! No! I will NOT poop on the potty. That’s not today, right? I don’t have to do that today, right? I’ll do that when I am five.” There was a disproportionate fervor—an almost terror—under her refusal that I did not understand.
Because we were navigating so much stress—the unknown trajectory of the pandemic, the birth of my son, the bereavement of two family members and her Godmother—I didn’t push it. Pooping was the least of our issues. I felt reassured because many of my mom friends told me that their kids pooped during nap for a while before learning to use the toilet. I assumed it would work itself out, over time.
But it didn’t. As the world and her world changed, my daughter processed much of her stress by controlling the conditions in which she pooped. She would wait all morning to get into her crib at naptime. As soon as I shut the door, she would hold onto the railing, jump up and down, and go. I’d dutifully re-enter to change her diaper and say goodnight, again. For a while it was a functional system; we were not travelling because of Covid so we didn’t have to be flexible. But last winter—nine months after her initial potty training—it became a problem.
“I didn’t go sledding today because I had an owie in my belly,” she told me one day after preschool. We were driving home. In the rearview mirror, I could see her holding her beltline like a beachball. “I just told Miss Susan, ‘no thanks.’”
“You said no thanks to sledding?” I cocked my eyebrow. This was very unlike her; she asked to go sledding multiple times a day at home. It was one of her favorite activities.
“I didn’t want to,” she said and looked at the ground the way she does when she’s not telling the truth.
“What happened to the poop?” I asked.
Her eyes opened wide. She stopped talking. I could see the machinery of her mind calculating how to say it wasn’t there anymore. She burst into tears. “It’s gone! It’s gone! It went away!”
“Sweetie, poop doesn’t just disappear…”
When I parked the car, she planted herself in her car seat. Body shaking, tears flowing, she flat-out refused to go near the potty. She wailed that she was too afraid of the splash. “What if it gets my bum?”
I knew the “splash” was the only tangible thing she could articulate—the only excuse that sounded plausible enough to justify how poop-avoidant she had become. But I could not get to what was really going on—what I knew was the tip of the iceberg. The bathroom scene ended the way most of them did: with her sitting on the toilet seat crying, me at her feet waiting, both of us frustrated with our powerlessness.
*
Eventually, my husband and I consulted a child therapist. She confirmed that my daughter was hanging on to one thing she could control in the face of so much change. That this was a normal response to grief in children. “She’s looking for ways to feel safe,” the therapist said. “She’s not old enough to understand permanence, or mortality, and so she’s controlling one of the only things she can--her bowels. The problem is, it’s disempowering her.” Both my husband and I nodded. We constructed a plan to take away the diapers, one at time.
The same week of the No Diaper Countdown, I read an article called “The Givenness of God.” In it, theologian Howard Thurman talked about the origins of his mystical experiences with God. He writes about a boyhood moment with his mother, watching the Halley’s Comet in the night. As he watched the comet streak across the sky, he asked his mother, “What will happen to us when that thing falls out of the sky?”
This nervous, worst-case thinking resonated. A child asking a specific question, about a specific situation, and yet desiring the most universal response to a fearful heart: certainty, assurance, security. The question, at its truest core, “Am I going to be okay?” Thurman’s mother answered him by confirming the most certain thing she knew: “God will take care of us.” This explanation birthed in him “a quiet reassurance” that never went away. It planted a seed that our deepest unknowing can be calmed by a source beyond ourselves—a source we so often experience first through our mothers, the embodiments of the Divine Feminine.
The exchange between Thurman and his mother reminded me of two things: the question my daughter was not asking when she refused to poop on the potty: (“Am I going to be fundamentally okay when I get up this control?”) and a moment I asked the same of my own mother, more than thirty years ago.
I must have been seven or so. I cannot remember what I was worried about, because I worried a lot, but one hot summer night, I told my mother I was scared. I expected her to hug me, as she so often did. Instead, she grabbed her car keys off the counter and said, “Let go to Salinger’s Hill.”
Salinger’s Hill was a steep hill half a mile from our house. In my pajamas, I loaded into her station wagon. She drove me to base of the hill. Together, we climbed up and looked up at the emerging planetarium of stars.
“God is here,” my mother said and pointed to the Milky Way. It’s the first I remember her talking of God, so while she looked at the cosmos, I looked at her. There was something so awe-filled in her tone that I felt the magnetic need to understand.
“Where?” I asked. I reached for her hand.
“Here.” She put her arms up, into a Y shape. “There.” She pointed to the stars. “Everywhere, sweetie. You can’t outgrow Him.” She gazed with such reverence and wonder and connection that whatever issue was churning in my smallness fell away. She often spoke of how God was Love and Love was God, so she might have said something about that. But whatever her words, this is what I heard: there is fundamental goodness in the world. There is order. You are going to be okay.
It would be decades before I understood this moment’s mystical connection to my own life, to my daughter: that, as small children, we need to hear of the givenness of something greater than ourselves—of the essential nature of knowing that despite the whirling situations around us, all is well and all will be well despite the inevitable changes of life.
That we are being taken care of.
It the seeming unrelatedness of my daughter’s refusal to poop on the potty and this theological commentary that intrigues me: the interplay of the ordinary and the extraordinary; the specific in service to the universal; the desire to know—that quest for spirit security from the very beginning of life, before we have the cognitive ability to articulate this need. The layers upon layers of defenses we erect around our innermost journey to Source. How underneath it all there is relief in the feeling of being held by more than the human experience.
That moment on Salinger’s Hill, under the Milky Way, I saw in my mother what I had only witnessed when she talked about how much she loved me and my brother: a sureness. An unbreakable, unequivocal, ineffable certainty. Like Thurman, whose Haley’s Comet experience with his mother kindled a Divine spark in him, a concept planted itself in me that night: I would be okay, no matter what. I did not know how. I did not know when. But I did know there was a way.
But I needed to hear it, in a human voice, and I needed to hear from the person who was the closest thing I knew to God: my mother.
*
After I read the Thurman article, I began to comprehend the spiritual significance of what my daughter was processing by refusing to poop on the potty and my whole energetic stance changed from enforcer to curious and reassuring message-bearer. As if in an instant, I began to see her increasing dependence on me as an existential question: what IS secure?
In a world that felt shifty to her, two things were constant: me and her diapers. Both, in her mind, were inseparable from her wellbeing. Both needed to remain unchanging to protect her safety. It was as if she were imagining the era of “After Diapers” to be life-threateningly worse than “Before Diapers.” Her mind began to tell her she was not safe, which no amount of logic or rationale could calm.
And so one day, I asked her: “what are you afraid of besides the splash?”
She ripped the toilet paper into tiny pieces. “Hmmm.”
“What do you think will happen after that?” I sat on the stool below her ankles.
“Well…”
I put my hand on her foot.
She swayed from side to side, looking at me and then away. “Will you still be my Mommy?”
And there it was: the primary and primal fear we had been dancing around for a year in which she had been introduced to the concept of death as unpredictable and irreversible and, to her three-year-old mind, incomprehensible. She needed to hear that her mother—her closest incarnation to security—was going to love her, was still going to be here, after she stopping using diapers.
“Yes,” I told her and scooped her off the toilet to sit in my lap. I stroked the small blonde hairs around her ears. “Even after you start pooping on the potty, I am going to be your mommy.”
She sunk into my chest, “Promise?”
“Yes, sweetie,” I told her. “Forever and ever.”
She didn’t say a word—just breathed quietly and hold onto my pinky.
“Nothing can separate you from how much I love you,” I told her. “Love is like God—it’s everywhere and it never ends. I’ll still be here after you stop using diapers. And no matter what, everything is going to be okay.”
She rocked back and forth on my lap. “Tell me again,” she said. And I so I did. Again and again and again.
Three days later she pooped on the potty.
