On his third birthday, Ziggy gave me the greatest gift: a smoking hot log, delivered into his ladybug port-a-potty, just moments before the doors opened to his birthday treat, a circus show presented by Cirque Eloize as part of Montreal’s Tellement Cirque festival.
A deft drop behind the back wall of the theatre, it was promptly scooped into a bag and dumped in an outdoor bin with enough time to secure pre-show cocktails and toast three years of motherhood with my fellow circus mama and grandma Bibby, before we skipped into the show and the lights went low.
While my fellow parental mates assure me there are multiple greater challenges to come, toilet training has been my most epic hurdle to date. With his little head resting on my knees as I squat or kneel on the filthy tiles of public toilets across the globe, I can’t help but see every tiny germ particle in 3D. As his little hands reach for the toilet brush or sanitary bin, my blood simmers, and I can’t contain the squeals of protest as I nudge him away from the smudged surfaces, grimacing as we hot step it out of the steamy cubicle.
Then of course there’s the high-speed release that is as urgent as it is high risk when it comes to my turn on the throne. As I juggle a pants-down approach to securing the toilet door latch without toppling over mid-stream, much to the amusement of the tiny hobbit before me, anything is possible.
Before we commenced the training sessions, our dear friend and solo mama warrior, recommended an online course book. At more than 500 pages, I managed to skim the first chapter before Zoe and I hit the cocktail bar and asked ChatGPT to summarise the key takeaways while we indulged in an overpriced and literally smoking mojito from our neighbourhood lounge. The core lessons? Go cold turkey for three straight days, spending as many of these as possible at home, progressing to a pantless situation with towels at the ready to capture anything and everything that might cascade.
Even typing that sentence almost 12 months later makes me shudder. I’m all good with bodily functions, but I still squirm every time I see a dog owner stoop to collect a hot steamer in the thinnest of poop bags, without so much as a light post-pickup spray of sanitiser to quash the poopery trail.
Well before COVID turned many of us into OCD hand wipe crazies, I had my sanitiser clipped to my belt flap on the Big Apple subway. The A Current Affair exposes on the germ-laden handrails of train carriages are burned into my psyche and I see Louis the Fly’s bacteria-heavy trail whenever an insect even hovers nearby.
While these confessions provide a better insight into my impossible juggles with toddler poopy training, I doubt there are many parents who could lay claim to enjoying this phase.
“So, what you’re telling me is that people with kids literally hang out in parks, or at home, until said littlies can confidently communicate their toileting needs?” I ask my parental guru and dear friend, mother of two splendid humans (including my godson), thankfully a few years older than my mini.
“Pretty much,” comes the smiling reply.
No way Jose. We are in no way prepared to entirely sacrifice our natural wine and specialty coffee jaunts in favour of playgrounds and sand pits. And with that, our ladybug port-a-potty was thrust into the bottom of the pram and whisked out behind countless trees from Montreal’s Place des Arts to Joshua Tree National Park and beyond. Our album of picturesque potty plonks is wild and varied. And our little man is a truly global (pooper) trouper.
joshua tree, california : august 2025
My next challenge appears to be how to now curb the toilet chat from poopies to farts and endless giggles in between, as we navigate our way to explaining the inappropriateness of hollering a need for number two in the middle of a very public place. In the heart of toilet training, every 10 minutes can become an obsessive check-in, a question of wee wees or more, so how then to communicate that we should no longer be toilet-talking every waking hour?
I have no doubt that folks with less of a pressure cooker temperament than moi took to this training with ease, embracing a pantless summer in the garden to capture nature’s calls once the nappies were shed. I’m also certain that impending teenage chaos will erase the summer of 2024 from my memoirs soon enough. But until then, my showreel loops from crusty toilet bowls to dusty street corners, crouched behind open car doors as ladybug catches the offerings, a tiny arched back leaning over, hands clutching my fingers until the “Filisheddd!” holler drops, and we’re ready to wipe the slate clean.