Toilet Training

Toilet training? Two words: woman’s work. This may be the last frontier in which sexism needs to be kept alive and well.

Don’t be bothering with toilet training. Your wife may think you should be involved, however; so tell your wife that the diaper budget will become the shoe budget once the kid is potty trained and she’ll have them pissing in a toilet before their first birthday. OK, that’s sexist too. But it might work, and you should be willing to risk sexism and many other awful things if it gets you out of toilet training. If the show gambit is somewhat ineffective, have your parents fake an illness or something during potty training and go live at your parents’ house for three months. Take a business trip. Get out now!

DO ANYTHING TO AVOID POTTY TRAINING.

Many of you guys will think you can handle this. You’ll think “hell, I change diapers.” You think that you’ve developed an immunity to being grossed out by changing diapers other than the worst poo bombs; even in the man-poo stage, you’ve learned to just grin and bear it. You think that nothing phases you. To you, it’s as if it is not even real shit (and I mean actual poop). Within the confines of the diaper, to you, it’s a completely different thing than real, actual human feces.

But what seems fake and manageable in a diaper becomes all too real and takes on a life of its own out of the diaper. When it is on the floor, or smeared over the toilet seat, or running down your child’s leg or your wrist or – just the worst – balled up in their underwear … then there is no mistaking it. It’s shit. The long semi-hypnotic state you’ve been able to manage that has allowed you to change diaper for two years comes crashing to an end, and you realize that what you are dealing with is simply shit. Human feces, plain and simple.

If you’re considering getting involved in the toilet training, sit back for a moment and think to yourself what you will do when your kid starts going in the pot most of the time, so you reward him with no diapers, and you’re at the mall one day and your kid shits his pants (and I’m taking it easy on you by letting it be your son that shits his pants in this little thought experiment). And let’s say you (oops) have no change of clothes with you. Even if you make it to the mall bathroom, how do you pull his pants down without the shit falling out all over place? If it falls out on the floor, what do you do? Can you leave it there? Should you kick it behind the toilet with your shoe? How do you clean your shoe? What if you accidentally kick it under a stall divider into Larry Craig’s stall and he mistakes the signal? If your son is sitting on the toilet with his pants on (these are his pants which are full of shit), and you are inching his pants down, how do you get the shit (and I mean actual poop) out of the pants? If he’s screaming, in a stall in a public men’s restroom, because he doesn’t like how the smushed up shit feels up against his body, how will you quiet him down? Once you get the balled-up lumps of shit into the toilet (normally by poking your finger on the clean side of the underwear and trying to knock it out and propel it through the air into the toilet (don’t overshoot!); a high stakes version of one of those wooden handheld labyrinth games where you try to navigate the ball through the maze past all of the holes) and clean him up, what do you do with the underwear? If you said “throw it away” do you realize that you’d probably have to buy 20 extra pairs of underwear, because this isn’t just going to happen once? If you have a newborn kid, you probably have the dirty diaper pail in your house yards and yards away from anything important to you. If you have a son being potty trained, it’s almost guaranteed that your wife is taking your regular clothes and mixing them in the laundry with your son’s shit and piss-stained clothes – particularly when she’s pissed off at you.

Look, the fact of the matter is that you want no part of this. I refuse to be in the same room as my children for at least 6 months after potty training commences.

You need to join the military and get your ass to Afghanistan or get assigned to the Asian division of your company and generally just be out of the country for approximately a 6-month period before and after potty training is to occur. Just get the fuck out of town. Trust me on this one.