Regrets, I Have a Few...

Hindsight is always 20/20 as we know, and it is so frustrating as a mother whose children are launched in the world, relatively well I believe, to look back with the knowledge that years gather, and have regrets.

Sometimes these memories are of incidents created by inexperience, some by fatigue, but the ones that bother me the most are the ones where I really had no excuse, and as the adult, I had the responsibility to behave better.

One that particularly sticks in my mind and bothers me to this day centres around that lovely task of toilet training. It is still an issue hotly debated, just as it was thirty years ago, but I believed then as I still believe now that we make too big a deal of it. Kids have their own agenda, as they do with talking, and they will come to the point where they do not want to walk around in a dirty diaper any longer. Mind you, the parent must provide the proper easy facility to do this and lots of encouragement, but ultimately, it will be accomplished when the child is good and ready.

Now I knew all this. I had read all the appropriate books, was lucky enough to have a very sensible father, who was also my physician, giving me advice, so there was very reason that I would handle this transition from diaper to potty with a calm competence. NOT!