Was it worth it?

Baby B. (Can I still call him that? He now says, "I'm not a baby, Mama. I'm a big boy. I THWEE" and he holds out three fingers) turned three in early August. Two days later, I had to potty train him. He was starting his three-year-old program a few weeks later, and his school -- like every other preschool in the area -- requires three-year-olds to be potty-trained.

I briefly thought about just holding B. back and asking the preschool director to let him be in the "Almost 3s." If I did, he could go in pull-ups. It was a tempting choice. But the teacher I love teaches the 3s, and I am not sure whether I will send B. to Kindergarten "on time" or not (that's a whole 'nother Oprah show, if you know what I mean), and I wanted to hedge my bets and keep him with his own age group. So I commenced potty-training.

Potty-training went great for a week. Then B. started having "accidents," probably a misnomer for what I am sure are conscious choices on his part not to make it to the potty. We are now a few weeks shy of THREE MONTHS of potty-training, and B. is exactly where he was August 20: he has had exactly zero accidents at school, a handful of accidents in public (including one memorable afternoon when he peed AND pooped in his pants outside the elementary school where we were waiting for his brothers, then ran from me in front of all the other parents, excrement dropping out of his shorts) and approximately a zillion "accidents" at home.

Most of the time, when we are home now, I just send B. around half-naked -- no underwear. MOST of the time, he will go to the potty if he is naked. Only about five percent of the time will he go to the potty and make it if he has any clothes on his bottom half. It has become a way of survival for me and our carpeting. We are coping with what I see as a giant battle of wills from a Threenager, and at this point, the only way out I can see is to actually wait it out. I can't threaten, bribe, plead, or reason him into using the potty all the time, because he doesn't want to. I just have to wait for him to grow up a little. At some point, it will hold less allure for him to potty in his pants. At some point, he will make it his lifestyle choice. I hope.

And so I find myself wondering -- was it worth it? Was it worth putting him in the three-year-old program to go through this? Our relationship has definitely suffered greatly from this potty-training mandate. Neither of us like each other as much as we did on August 9. Try as I might, it is hard to show no emotion at all when your child drops a load on the floor two feet from the toilet or pees directly in front of the bathroom, giggling. The frustration of throwing away pair after pair of (cheap) underwear and wiping down his whole lower half has worn on me. But the true PTSD comes from not knowing when or where the next load or pee will fall -- can we risk a trip to Disney? Can we make it all the way to violin practice from school pick-up? Will he pee on the brand new IKEA $250 sofa slipcover? The unpredictability, the utter helplessness, is relentless and exhausting.

Even though he has the teacher I love, even though he adores school with a thrill and delight that I find completely endearing, even though I left all my options open, even though he is in class three days a week and leaves me open for volunteering and the occasional lunch with friends... I miss my baby. I miss the child who didn't have such expectations placed upon him, who didn't feel the need to push back against something that is very important to me whether I like it or not about myself. I am not sure it was worth it. I would be happy to be changing diapers right now. He's all of 38.5 months old and I could have waited a few more months. This tug-of-war that I feel so often with my older boys, the tension of what I need for them to do versus what they want and choose to do -- it wears me down. It makes me sad. It reinforces that, once again, I have to be the Heavy, the Bad Guy, the one asking them to do something they don't want to do. I could have had a little longer with my baby. I'm not sure it was worth it.