An old family story…

My mother has often told me a story from my childhood about myself that I will relate here, although I have no first-hand memory of it.

My mother was attempting to potty-train me. In those days, around 1975, although disposable diapers were catching on, they were still expensive compared to using old-fashioned cloth diapers. I was raised to the cloth, I guess 😉

Those of you who know me well know that I am very literal-minded. Although I have grand dreams and aspirations, I’m very grounded in the real world; I tend to take things very literally. It often impacts my comedic timing, because I won’t realize someone’s telling a joke. I’ll take the barb personally and try to carefully consider what the person was saying, completely missing the sarcasm.

Anyway, the way my mother worked on training me was to show me where the poo-poo goes. (I apologize for the plethora of poop stories here in the last week, my brain is focussed a lot on excretion lately I guess.) To give me a sensible understanding of where I’m supposed to do my duty, rather than in my pants, she would take me by the hand and lead me to the bathroom. There, she would patiently remove the soiled undergarments, dump the contents into the toilet, say “ooh, yucky,” and flush the contents down. If I recall correctly, she would then rinse the worst of the mess off the diaper there in the toilet so there was less to wash off later.

I watched her do this several times, and she finally became very excited when the light bulb seemed to turn on, and I got it!

I approached my mother, took her by the hand, and led her carefully to the bathroom. There I raised the toilet lid, pulled down my pants, took off my soiled diaper, dumped the contents in the toilet, said “ooh, yucky!” then flushed it down.

The moral of the story? Actions speak much louder than words… or intentions 🙂