I am about to make a confession; the same confession which, when I made it to a girlfriend who has a daughter the same age as Keira, was enough for her to reach out and grasp my shoulders and say, “Oh, Thank God it’s happening to you too. I thought it was just us.”
And that is: Keira, on the verge of her fourth birthday, is (on some days) still going through upwards of six/seven/or even eight pairs of underpants…
Important note: …and let’s just say they’re not very clean.
We often call ourselves or other people anally retentive; in this case, it’s the literal truth.
I can stand in front of her and cajole, plead, bargain, bribe and eventually scold and get angry but none of that budges her brain to say to the colon: RELEASE!
So she sits there, often crying, but the whole bathroom now reeks because there are poo skids everywhere and she yells, “It just won’t come out!”
And I return, “Yes it can!”
But after five minutes I get tired of this farce, and I haven’t got the time to fight because Riley’s off painting the walls or getting into my computer files or some such diabolical naughtiness, so I say, “Fine, next time” and she gets down and her whiney voice immediately perks up and she says, “What we doing now, mum?”
Then we’re back there 20 minutes later for another instalment of the same debacle.
I’ve read that this is just a natural stage that kids go through; that, to channel Freud, they go through some sort of physiological reasoning that sometimes it feels nice to ‘hold the poo in’ (eugh). This may or may not be true, but I would extend the point to add that by doing so they also come to realise it aggravates off your parents.
And aggravating your parents also = getting extra attention off them.
So part of me just thinks I should completely ignore it when this happens and hum and sing like Maria von Trapp when I’m wiping shit off the toilet seat. This is also the part of my brain which tells me I should eat bulghur wheat more often; that I should blend my own wheatgrass and get up at 5am and do yoga.
In other words, the part of my brain I too easily ignore.
Instead, my temper snaps and I find myself saying positively unrealistic and unfair things like: “You’re nearly four! Shouldn’t you be too old for this?”
Until my friend said the same thing, I thought I was alone. Perhaps I’m not.
But it doesn’t make this battle any easier, I’m afraid.
