Jake took a bath last night for the first time in a week.
This fact is notable for three reasons. First, he is generally quite fond of the tub, so a one-week boycott is a serious thing indeed. Second, the fact that I was able to ease him back into the tub wearing a swim diaper adorned with Winnie the Pooh suggested that he might one day overcome the Poop in the Bathtub debacle I inflicted on him, oh, last time he voluntarily took a bath. Third, of course, is that he has taught me a big lesson about giving and receiving.
The Debacle Explained
The Poop in the Bathtub debacle is, perhaps, one of those stories that those without children might feel inclined to skip. And, in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that it is likely to include scatalogical details that I have lost the capacity to even notice, much less flinch at. But the larger point, should you be able to stomach the path to it, isn't about parenthood, so much as the life lessons that parenthood frequently teaches with alarming forcefulness.
The debacle of the Poop in the Bathtub debacle is not that Jake pooped in the bathtub. That has happened before and, depressingly, will likely happen again. The debacle part is how I had been planning to use this event—and indeed did use it—with devastating effects.
Jake has, you see, been giving signs of moving—in toddler steps—toward toilet training. More specifically, for the past couple of months, he has, from time to time, announced, "Diaper wet."
This is a big deal if you have been changing diapers many times a day for going on two years. It is an even bigger deal when you fancy yourself the kind of parent who waits for her child's natural cues to approach such big moves as eating solid food, drinking from a cup, and, yes, toilet training.
And so, I give no thought to the sharp increase in the fortune I will now spend on diapers and instead immediately respond to, "Diaper wet," with a hearty cry of, "Let's go to the potty to change it!"
Jake gets the going to the bathroom to stand up while his mother changes his diaper part. But he doesn't seem to put it together with the lovely blue Bjorn potty I put in there for him. He's perfectly happy to sit on the potty fully clothed and even, from time to time, naked from the tub. But ask him if he'd like to sit on the potty during a "Diaper wet" episode, and he'll fix me with a look of wonderment that anyone could suggest something so illogical.
As I said, this has been going on for a couple of months now, so, naturally, I began to suspect I needed to help him get to the next level. "If only he goes on the potty once," I said to Mike in one of those conversations that rudely shifts him the moment he arrives home from the adult world of work to the two-year-old's home in which he now lives, "I know he'll get the concept."
Thus was born the bathtub idea.
As I mentioned, Jake has pooped in the bathtub on more than one occasion. In fact, he had been doing it with increasing frequency, but always with the warning announcement, "Diaper wet." Easy enough, I reasoned. I'll just take his cue.
And so, last week, poor Jake made the mistake of saying, "Diaper wet," in the tub.
In a flash, I pounced on him, cackling, "DIAPER WET?!" and whisked him, wet and confused, from the tub to the potty, a trail of not-in-the-potty-poop trailing disconcertingly behind him.
When Jake had finished screaming sufficiently to stand up and reveal that he had, indeed, pooped in the potty, he was met with a new eruption of yells from both his parents. "You pooped in the potty!" we screamed, our eyes bulging in what I'm sure was more of a frightening than a congratulatory manner. "Jake pooped in the potty!"
Apparently, when both your parents are yelling at you about pooping in the potty while you stand, dripping wet, shivering, and crying in the middle of the bathroom floor, you take one clear message away: You will never, ever, poop in either the bathtub or the potty again.
Little did I know that this was the lesson I had taught as I cuddled my finally dry and dressed (and, yes, diapered) little boy into my arms and Mike asked, "How exactly are we supposed to clean this thing?"
Ah, the mysteries of parenthood.
Jake's Bathtub Gift
I figured out—far, far too late—what I had done a night or two later when I tried to give Jake a bath.
"No! NO!" he yelled as I dangled his feet over the water he usually loves so well. "Hot! HOT!"
The water wasn't too hot. I know this because he did the same thing the following night when I tried to introduce him to a tub of tepid water. And the next night when his hair began to look a tad greasy to me and I reached the point of begging him to at least consider a quick dip. And the next night when he was quite amused to watch me get into his tub and play with his toys but not the least bit moved to join me.
"I think he's afraid of the potty," I moaned to Mike. "I've put off his potty training by a good year."
Mike assured me that Jake still likes to sit on his potty, as long as he does it of his own volition and with his pants safely pulled up. And, it's true, pointedly moving the potty into the hallway before attempting a bath didn't budge Jake one inch from his firm position on the subject.
Wednesday night I took the limited but human approach. I staked out my own counter-position and tried to scheme a way into getting Jake to accept it.
Despite his clearly expressed protests, I put Jake in the tub. He stood there, up to his knees in water, and cried. He threw one leg over the side of the tub and reached around my neck for ballast, trying to pull himself out. Luckily for me—but not for him—we have a claw-foot tub that is too far off the ground for such a simple maneuver to provide escape. This is what we parents call a negotiating advantage.
Instead, I did what I saw as a Very Good Mommy thing. I spoke to him gently. I told him he didn't have to worry about the potty. I smoothed warm water over his back with my hand. I even convinced him to stop crying before—defeated in war if not in battle—I took him out of the tub.
I did, however, gain one concession. "Do you think you can try this tomorrow with your swim diaper?" I asked.
Jake considered the question gravely. "Yes," he said, making no promises.
Jake Giving and Receiving
The reason Jake gave me his permission to try the bath one more time with a swim diaper was because I finally saw my way clear to receiving the messages he was giving me. Which, in turn, allowed me to give him something he needed.
One of Jake's repeated refrains as he tried to scramble up the cold metal walls of the tub had been, "Diaper on! Diaper on!"
Granted, toddlers offer us many words that indicate nothing more than raw desire. And, since toddlers don't comprehend much beyond their own raw desire, we are justified in frequently ignoring them.
But, I thought, as Jake said, "Diaper on!" one more time, maybe it was better to listen, even if I couldn't necessarily comply. Because actually listening was a way of honoring my child and his desires, toddler/caveperson-like as they may be.
How, I thought, could I grant him his "Diaper on!" wish while at the same time fulfilling my desire that he take a bath some time this month? Swim diapers of course.
In other words, once I was willing to receive what Jake was offering—his opinion of what he wanted and, indeed, needed in this bathtub time of strife—I found myself able to give something back to him. A chance to wear a diaper in the tub and, thus, avoid the terrifying prospect of another Poop in the Tub episode.
By the time bath time rolled around last night, I was wise enough not to count on success. All I could do, I understood, was receive what clues Jake provided me and give him what I thought he needed.
Indeed, he was initially skeptical of the swim diaper plan. On the one hand, the idea of taking a bath with a swim diaper seemed okay when he was fully clothed and merely watching the tub fill with no small amount of suspicion. On the other, once he was clad only in his swim diaper, he decisively reached for the doorknob and said, "Outside."
"Let's just try it," I coaxed. "In and out if you don't like it."
Such promises mean nothing to a toddler, merely proving that there are plenty of opportunities to ignore your child's expressions of desire—say, cries clearly conveying that he did not appreciate being picked up and placed in the bathtub.
For a while, it was all about standing knee deep in the water again. Only this time—a great triumph that would, honestly, have been enough for me—playing with the boats Grandma gave him held more appeal than trying to escape. And shooting baskets with the ball-shaped animals. When he said, "Cup, please!" I knew I was on my way.
I handed Jake the cup and noted how he was squatting to fill it with water, no longer concerned about the prospect of his bodily functions occurring while his bottom was in the bath water.
And then—oh, flash of Mommy brilliance—I began singing, "Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed," a song he loves that I had fortuitously just learned that morning.
Jake sang with me and sank happily into the tub, where he played for a good, long, swim-diaper-clad time.
The True Gift of Giving and Receiving
The lesson couldn't be clearer. It's not enough to give when you feel like it and in the way you want, and it's not realistic to expect that you will receive what you are asking for in return.
Giving and receiving are more interconnected than that; they are much bigger than that. You are, in a sense, a conduit for the larger, beautiful energy of giving and receiving that goes on around us. Not the battery that runs the whole program.
It's no secret that the only way to give meaningfully is from from your heart. If you don't really mean it, it isn't exactly a gift, even if it is, say, the new iPhone. And your heart, of course, isn't self-contained. It beats with the beauty and energy of the Universe. The reason we strive for an open heart in yoga is because we believe there is a little piece of god in every one of us, residing in our hearts. If we open ourselves to that connection, we find our own version of god, peace, beauty.
And—more to the point here—if you open your heart, you are ready to receive.
So, in a sense, before you can truly give, you have to be able to truly receive. Before I could give Jake what he wanted, I had to be open to receiving from him a clue as to what that was. And when you're dealing with a 23-month-old, something as simple as saying, "Diaper on!" is a huge gift. Ask anyone who has tried to get some semblance of meaning from a tantruming child. Or a sulking pet. Or a soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend.
It's when you are open to what is being offered—not equating reception with your own desires—that you are ready to give back fully. If you only see what you want, you will miss all the things being offered to you. If you don't see them, you can't receive them, and you can't give fully.
This is some comfort to me as I enter the deluge of pre-Christmas messages about donating to charity instead of giving gifts. I have a two-year-old child. How am I supposed to explain to him the joy of my making a donation in his name to a children's shelter? It's not what he needs.
True, he doesn't need a million gifts, only a few really special things for which he's shown fondness and developmental readiness—an easel for doing art, a toy train starter set, some new books. And, equally true, that children's shelter could use my donation. But, see, I can give both from my heart when I'm open to the needs of both.
And here—free of any of the approaching holiday sentiments—is the really beautiful, almost shameful, part. Once I give from the heart, I'm going to receive something beautiful. A boy playing in the bath. Or—hooray!—sleeping through the night for the first time all week. Or something else that I almost feel I don't deserve because, after all, I gave a gift because that's what my heart prompted me to do. Not because I expected anything in return.
And that, in the end, is the joy of the Universe, of parenthood, of love.
A Meditation of Giving and Receiving
I offer here a simple meditation on giving and receiving. It can unfold in different ways; part of its beauty is in letting go of expectations and seeing how your nature truly works, how your energy unfolds.
It also, by the way, feels good, both physically and spiritually. Which, as cold weather descends and cyncial calls to stimulate the economy with the usual holiday purchases ring out and end-of-the-year scrambles to donate to charity for the less than noble purpose of tax deductions tickle at you, is a gift you can both give yourself and receive fully, with all your heart.
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