I’ve been spending a lot of time in the bathroom lately. Let me explain: We’re potty training our twins. This past weekend I was in the bathroom every 20 minutes begging, pleading, praying for my kiddos to use the potty. We didn’t always leave that room excited and hopeful, but when we did it was amazing. And when there was success, there was even a blessing:

Praise to You, Adonai our God, Sovereign of the Universe, who formed the human body with skill creating the body’s many pathways and openings. It is well known before Your throne of glory that if one of them be wrongly opened or closed, it would be impossible to endure and stand before You. Blessed are You, Adonai, who heals all flesh, working wondrously.

I don’t generally recite this traditional “bathroom prayer,” but remembering that the body and its functions are a part of divine creation gives me a little bit more patience for my children as they learn to use their bodies. (For those of you in Jewish-Catholic relationships, there’s no patron saint of potty training, I looked. There have been some moments I could use more entities to pray to.)

For me, potty training is an act of faith. For my twin toddlers, it’s torture—unless they get to watch Daniel Tiger. Hearing Daniel and his friends sing the calm, uplifting tune of, “When you have to go potty, stop and go right away” motivates them and keeps them happy. When I start singing along, their faces light up. The hymnal of Daniel Tiger makes me forget my desperate desire to hear that familiar tinkle and a feeling of connection and joy overcomes the three of us sitting there in the crowded bathroom.

We repeat this ritual over and over, prompted by the ring of a timer. Excitement mingles with fear and anxiety as we all rush into the bathroom hoping for a positive outcome. We mostly know what to expect in there: sit in the same seat as last time, sing the same familiar song, pray to God for what we need and give praise often.

This isn’t the spiritual practice I’m used to, yet the ritual feels strikingly familiar. For most of my adult life I’ve engaged in the spiritual and religious practice of prayer that includes repeated ritual either alone or in a community. When the clock nears 6 pm on Friday or 10 am on Saturday I rush to the synagogue, sometimes with excitement and sometimes with anxiety or reluctance. The rabbi reads the familiar opening prayer that helps the congregation settle in.  The cantor sings a song to raise our excitement for joining together in community, and smiles fill the room when a familiar song is shared. We continue in this ritual for an hour or so and then we leave the room and go on with our lives until the next time. Sometimes I leave the room feeling energized and excited, and sometimes I feel sad or dejected. But I know that I will return to that room and that ritual and have another opportunity to try it again and to feel that spiritual connection I so long for.

While the potty training ritual is messier, smellier and quicker, it has all the makings of a spiritual or religious practice. Every time I walk into that room with my toddlers, I hope and pray that we will all leave it excited and successful. I hope and pray that they will feel empowered and “grown up.” In some ways it feels as though my higher power in that ritual is not the god I pray to regularly, but instead, my toddler or sometimes the potty chair that we have all come to worship. My prayers are directed at my little ones as I say, “You can do it! Go pee-pee in the potty!” all the while praying silently, “Please, please, please let her go pee in the potty this time” or “Please God I don’t want to clean up an accident right NEXT to the potty as soon as he stands up.”

These aren’t (usually) the prayers I say in synagogue, but they are prayers. They are the language of my hopes and dreams, motivated by love and gratitude, and sometimes even fear.

Potty training is a hard and confusing task filled with extreme ups and downs. We’re doing our best to muddle our way through and within an hour our moods can swing from wild desperation to joyous celebration. Potty training is an act of faith and the ritual helps us through when it’s hard and lets us celebrate when it’s great. One day my kids will be potty trained and will forget that this was ever something they struggled with. But until that time, I’ll have my prayers, Daniel Tiger and a large canister of Clorox wipes at the ready.

To read more about parenting, check out the InterfaithFamily Parenting Blog.

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