Sh*t Happens

Every night I am dragging Lilly to the potty to do her poop. I finally couldn't take it anymore. Go ahead, hold it in until you graduate from high school. It will be a shitty, shitty graduation. So I told her in bed (after I controlled my rage by squashing it into a little ball and harboring it in my stomach so it can flourish into cancer later), I said, look, you just have to go to the bathroom everyday. What if we set up a little chart on the wall and you get a sticker for every time you go to the bathroom when you feel it. You get a bunch of stickers and when you fill up the chart you can get a prize. She already knew what she wanted. What are those things you tie on your hands and they have a key? She wanted handcuffs. I found myself saying, at 9 at night, "Yes, Lilly, if you do your poop you can have your handcuffs." So the next day we put up the sticker chart and she was so excited to fill up every square on the chart, she pooped like forty times and she was really upset to find out that the chart was supposed to last a few DAYS, she wanted to do it all in one day, and poof get her handcuffs. But she did manage, between poop and pee, to fill up the chart in like 9 hours. She even said, "I have to do another one. Because my poo poo wants to win the pooping contest." One day later, we just came from Nathan's school where he got an award for I believe the category is "Douche Who was Failing English and is Now Getting an A." And Lilly handcuffed her ankles and was walking like she was going to a criminal hearing. After the awards we had to walk out with the hordes of kids leaving the school for the weekend, and it kind of scared me, I don't remember people with such tight pants in middle school, and Lilly is walking along handcuffed to herself and I'm thinking, motherhood is this insane improv, unscripted experience. And by the way, Lilly does not want to ONLY be a tattoo artist anymore. She wants also "to paint nails." My daughter, she could quit school now, she's already overqualified, the manicurist-tattoo artist with the handcuff fetish.