I Am In The Bathroom, Hiding From My Toddler

Toddlers are a lot

The Shining/ (Warner Bros./ EMI Films/ Columbia Pictures/ Warner Bros. Pictures)

I am in my bathroom, using the toilet as a chair, typing this into a notes file on my phone. I can only imagine the colonies of bacteria gathered on every surface, eyeing my device like prospective home buyers. I am being as quiet as possible, but my daughter has the ears of a Soviet submarine.  She knows I’m in here. I can feel it.

When I was pregnant, more than one person warned me that sometimes newborn babies wake up because they can smell their mother nearby, like vampires. This is true. 

Another creepy fact: babies don’t individuate themselves from their mothers for their first six months or so of life; babies believe that they are the primary organism and their mothers have no separate humanity; mothers instead are supplemental organs that exist to hold and feed them, the baby, the protagonist of existence. (For many people, this attitude toward their mothers and by extension all women perseveres into adulthood.) 

When Juniper got a little older I started believing– truly believing– that if I thought about her, I’d wake her up. It happened too many times to not be true. It’s possible that it was a chicken-and-egg relationship– did the thinking cause the waking, or did the waking cause the thinking? Either way, we had a spooky, mysterious, wondrous, annoying connection. 

That connection continues. Through the psychic miracle of motherhood or the process of elimination by checking all of the other doors in the house, she knows I’m in the bathroom. I can hear her little feet thumping across the floor like a dryer filled with tennis balls. 

Suddenly she’s right outside the door, smacking it with open palms, reaching for the knob and jangling it around. “MAMA! MAMA! MAMA! MOMMY! MOMMY OUT!” 

She’s crying, but I know that’s not her “real” cry; it’s her whine-cry. Her real cry unlocks the sort of instinct that leads mothers to lift entire cars off of pinned children. Her fake cry makes me want to gouge my eardrums out with sharpened pencils.

We have a towel rack over the bathroom door, and as a result it doesn’t always latch all the way, especially when all of the wood swells in muggy weather. This means that my daughter can force it open if she leans on it hard enough and for long enough. She has stopped hitting the door and is now pushing on it. 

She’s in.

“Mama! Mommy! Mommy out! Mommy poop!” (In point of fact: mommy not poop. Mommy simply want to be left alone for a goddamn minute.)

Toddlers have no way of reading the subtle clues that their caretakers are a little annoyed, and I try my best to never overtly indicate to her that she’s getting on my nerves. That’s now how little brains work; she can’t help it— at least, according to the book I read about toddler brain development that may have been written and financed by Big Toddler. .

She wants me to pick her up. She wants to play with my phone. She wants to play in the trash. She wants to pull all of the Sephora samples off the shelf above the shelf where we keep her bath supplies. All of these are suboptimal behaviors, because they are chaotic behaviors. If I won’t hold her, the least I can let her do is let her make a mess in my presence.

I veto each of her suggested bathroom activities. She’s furious, but toddler fits are temporary and she’s pretty easy to distract. As her whines crescendo, I remind her that she has an Elmo toy. That does the trick.  

She calls every Muppet “Elmo” sort of like how she calls every white woman with long hair who is roughly between the ages of 25-45 “Mama,” because she thinks I’m the most fascinating person in the whold world. She has even pointed to inanimate objects and called them “mama”-- a book about Sandra Day O’Connor, a wig that somehow wound up on the sidewalk outside of the hourly-rate motel in our neighborhood, a paper bag with nothing inside it. 

I love my daughter more every day, because she keeps getting more interesting, but she’s also almost oppressively obsessed with me. I know that there will be a time when she doesn’t want to cling to me like a baby monkey all day long, when she won’t bang on the door when I’m in the bathroom, or insist on standing right next to the shower when I’m in the shower, or cry when the time comes every night to put her into her crib by herself. There will be a time– probably sooner than I realize– when her most-uttered word isn’t “mama, mama, mama,” and it will break my heart, and also be a little bit of a relief.

Having a toddler is a little like being served lasagna every day single day for a few years, but knowing that after those years are up, I know I will never be served lasagna again for the rest of my life. I should savor the lasagna while I’m able to eat it. This is great lasagna, my favorite lasagna of all time. The people who can’t eat lasagna anymore are always going on about how fondly they remember lasagna. Some former lasagna eaters will confess that they do not miss lasagna one bit and are glad that their lasagna days are behind them. On most days, I enjoy the lasagna, but there are other days I want to eat anything besides fucking lasagna.

The other day I told my mother that I wish that I could experience my child growing up in a nonlinear way, out of order and at random. I wish every day I could wake up and she’d be a different age, moving between being a teenager one day, and then the next day she’s a baby, and then the next day she’s 10, and then the day after that I’m getting her ready for her first day of school, and then she’s learning algebra, and then she’s potty training. It would feel a lot less relentless and ruthless, because every phase could be revisited like a page in a photo album, flipped back and forward until one day I would get to the day she leaves the house, but on the day before that, I could take one more nap with her curled up next to me in a little ball, enduring the discomfort of a hand numb with circulation loss because if I move I know she’ll wake up.