Small Victories

The phone rang, and I looked at the number, surprised. It was a single guy whom I’ll call Bill. I couldn’t remember a time he’d ever called me before.

“Hello?” I said.

“Hi, Amanda. I just thought I would let you know that, well, you might want to know that your son is standing on the windowsill in his room, and he doesn’t have anything on. Like, nothing on. And he’s looking out the window.”

I groaned.

“Okay. Thank you very much,” I said, shaking my head.

Dashing back to Christopher’s room, I opened the door. Sure enough, he was standing on the windowsill again, but then the smell hit me like a tsunami.

What in the world?

This would not be the first time his room had smelled like this. Our toilet-training journey was not going well. Then I saw the window, the walls, and the shoes in the corner. All of them had been smeared and painted with unspeakable substances.

I grabbed my head in my hands.

“Oh no, Christopher. What did you do?” I asked.

He jerked and jumped off the windowsill where he had been standing.

“Come with Mommy,” I said.

I took him to my bathroom and turned on the water. I felt like taking him outside and spraying him off with a hose, but I knew that would cause even more alarm. After rinsing him off in the shower and settling him into a bath, I went back to clean and sterilize the room.

How were we ever going to overcome the toilet-training issues? We’d been at it for years! And not just the toilet-training issues, but the hatred-of-clothing issues as well.

I had tried softer clothes and cut every tag out of T-shirts, pants, and underwear. But there was always some problem. The second Christopher was out of sight, off came the clothes.

During nap times and while he was outside playing, we lost more shoes than I could count. Somehow they simply disappeared, but I reminded myself that this was a journey.

At least it seemed like we already had some victories behind us, like wetting. Now if we could just get victory with the big jobs and clothing.

Learning to use the potty had included sitting for entire days with him, reading books while he sat on the potty, or sitting beside him next to the adult toilet waiting and watching for success. As strange as it sounds, that turned out to be marvelously helpful because he loved watching water coming from any source. Watching it hit the water in the toilet was even more exciting.

Suddenly, we had a breakthrough, and I wished I’d known that trick before spending endless days and weeks sitting beside the little frog potty that a typical child would have learned on.

After Christopher got out of the tub that day, I brought him back into his room and showed him the pile of dirty rags, clothes, and ruined shoes.

I talked to him as if he could understand every word.

“Christopher, we never do this. That’s very dirty. It can make people sick.”

On and on I went.

I didn’t know if a hundred percent of my words were being understood, or three percent, or zero, but I kept talking. I showed him and let him smell the mess. I explained until I saw something registering in his big brown eyes.

“Oh, you don’t want to do that? Oh, you don’t want to do that?” he repeated in a high-pitched voice, nervously shaking his hands like wings.

Walking the fine line between disturbing him enough not to repeat the behavior and pushing him into a meltdown was always a balancing act.

“That’s right,” I said. “We’re not going to do that anymore.”

And amazingly, we didn’t.

That problem finally disappeared.

Now, the getting-naked issue was another story. At my daughter Helen’s sixteenth birthday party, she had several friends over to celebrate. The house was full of girlish laughter and chatter. Candles had been blown out, presents opened, and Helen was enjoying her special day.

Meanwhile, I had been working diligently on privacy lessons.

“We get dressed in private,” I explained again and again. “No one should see you getting undressed except a doctor or if Mommy is helping you.”

We practiced shutting the door and putting clothes on privately.

Then suddenly, in the midst of the party, Helen squealed.

“Mom!”

I turned around to see a very naked Christopher standing right in the middle of the room full of teenage girls.

“Christopher! What’s the problem?” I asked, rushing over to usher him out of the room.

“Nicolas invaded my privacy,” he announced indignantly, referring to his two-year-old brother, and using terms he’d heard me use in my explanations.

“I was getting dressed, and he opened the door.”

Well, at least part of the lesson had worked.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to laugh. “But let’s not come out here.”

I herded him back toward the bedroom while poor Helen turned bright red all the way to the roots of her hair.

“I’m sorry,” I told the girls. “Just think Adam and Eve. He doesn’t understand.”

The toilet training eventually became a success, and sometime later we were taking a family trip through the mountains of Utah.

We packed our lunch into backpacks and headed down a trail toward a beautiful river. After hiking for about half an hour, we found the perfect picnic spot.

The pine trees swayed in the wind. The scent of the forest drifted through the air, and the river rushed over the rocks beside us.

Carri Beth gathered pinecones in her skirt. Blair skipped rocks, and everyone settled in for a wonderful picnic.

Then suddenly Christopher began to dance.

“Do you need to go potty? Do you need to go potty?” he cried.

Which meant, of course, that he needed to go potty.

What followed was a complete disaster, or so I thought.

I took Christopher off to a private spot and carefully explained that there weren’t any potties in the wilderness, but that we could make do.

The moment I reached for the buckle on his bib overalls, however, he looked at me as though I had violated one of the Ten Commandments.

He dashed around the other side of the tree with a scream. I followed, but he darted around the opposite side, smearing sap on his clothes in the process. The cries escalated into shrieks. Soon we were headed straight into a full-blown meltdown.

Dan came over.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I don’t think I’m going to get him to do this.”

“Well, what do we do?”

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to take him all the way back.”

“Oh boy,” Dan said. “That’s a long walk.”

As the meltdown intensified, Dan scooped him up and began jogging back down the trail toward the trailhead where there was a porta-potty.

“He acted like you were murdering him,” Blair observed.

“He doesn’t understand the difference between a small deviation from normal and a terrible crime,” I said.

We laid out the turkey sandwiches, opened the chips, and sat down beside the beautiful mountain river, but our hearts were heavy.

“When’s Daddy getting back?” Zach asked.

“Hopefully soon,” I said.

We were packing up lunch with Christopher’s plate still sitting untouched on the picnic table when we finally saw them.

Dan walked up with a grin on his face. Then he sat down and patted the seat beside him. Christopher climbed onto the bench, picked up his sandwich, and took a huge bite.

Now that was a victory all by itself.

There had been a time when even eating away from home could cause a meltdown. New places, new routines, unfamiliar surroundings—any one of them could derail an entire day. Yet here he was, calmly eating lunch beside a mountain river as if nothing unusual had happened.

Then he looked around at all of us.

“Christopher was a big boy,” he announced proudly.

We smiled.

“He went potty.”

The family erupted into cheers. To anyone else, it might have sounded ridiculous. A family celebrating a trip to the bathroom, but to us it felt like standing on the summit of a mountain.

We knew how many tears stood behind those words. How many hours spent sitting beside little plastic potties. How many ruined pairs of shoes and loads of laundry. How many public embarrassments. How many moments of wondering whether he understood anything we were trying to teach him, and somehow, little by little, the lessons were taking root.

Raising Christopher taught our family to celebrate things we might never have noticed otherwise. A successful trip to the potty. Keeping clothes on all day. Respecting privacy. Eating a meal away from home.

To most people these would seem ordinary. To us they were hard-won triumphs.

There were many times when I wondered whether my words were reaching him at all. I wondered whether the constant explanations, the patient repetition, and the endless practice were accomplishing anything, but over and over again, Christopher surprised me.

Sometimes the victories came months after I expected them or arrived in forms I never anticipated. Sometimes what looked like a defeat in one area turned out to be a step forward in another.

That day in the Utah mountains seemed at first like another failure. We had interrupted the hike, disrupted the picnic, and sent poor Dan jogging down the trail with a screaming child in his arms. Yet by the end of the day, all any of us remembered was Christopher’s proud announcement.

“He went potty.”

We often measure progress by the battles we lose. God measures it by the ground we gain, and most of the ground is gained one small victory at a time.

Those small victories accumulated over months and years until one day we realized we have been utterly transformed into something much better than before.

The victories have become a life.