My time on the big white throne is exactly how you’ve seen it portrayed in movies about families.
Man grabs newspaper, closes door, finds comfort on the throne, and just as his business is about to begin a knock comes at the door followed by thumping from a little kid jumping up and down and saying, “daddy, I REALLY gotta go!”
There’s four of us in this happy little perfect family and only one toilet in our delightful estate.
The boy never lifts the seat.
The daughter never, NEVER flushes. Even when it’s brown she doesn’t flush it down.
The wifey…well, she’s the smart one in the family. She’s managed to get herself on a cycle that fits perfectly into the times of the day when the kids’ bowels and bladders are empty.
The rest of us are like teenage girls in a dorm suite – we’re all on the exact same cycle.
And me, well…I’ve learned to poop at mach speed.
I can pee, brush my teeth and put deodorant on at the same time.
Nine out of ten times that I leave the bathroom the first thing my kids say before running in is “did you spray daddy?!?”
“My shit doesn’t stink!!!” is what I want to yell, but instead I chalk up another interrupted bathroom moment and just mutter, “yes child-of-mine, I did,” as I hang my head low and stumble away.
Then I think to the future, when the boy becomes…well, not a boy. I think of how the bathroom was my safe-haven, as a teenager, for taking care of “personal deeds.”
There’s something to be said for going into the bathroom in your own home and knowing if there’s anything that shows-up on a blacklight it’s because you put it there, not someone else.
But we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.
In the meantime, all I ask for is:
- Enough time to poop and play a game of Sudoku (easy mode) without being interrupted.
- To pull the curtain back on the shower and actually have my towel be there instead of wrapped around my wife’s head in the other room.
- To not view my daughter’s “boom boom” floating happily in my toilet.
- And to brush my teeth early in the morning without having to see my son come racing into the bathroom with his miniature morning wood and witness him hose down every square inch of my toilet while screaming, “don’t look daddy I need privacy!!!!”
That’s it…nothing more.
