All My Mother's Rules

Chapter 73: Cat and Mouse

I missed my potty-training watch.

That this thought had passed unbidden through my head was borderline heretical.

Back when Mom had been making me wear that stupid watch, pink with the picture of a kid's toilet seat for the watch face, I had been both humiliated by the sight of it every time I glanced at my wrist and greatly annoyed at the sing-song tune it would play to remind me to go to the toilet every thirty minutes.

I kept glancing at my bare arm, as if between looks, it might magically appear on my wrist.

As much of a nuisance as the watch had been, I had benefited from both the predictability and frequency of the toilet breaks it had directed me to take. It was basically impossible to wet my pants when I was sitting on the toilet two times an hour.

To be fair, as I had later learned from Lisa, going to the toilet that frequently, while useful for avoiding accidents in the short term, could cause issues with being able to hold one's bladder for longer periods of time. But I wasn't concerned with long-term consequences at the moment. I just needed to get through this later toilet training challenge. I could work out how to deal with whatever came next when it was time to deal with it.

I was sitting on the couch. I had tried to sit on the floor in front of the coffee table, but my bottom, absent the thick padding of the diaper, wasn't comfortable in the least, even though the room was carpeted.

The couch was a slight improvement from sitting on the floor. Yes, my bottom was appropriately cushioned by the leather couch beneath me. But with only a skirt on over my regular cotton underwear, there was not much to protect me from the too cold feel of the leather.

I couldn't take my eyes off of my sister. With the new potty-training rules that Mom had in place, she was the key to everything.

How often did my three-year-old-soon-to-be-four-year-old sister need to use the toilet? One would think that after being stuck at home with her for two weeks during Christmas break that I would have managed to make at least some observations about her toileting habits that I could recall, but I was clueless.

I knew that there would still be times where she would get up from whatever she was doing and rush off to the toilet. And on other occasions, mom would need to give her reminders so that she would make it to the bathroom in time. That wasn't a good sign for me. If Emilia was constantly waiting until the last moment to use the toilet, that only meant that I would be needing to wait longer to go as well.

But if I had to guess, I didn't think that there would be many times when Emilia would go longer than an hour without using the toilet. If that proved to be the case, I felt reasonably confidence in my chances of success.

Emilia was watching classic cartoons this morning. They really didn't make them like they used to. Tom was running around trying to catch Jerry. It was hard to pull my eyes away from that entertaining chaos, but I had to. I couldn't allow my mind to wander today. I couldn't allow myself to get caught up in any distractions that might cause me to ignore a signal from my bladder.

Even if Mom had allowed me to no longer be grounded from using my phone and my computer, I would have still ignored those devices today. I felt that the greatest danger to failing to complete this potty training challenge was not from being unable to hold my bladder in while I was aware that I needed to go.

No, the biggest problem for me was what happened more rarely: the completely unexpected accident. The times where I would wet my pants completely out of the blue without any forewarning from my bladder. Looking back, I found that the common denominator for those situations was that it was most likely to occur when I was either intensely preoccupied by another task or in a situation where I was under a lot of stress.