Rome wasn’t built in a day, and The Kid wasn’t potty-trained in three. No matter what the books said would happen–and I read a few of them.

I’ve been dreading potty-training for a while now, and have put it off as long as possible: TK is three-and-one-third-years old. I was waiting for him to talk. Waiting for the weather to turn warm. Waiting for Jesus to come back and take us all home, rendering the process unnecessary. I waited myself into tossing and turning and waking up to middle-of-the-night toilet-ridden anxieties. It got out of hand, as things do when I attempt to control rather than trust my way into peace.

Last Thursday was the day.

Coming as soon after Easter as it did, the time arrived with the Biblical pairings I found so easy to assign: Day One–disaster and hopelessness. Day Two: darkness and mourning. Day Three: resurrection and celebration! Along with these overtones, I surreptitiously and silently attached my own agenda to the proceedings, though outwardly I told anyone who would listen that I had no expectations; we were just going to “give it a shot” and “see what happened”. I was being breezy, you see.

I’m not breezy.

The first day revealed, though, what I am. It revealed all the things in which, and places where, I stow my hope other than where, and with Whom, it should be. It revealed my constant inner hidden agenda and secret expectation that everything should go the way I planned. Because old habits? They die so f-ing hard, man. Might I refer you to the title of this blog? And to the lessons it represents that I’ve been learning my whole life?

No dice whatsoever in the first twenty-four hours. Lots of pee, however–on the couch, the rug, the towels placed over the couch, the training underwear. And one memorable dump outside that I caught just in time to get it spread all over my arms as we raced into the house, TK screaming in my arms because, really, who wants to be rudely interrupted mid-stream when doing their business in the grass like a dog to be hassled indoors to proper plumbing?

By the end of the day, I was run ragged with no visible results. TK was confused and belligerent. I should mention now that I was going on a week since nursing Little Brother for the last time, which added the fun bonus of wearing sandbags FULL OF PAIN on my chest. By the time The Husband arrived home, the only form of communication I could muster was to alternate between shaking my head tearfully and stomping between rooms, muttering things like “I suck at everything” and “I hate myself.” I went to bed with these and darker thoughts, my inner monologue talking me down a twisting hallway full of lies and despair. Over potty-training, y’all. But also…not. Because it’s never just that.

It was ugly. It was scary. It was hormone-riddled. It was revealing.

Overnight, I leaked twenty gallons of fluid through my shirt and slept, and when I woke up the next morning–the Second Day of Potty-Training, traditionally known for darkness and mourning,–I felt slightly ridiculous. Chastened, gently. I had treated myself horribly, had reduced myself to the sum of some arbitrarily-chosen accomplishments, had equated my worth with a to-do list. Again. What was fun this time, though, was that I carried my kid along for the ride. And the other kid. And my husband, who was likely googling “mental health” and sleeping with one eye open. Something had to change.

TH came home early the next day, probably fueled by a desire not to walk into a scene from a Lifetime movie, and I didn’t pull myself up by my bootstraps or hold my chin high or resolutely change everything about myself as much as I just decided to let go. I ain’t got no bootstraps left at this point, anyway. One of the books I had read mentioned potty-training as a bonding experience for mother and child, and at some point during the day before I had laughed bitterly and tried to find that writer’s address so I could set a bag of flaming dog crap on her doorstep. But today I opened my eyes to TK, sitting there in his training pants all confused as hell, and I was his shadow. But not his results-seeking, achievement-oriented shadow–or my own. I just sat with him, which I’m beginning to learn is truly one of the most loving things you can do for a person, and we played. We sang. He pissed the pants and the floor, sure, but we cleaned it up and kept going. At one point LB barfed up his lunch onto the couch and a second later TK unloaded his bladder one cushion over and yes, I cried a little, but more importantly, I didn’t yell and everyone made it out alive. And then TH got home and I put LB down for a nap and my #precioushusband gave me an hour to watch guilty-pleasure TV and one of the characters was giving birth, and when she cried out “What am I being punished for?” I just laughed and thought, “Wait for potty-training because there is not epidural for that,” from a slightly less tenuous mental spot than the day before because look at me and my sense of humor and absence of suicide threats! Progress!

This was when I realized that the joke was on me. Because I was the one, it seemed now, who was being trained.

I don’t know why some things feel so much harder for me than they seem to for other people. Maybe those a-holes are just lying. But even if they aren’t, the fact remains that few ventures in my life–okay, no ventures in my life–are free from over-thinking and over-emoting and over-doing. And I forget about grace, oh how I forget about it, all the time. Even though I write about it every week, even though it has saved me more times than there are numbers for, even though it’s the air I breathe. That must be so frustrating for the one who is its source.

But I’ve learned, and I keep learning, that though I try to shield myself from these all-consuming emotions–though I try to protect myself from the breaks and failures that come with just being alive–something always steps in: grace, dressed as hormones or brokenness or literal poop on the floor. And it is never not the answer, for myself or others. It is never wrong to show some grace, to receive it, to empty the crap from the pull-up or let go of the agenda that drowns me and flush it all down.

There was one poop in the potty over our training period, and it was met with great fanfare and rejoicing by TH and me. TK turned to us from his perch and stared, all, “What the hell? I’m watching Mickey.” There are celebrations that I’ve missed because I was looking somewhere else, too. But I didn’t let him miss this one. I shoved the cookie into his hand, I told him how proud I was, I hugged him mercilessly. The third day came and went with no finish line in sight, and I wrote off the weekend as an introductory course rather than the Monumental Self-Defining Life Venture I had (apparently) deemed it before. There are more cookies, more pull-ups, more accidents, more occasions for cleaning and rejoicing. There will be more tears too. I’ll say some crazy things and be forgiven. We’ll all get to know each other a little better, driven deeper into relationship and love by a grace that outlasts every meager time allotment I give it.