She Un-Potty Trained My Daughter While I Was Out of Town

It's just one of the reasons she's no longer my mother.

Good morning, beautiful. Thank you for being here.

This is the piece I wrote that drove me to write Adult Children Don’t Cut Ties Without Good Reason
as a bit of a blueprint for any folks who aren’t familiar with the proper way to sit with someone in this space.

Some of the feedback this received when I first published it came from a place I felt needed a renovation.
So I knocked down some walls and built it better.

If you haven’t read that piece, feel free to give it a gaze after this if you thought it would be helpful.

You were all very kind here about that one, and I appreciate it so very much.

Originally published on Medium, November 2024.

me and my littlest when she was littler

It was the worst fight we’d ever been in. And that’s like saying this piece of hay is more hay-like than that other piece of hay. We fought all the time. I can realize now, being so far removed from the people who raised me, that they really weren’t fights so much as… them punishing me when they weren’t getting their way.

That’s what it’s like being strong willed and brought up by a couple of narcissists. Life would have been much easier if I didn’t have any opinions on how I should be treated, or didn’t wish to have autonomy over my life, or enjoyed being coddled and infantilized.

That’s why I was raised by different parents than my sibling.

My upbringing was just a maddening and clunky set of rules conveniently placed to provide comfort for the parent. They were narcissists and drunks just like the narcissists and drunks who raised them.

I’ve got addiction markers highlighting the hell out of both sides of my blood. And when you’re raised by that dream team of super addicts who never stopped to learn a different way to parent, every rule they set is simply mood based. And it generally contradicts with the one they set yesterday when they were in a different mood. Or not as drunk.

I was never allowed to make a mess, but the house was always cluttered and dusty, which then became my job to clean.

My cockapoo wasn’t allowed on her furniture and was forced to stay in a crate at her house, but their free range pitbull stole food from our plates and knocked down my toddlers.

When I wet the bed as a child, I climbed the linen closet shelf in the dark for a towel to cover my mess. The last time I woke them up from having an accident, he hit me. The next morning I was hit for soiling a bath towel.

Trying to keep upright in a funhouse mirrored reality on such a precarious foundation is nearly impossible as a kid. And I’ve always been the kind of person who questions everything, because I have always wanted to learn.

So being told the answer to ‘why do I have to do this?’ is ‘because I said so’, was not easy on me.

I needed to know why.

I always needed to know why.

And I’m sure that can be annoying to a man who just wants to drink his 5th Budweiser with his shot of Makers Mark in peace.

I got older and found coping mechanisms and work-arounds to find a semi-comfortable place in the family. I got really good at lying and sneaking out of the house when they were still drunk or didn’t want to wake up to send me off to school.

But the truth is, I never felt liked in that house.

And that version of love turned out to be just a disjointed, tarnished and misfitting chain of obligations.

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This would be the longest and farthest I’d ever been away from my children. I was very anxious about leaving them.

My husband’s mom was scheduled to come stay at our house, which made it all much easier on everyone. Knowing the kids would be in their own space really helped my nerves. But a week before we were leaving, she wasn’t able to make it.

The runner-up choice was my side of the family a couple minutes down the road. But the folks who raised me didn’t like coming to our house to watch the kids.

They did it 3 times in 13 years. And not once overnight.

I had to bribe them to do it with home cooked meals and loading up my DVR with their favorite shows. I needed to recreate their living room in order for them to want to watch my children in mine.

Because the prospect of spending time with grandchildren was never enough incentive for them.

When my husband and I came home one of these times, both kids were scared and awake at the top of the stairs, and the adults of the house were full-bellied with feet up on my couch watching The Big Bang Theory.

So, now that I was having to take the kids to their house while we would be across the country, I was even more nervous.

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Months before the trip, my daughter had started her potty training journey. She was only 17 months old, but told me she wanted to do it. It was a challenge with her being so tiny, but we did it. We had to bring one of those toilet seat cover thingies that make a big toilet hole small enough for a tiny tushy everywhere we went, but it was a small price to pay for raising a functioning human. I was fully committed.

My then-mother hated this. She made snide remarks under her breath every time my daughter would say she needed to potty. Or if I mentioned I turned around on a stroll because she said she needed to go. I never understood why this bothered her so much. But I now know it challenged her belief system in what a mother should — and should not — do.

She would never have gone out of her way to do that for her child, so it didn’t compute. Therefore I must have been wrong for doing it.

But my daughter picked it up quickly and was sleeping through the night with no accidents after a couple of weeks. It was amazing how great she was doing. And she was so very proud of herself.

It was a huge concern of mine now having to leave her and pull her away from her home for several days. I wrote out directions and tips, which were received kindly.

I was assured that everything would be ok, she’d continue the training, and that I should relax and go have a fun long weekend with my husband.

I had my first ever panic attack on the plane.

At the same time, my 18 month old daughter was being told she needed to pee in a diaper and not on the potty.

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When I pulled into their driveway 3 days later to pick up my children, my daughter looked like a shell of herself. She was in the middle of a backyard photo shoot wearing a corduroy jumper I’d never seen before… Grandma had grandma only clothes, and even though I packed suitcases for my children, they were rarely opened.

And when my little girl laid her weary eyes on me, her face looked like it was being rescued from a deserted island.

When I lifted her up to hold her and cupped her bottom with my right palm, I felt the diaper.

I asked why my daughter was wearing one. And the response was shrugged off.

Oh, it was just too much to keep up with.

Too tired and too livid to eloquently argue, I didn’t say anything and we took the kids home.

I removed the bloated, urine soaked diaper from my reddened and rashed daughter’s body, and asked if she needed to go potty.

She started to scream in terror and tears flooded her face.

This was a little girl who — just days ago — would run with glee to the bathroom every time she needed to go. She was so full of happiness and pride. Now she was petrified.

No potty. Bad potty. Bad girl

She cried these words into my neck.

For several months — far longer than my initial training with her — I worked with my fragile, terrified and traumatized little girl to trust me and a bathroom again. She would scream every time I put her on the seat. I held her shaking body every time as she sat there.

She wasn’t eating. She wasn’t communicating like she used to. She was devoid of her spark. She was not the same girl.

My mother had broken my daughter.

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I invited both of the parents over one night. We sat down and I asked why she did not keep up the training like she said that she would. And the reaction she gave me was instant anger and defense.

I got a lot of ‘it was just too hard’ and ‘no one could do that’ and ‘see! she’s too young like I’ve been telling you’.

Then he quickly takes over and I become the familiar villain for ‘attacking your poor mother who took care of your children while you were away on a fancy vacation.’

He almost punched me that night. I know he wanted to. I watched his fist clench and wiggle with eagerness at his right thigh as he towered over me.

The last time I saw his hand do that was the time I mentioned that the downstairs of his beach house had a cockroach, rat and dust mite problem, and I’d prefer to not stay down there with my children again on the next family vacation.

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Weeks went by with a mixture of silent treatments and sporadic telephone attacks. They continued to yell at me and blame me for disrespecting them, and I continued to express how unacceptable their behavior was. And it was going nowhere.

The only way an argument was ever over was when I punctuated it with an apology. And I was not going to fake that this time.

During one of the arguments, I pressed her hard on why she didn’t keep potty training my daughter. Why she didn’t even try. Why she told me she would and then didn’t. Why she disrespected my role as a mother and damaged my little girl.

I needed to know why.

I pressed and I pressed until a desperate narcissist was pinned against a wall with nowhere else to turn.

She yelled at me in response with a guttural, almost animalistic voice that could only have come out if she had momentarily forgotten she needed to keep this truth a secret.

Because I didn’t want your kid to pee on my nice, white couch!! THAT’S WHY.

It sounds strange, but that moment was a tiny win for me. I didn’t need to win anything. And I certainly couldn’t reverse what she had done to my daughter, but it was the first time I heard out loud the things I had suspected all of my life.

I wasn’t raised with love. I had been raised by selfish monsters who will always do what’s best for them, no matter who else is involved.

Hearing her scream such a horrible truth set a lot of myself free. I didn’t know anything about mental health or personality disorders then, but it helped me realize for the first time that I was not crazy.

They just had an incurable ailment; a handicap. And nothing I could do could change it.

And it was in that moment that I should have said,

Thank you for keeping me alive with a roof over my head. Thank you for cooking for me every night and teaching me how to use a tampon.

Thank you for my 6 year old birthday party where you served ginger ale in those plastic champagne flutes with the detachable stem. That’s probably the reason I named my company, Everyday Champagne; I had never felt so special.

Thank you for teaching me to wash extra well behind my ears because that’s what people smell when they hug you.

Thank you for going out every weekend so I could learn how to put on makeup by watching you do yours.

And thank you for making me so I could make my daughter.

She is unbreakable now.
She is that way because of me.
She is that way because I broke away from you.

She is strong and she has opinions on how she should be treated. And she has autonomy over her life.

She is brilliant and weird and asks too many questions that we both figure out together.

She doesn’t remember how you broke her when she wasn’t strong enough to fight you harder than she did. But I do.

And I know you recall things differently from that time, and all the times before — and after, because that’s what your brain needs to tell you to do. And that’s ok with me now.

Because you are there.
And I am here.

Sitting on my nice, white couch; patinaed from a lot of life and cuddles and spills and dirty feet from creek splashes and wildflower seed spreading and Rottweiler and Bengal hair. From all the back scratches under the blanket before the fire has warmed our feet. From the sleepy morning coffee snuggles in the dark, to the tickle parties after dinner.

From the years of unconditional, unwavering dedication to making sure my children know — and feel — how much I love them and find them to be a priority in my life. Because I always questioned that in your home. And so did they.

I wish you could know love like this. I know you won’t because you can’t. And that’s ok with me now.

Because you are there. And I am here.

Only because of that.

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Happiness exists within the stains and tatters of the objects that hold us. Love lived there when things don’t look pristine. It is such a delicious gift we have in this life to allow messy moments to happen with our children. It’s the only way they will learn how to one day take care of themselves.

Because one day they will leave and create their own messes with their own people. And when they do, they will always remember how you cared more about loving them than you did about a thing. And they will return to you with desire because they want to. Not because they are obligated to.

I could only have learned these things by being my own kind of mom, separate from the one who never enjoyed being mine.

Only because of that.