‘My daughter is a steel-willed potty refusenik’

She refuses again, of course, sticking her hand in my face in disgust at the notion. She would be maintaining furious eye contact were she not turning small, agitated circles across the floorboards, in a state of clear discomfort. It’s the kind of discomfort, we avidly point out, that might be greatly reduced if she would just sit on the potty and relieve her bladder of its burdens.

It is our third day of this round of potty training, itself the fourth we’ve mounted in the past six months. Our previous attempts have become the stuff of family legend. We’ve had charts on the fridge, two potties – one stationary, one portable – and a cushioned seat that sits atop our toilet in case she wants to feel “like a big girl”. All have been resounding, comical failures, which dragged on for a few days to a week, before delivering the clear, unambiguous message that nothing is working. At each such point, we packed it in and resolved to try again some months hence, once the pain, mess and tedium of our efforts retreated from memory. And now, three months after our last attempt, we’ve come to this: what we insist will be our final go-around, our last pitch to surrender nappies forever, or else give up and sign her on for a lifetime of resolute incontinence.

We began as soon as nursery ended on Friday, removing her nappy once home and telling her it would just be pants from now on. She buffered at this, clearly perturbed by the change in routine, and perhaps remembering the misery of our past few times on this merry-go-round. My wife, for reasons which remain unclear, told her we had no more money for nappies, perhaps in the hope that fiscal probity would work where talk of growing up, or becoming a big girl, had previously failed.

It appears such hopes were in vain. Teaching a child to use the toilet is a maddening experience at the best of times, but my daughter has no such times in mind. I’ve never met anyone as stubborn as her in my life. She is simply incapable of giving in, and has never stepped down from an argument, nor once consented to a single thing she hasn’t wanted to do in the first place, in her whole short, committed life. It’s a miraculous thing to behold. As someone who vacillates through this world, acceding to each new command and insult proffered his way like a weak-willed little worm, I have often wondered what it would be like to live, if only for one day, with her spellbinding fixity of purpose. To feel her iron will, to know an utterly indefatigable resolve.

For days now, presumably in maximal discomfort, she has refused to play ball. Over the course of this weekend, she has done one wee, and didn’t pass a number two, even overnight, from Friday to Sunday morning. Instead she fidgets and pirouettes, tracing figure eights across the carpet, refusing, on point of principle, to entertain our suggestions that she uses the potty we sit her on every 30 minutes.

This has not, in short, been a good time. There is obviously the surface-level unpleasantness of being forced to think and speak exclusively about bodily waste for several days, a not insignificant part of which is spent cleaning up said waste. But the real horror is the concentration it demands, the nerve-shredding attention which must be paid to your child’s every move, the constant, soul-sapping process of entreating them to do something they have no interest in doing, and which is next to impossible to describe to a three-year-old in the first place.

How, exactly, you might convey the internal muscular configurations necessary to release your bladder or bowel, becomes one fixation. How to counteract the psychological or emotional discomfort which arises from letting go, becomes another. The true discipline in potty training is not for your child at all, but for you, the parents, who cannot let your guard slip for a moment, and must invent new language to instruct a child to do something you never think about doing at all.

The first time she went in her potty, on Saturday evening, we cheered and clapped and roared. She seemed delighted, and we hoped a levee had finally broken. We were to be disappointed. Her fast resumed for the rest of the evening and all the way into Sunday. And then, unsupervised for one brief moment, she disappeared upstairs with peppery haste. Fearing she’d found a discreet corner in which to defecate uninterrupted, we scrambled after her.

There we found her in her bedroom, not in the act of discharging clandestine turds, but counting out gold coins from her little toy treasure chest.

She held a fistful toward us in her outstretched hand. “For nappies,” she said sternly, her will unbroken still.

Photograph by Getty Images