OUT AND ABOUT

Many children dislike using public toilets, which are often not the nicest of environments.  A lot of parents will be able to tell stories of their children trying, and sometimes failing, to hang on until they get home when they need a wee, which can result in wet pants or an emergency wee behind a bush, against a wall, down a drain or beside the car.  They may be even more reluctant to do a poo on an unfamiliar toilet.

Many children prefer using the toilet at home
 to using public toilets.  This was certainly the
case with me when it came to doing a poo. (c)

In my case I had no problems using public toilets when I needed a wee.  Indeed, unlike many little boys, I did not regard the outside world as my personal urinal and would have to be really desperate before I would consent to urinating al fresco.  But it was a different story when I was away from home and needed a poo.  Although I was willing to park my bottom on a public toilet when I was very young, as I got older it became a complete no-no for me.

I think this probably came from my early experiences of using the Ladies as a little boy, with my Mum or older sister standing outside the cubicle urging me to hurry up.  I never liked to rush when sitting on the toilet so I stopped asking to be taken in the first place and simply withheld my poo in a similar way to what I did at home.  Naturally, this resulted in a lot of accidents, either on the trip itself, necessitating an embarrassing clean up, or after returning home.  After a while avoiding the toilet and withholding when on day trips and holidays became so common for me that I did it without even thinking about it, like it was an automatic response.  Even my mother’s expressed displeasure at having to change my pants on days out failed to change my behaviour.

After the age of 8 most of my accidents occurred away from home.  Avoiding public toilets when I wanted a poo had become so deeply ingrained in me that it was even harder to break the habit than withholding at home had been.  However, my accidents on trips decreased in frequency over time and eventually became very rare, helped by the fact I was now old enough to use the Gents by myself.

Aged 5, at Skegness with Paddington
Bear.  Days out were fun, but I often
had an accident in my pants.

One trip that sticks in my mind was when I was 10 years old and my mother took my sister and me away for the weekend to a wedding in Humberside.  Before we went my mother told me how she was packing spare underwear ‘in case you have an accident.’  It was one of the few occasions when I can recall her referring to my soiling problem while I was clean.

At the disco on the evening of the wedding I needed a poo and shortly afterward felt the need to wee as well.  Amazingly, the Gents contained only one toilet, and two men who also needed to answer the call of nature came with me.  As a child, I was allowed to go first.  I unzipped my trousers and emptied my bladder.  I hesitated for a second but then, despite the fact that these two men were standing outside the cubicle waiting, I pulled down my trousers and pants and sat on the toilet to do my poo and stayed there until I was happy I had finished.

I don’t know what gave me the confidence to poo in public toilets in such circumstances that weekend.  It might have been wanting to avoid the embarrassment of soiling myself at the age of 10 in front of so many people, or a determination that the spare pants my mother had packed would not be needed.  But looking back I feel it was a breakthrough.  However, I was still not completely free of accidents.

WHY I POOED MY PANTS

This is a slightly amended version of the post on my first blog, in which I wrote in detail for the first time about my childhood soiling.

Aged 3 and still in nappies.

My toilet troubles began at an early age.  Potty training was a slow process for me and I didn't come out of nappies until I was three and a half years old.  But though I was ‘dry’, I was still not completely ‘clean’ and often messed my pants.  This occurred between the ages of 3 and 11, although it was worst up to the age of 7.  It happened because I often avoided going to the toilet when I felt the need to poo.  Instead I would clench my bottom and breath inwards and wait for the need to pass.  If I felt the urge again I would repeat the process. I freely admit that withholding began as an act of laziness on my part, not wanting to stop playing in order to attend to my bodily needs, but it was never an act of naughtiness.  I didn't deliberately go in my pants, but I would soil myself sometime later because of my failure to use the toilet earlier. I never felt myself actually pooing, I just became aware later that my pants were messy.

It was a long time before I made the connection between avoiding using the toilet and having dirty pants, because the need to poo seemed to go away when I ignored it, making me believe that I had made my poo disappear.  This was different to the feeling of a full bladder which, if I did not go to the toilet straight away, would gradually get stronger until eventually I wet my pants, something which I never did after my toddler years.  Because of the time lapse between avoiding using the bathroom and soiling myself, I really don’t think I made the connection between the two events for a quite a while. 

A typical withholding position for me
when I needed a poo and decided
not to go to the toilet. (c)

For a long time I had wanted to stop soiling myself but didn’t know how to do it. Once I had made the connection I then made more of an effort to start using the toilet when I knew I needed to poo. It wasn’t easy as avoiding going to the toilet had become quite a habit, and there were times when I still did it. However, before my 8th birthday I was mostly clean, other than on trips as I disliked using public toilets for bowel movements.  My very last accident occurred on holiday at the age of 11.  By that stage I had suffered the embarrassment of being messy and smelly, and gone through the humiliation of being changed by my mother, more times than I would wish to remember.  I had put my parents through a lot of worry and heartache, not to mention some horrible laundry and clean-ups, and I had been shouted at and told off on numerous occasions.  But at least the nightmare was over and I could forget about this awful chapter of my childhood.

I thought at the time, and for a long time afterwards, that I was the only child in the world who dirtied his pants.  But I was later to discover that this was not the case...

To read about soiling from the point of view of a girl sufferer, take a look at this blog post from Dimity Telfer: The Story of My Life

INTRODUCTION

In December 2012 I nervously hit the ‘publish’ button on my latest blog post.  I was about to tell the world (well, anyone who cared to read it!) about something which I had always thought I would never tell anyone, something which I considered to be my shameful childhood secret.  I was about to reveal that I frequently soiled myself as a child, and had carried on doing this until I was 11 years old.

For many years I had believed that people would think the same as me, that frequently pooing my pants when I was well past potty

The words are spoken by a fictional character,
but they could have come from my own mouth.

training age was a babyish and disgusting thing to do, and would judge me accordingly.  This was reinforced by the fact that for so many years I had thought that I was the only school aged child in the world that did this.  Although I later became aware that this was not the case, it was still something that I kept quiet about, a part of my past that was best kept secret.

My discovery, via the internet, of just how many children and young people regularly soiled themselves convinced me to open up and tell my story, in the hope that it might help some of them to understand that they were not alone in having this problem, and for the benefit of the many parents who were struggling to cope with their children’s soiling.  In the previous few years I had posted on internet parenting forums about my experiences, but this was the first time I had told my story in a blog post that would include my full name and photographs.

Fortunately the response from parents was positive, many thanking me for sharing my history and, in particular, finding comfort from the fact that I had eventually stopped soiling my pants.  I was not plagued by any internet trolls and no-one was judgemental or disgusted about what I had done as a child.  The post was also consistently the one with the most hits on my blog.

The covers of my books
for children who soil.

In 2014 I published a book for older children who soil, called A Child Like You, partly based on my own experiences and have recently republished this in separate editions for boys and girls, called A Boy Like You and A Girl Like You. 

Now I have decided that the time has come to start a new blog, this time concentrating on the subject of childhood soiling, which is still often considered a taboo subject in ‘the real world’.  I plan to write in greater detail about my experiences through a series of posts, which may be TMI for some people but I have found that being frank and candid about my childhood toilet problems is appreciated by parents of children who soil.  This blog will not continue indefinitely, when I had said everything I have to say I will stop posting, but the blog will remain to hopefully help future sufferers cope with the distressing condition that is encopresis.

Finally, please note that I live in the UK and will be using British terminology in this blog, but I’m sure American readers will be able to translate ‘pants’ into ‘underwear’!  There will be several childhood photographs of myself, but other pictures are posed by models.  These images, which are marked '(c)', are copyright and used under licence.

For more information on childhood soiling and constipation, and other continence issues in children such as bedwetting, daytime wetting and potty training, why not visit the website of the charity ERIC who specialise in helping with these problems.