Mature?

The deal was very simple: When my brother's daughter was born, I told him that she was more than welcome to spend the night at my house. Just as soon as she could say these words: "Uncle Dave, I need to go to the bathroom, where is it?" This suggestion caused some minor challenges to her normal development, as my brother looked at this as a challenge to skip past "Mama," "Dada," "doggie," and other such infantile drivel to focus on that particular phrase. It is hard for me now, after ranching my own son's diapers and those of numerous babies since, to imagine how upsetting the idea of someone else's poop was to me back then.
But, on the occasion of my niece's twenty-first birthday, it should be noted that I am just a little sad that I was so uptight. It is difficult for me now to reconcile just what part of that bit was for real and what was hyperbole. I know that she was the first baby with whom I actively worked to forge an actual connection. I was always good at amusing babies, but I really wanted to make sure that she knew that I was there for her. I fed her. I held her. I carried her around. And in a shopping mall recording booth, my younger brother and I teamed up as her uncles to sing to her. In her first few years, I made her laugh, cry, fall down, and dance around my mother's dining room to the soundtrack of Disney's "Beauty and the Beast." She knew all the words. Scarcely more than two, she knew all the words. But she never said those "magic words."
She was three when I got married and moved to California. She was our flower girl. Years later, she came out here with a couple of her friends to experience life on the coast as a teenager. She watched our house while we went off to Disneyland. Not once did she or her friends inquire as to the whereabouts of the bathroom. I guess she's all grown up, and she's welcome at my house anytime. Happy Birthday.