Maternal guilt, my daughter’s new specialty

She played me like a fiddle. My precocious, clever toddler daughter has figured out how to lay on the guilt like an expert, although I’m sure her intent wasn’t to hurt, and I’m not even sure she knows she did it. Not just with sad puppy eyes and crocodile tears, but with words that stabbed like so many arrows STRAIGHT to the heart. And believe me, I suffer from my fair share of maternal guilt, so this poses a new! exciting! fun! parenting challenge.

She had been having trouble listening today, lots of touching things I had repeatedly asked her to leave alone, lots of ignoring my requests, just testing the boundaries again. When do they stop doing that? 25? 30? I was already quite cross with her when my potty-trained child then had an accident on the floor of the bathroom, just shy of 2 feet from the potty where she had been playing for several minutes with her tub toys. File this under “Things You Shouldn’t Do as a Parent,” but I got frustrated and really upset and raised my voice. I know, I know, not good. Especially because when I got upset, she got upset, and my goal here isn’t to give my kid a complex about the potty. I asked her to stand there, wet, while I cleaned up. I told her that if she couldn’t use the potty, she needed to wear a diaper (which she HATES) because peeing on the floor isn’t okay. I told her that kids who can’t use the potty can’t do lots of fun things like go to school; this didn’t make her happy. I cleaned her up, put a diaper on her, which also made her unhappy, and I explained that she could pee and poop in the diaper, which she vehemently did not want to do. Clearly I am NOT any kind of parenting genius. After much back and forth about the diaper issue, she insisted that she didn’t want to pee in her diaper, she wanted to pee in the potty. I took her back to the potty, where she did pee just a bit more. When she was wiped and dressed again, she was practically giddy with excitement.

“I peed in the potty ALL BY MYSELF.”

“Yes, you did.”

“I’m SO happy.”

“I’m very glad you’re happy.”

“Mama, are YOU happy?”

Uh oh… “Honey, I’m not happy that you peed on the floor, but I’m glad you told me you had to go potty again.”

Please note that at this point, I’m already feeling pretty rotten about how I handled the situation and strategizing about how not to be an asshole the next time it happens.

In her most sacchariney sweet voice she follows up with this: “Mama, I just want to make you happy.”

If the coroner asks, tell him I died of guilt.

But is she done? No. Nyet. Nein. “Mama, when I say ‘I love you,’ it makes you happy. Mama, I love you.”

So, yeah, ouch. She’s totally got me pegged, and what can I do at this point but have a long conversation with her about how lots of things make mama happy like when she’s a good listener, and when she’s kind to her friends, and when she shares her toys, and yes, of course when she says ‘I love you.’ Then we follow that up with a conversation about how it’s okay for people to get sad and angry, including her and all her favorite people in the world, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t love each other. Then we talk about how mama loves her all the time, even when she’s not a good listener, or when she has accidents, or when she doesn’t share. Then we talk some more about how we’ll work together to make sure she continues to use the potty like a big girl, and mama is really sorry she raised her voice. Hopefully this was a reasonably good save after a decidedly lame parenting decision. She, of course, seemed perfectly fine, but I have to be grateful that kids are smart and resilient and that I don’t always have my head shoved halfway up my ass.

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