The Things We Endure for Our Children
The Things We Endure for Our Children
My wife will corroborate the following as it pertains to my urination routine:
I raise—and lower—the toilet seat.
I practice dead-on-balls accuracy when it comes to aim (kudos to anyone who heard Marisa Tomei's voice from My Cousin Vinny when they read “dead-on-balls accuracy.”
Despite my marksmanship, I nevertheless snag a handful of toilet paper, and wipe down the top and inside edges of the bowl before returning the seat to its rightful position. I have several reasons for this, chief among them is that particular parts of my wife's body—parts that are of great interest and import to me—sit on, and maneuver, around that chunk of porcelain.
All this to say, I maintain strict standards when it comes to bathroom etiquette. I enjoy South Park as much as the next guy, but I appreciate its potty humor from a distance. It’s not something I enjoy in the first person, as either perpetrator or victim.
Related, I hate public restrooms. Which is hardly a hot take. If I had professed enthusiasm and passion for public restrooms, that might be a little more provocative, sure, but the inauthenticity of my sentiment would, as they say, stink up the joint.
While I’m grateful for indoor plumbing, I feel like we should do better when it comes to privacy. For one of the more intimate, vulnerable acts we perform as human beings, we’re pretty cavalier about personal space. “Here,” we say, “sit on this cold porcelain while another stranger sits an arm’s length beside you on either side, nothing between your stressed bowels but a flimsy panel of fiberglass that almost never stretches floor-to-ceiling, instead leaving a gap below and an opening above so that sounds and odors can pass freely for our collective humility.”
For men, urinals are even more exposed. A few weeks ago, I had an interaction with a man who, unlike me, did seem enthusiastic and passionate about public bathrooms. It was 8am. I was at the Anaheim Convention Center for my daughter’s club volleyball game (Go Saddleback!). Watching my daughter play volleyball (and my son play basketball) presently tops the list of my favorite things about being alive. Every tournament tips the fun scale; however, every tournament also feels like a prolonged anxiety attack, and as the anxiety ramps up, so do my visits to the urinal.
Like any sane man, I try to put as much distance between myself and other fellow urinators. If there are a dozen urinals and the first is in use, anyone looking will find me at urinal number twelve. On this morning, the bathroom was empty, so I took the first open spot, reasoning you never go deeper into the bog of eternal stench than is absolutely necessary (there’s one for the David Bowie and/or Labyrinth fans). So despite the fact that maybe a dozen of urinal options were available to anyone else needing to tap the ol’ kidneys, some guy entered and sidled right up beside me.
Normal looking dude, maybe a little older than me, late 40s or 50s. He unzipped right beside me and then sort of arched his posture, holding his palms against his lower back, opting for the hands-free approach. Kinda like this:
And as he did his business, he audibly sighed, like, multiple times. It was as if he was trying to make himself as large as possible while he did his business. His need for attention was up there with the Andy Dicks and Kanye Wests of the world. I hated him. And this was before he committed the ultimate coup de grâce of faux pas.
He farted.
Yeah, yeah, I hear you—the bathroom is where farts are supposed to happen. But this was no ordinary fart. It was aggressive. It was a fart that was trying to say something, maybe even start something. It wasn’t accidental, something that just slipped out. He had put effort behind this fart.
And just as that thought occurred to me, I saw this man in my periphery. He had turned toward me, trying to draw out my gaze. I haven’t verified this in The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but I’m fairly confident that urinary eye contact is a marker for psychopathy.
He held his gaze on me for some time. It’s difficult to say how long. As far as I know, time dilation hasn't been studied in the public restroom context, but it ought to be because those ten or eleven seconds felt as long as back-to-back Catholic funerals. And I was holding my breath, sure to pass out at any moment.
Finally, I broke. My eyeballs panned over and I raised my eyebrows as if to say, What the hell do you want, you son of a bitch? The sound of his fart was still echoing off the ceramic tile. He exhaled out of his mouth, his lips flapping, and he nodded his head, as if it say, Brother, it’s gonna be a long day.
I gave him the courtesy of a single head nod. While I saw the urinal firing line as a place to get in and get out, he saw it as a commune, a place to empathize with his fellow man and commiserate via bodily functions on the excitement and anxiety that lay before us.
I left the bathroom and had this thought: The things we endure for our children.
I’ve written about my wife before, about her sunny disposition, her intelligence, her beauty, all the ways in which I’m a fortunate husband and father.
This little collection of pics is a solid example of the evolution of parenthood. You’re young, healthy, energetic. You smile a lot. The next thing you know, you go to a lunch party, and when you enter, your kids cling firmly to your ass while you balance precariously on wedges and hope against hope that you don’t face plant when one of their hands inevitably gooses your inner thigh.
The things we endure for our children.
I’ve had this thought many times since becoming a father—in fact, on the very first day I became a father. I woke up in the hospital on that tiny little bed/couch thing to watch my wife change our daughter who was only hours old.
My wife had labored 36 hours—yes, 36!—and she looked the part. Her hair was everywhere. The 1980s would have said, “Uh, maybe your do is a little…too much.” She had her glasses on. This was pre-Lasik, and her lenses were fit for a Nasa telescope. The wrinkled hospital gown draped across her like a wet cardboard box. Still, she smiled as she changed Charlee’s diaper for the first time with all the grace of a bomb squad rookie. I wish I had taken a picture. It’s still my favorite image of my wife, the one I go back to in my mind’s eye the most, the one that told me that the great adventure had started.
The things we endure for our children.
For some reason, this refrain has come to me in moments related to bathroom business—in the urinal of the Anaheim Convention Center, during our daughter’s inaugural diaper change, and in the urinal of The Forum.
We had gotten my dad tickets to Dead & Company. He’s a lifelong Grateful Dead fan, and it was important to us that our kids go to a show with him. He’s smoked enough cigarettes that downtown Vegas should give him the key to the city, and he has a bumper sticker for having eaten “The Logger,” a 40-ounce Porterhouse served at McNally’s in Kernville, CA, where men know a thing or two about eating beef. Suffice to say, he ain’t exactly running marathons, but if you take him to a live music venue, he’s always the first and last one dancing.
Dead fans—the OGs anyhow—are a little long in the teeth, at least those who still have teeth. Faded tattoos of dancing bears and 13-point lightning bolts cover their papery, wrinkled skin. Most of them have kept their long hair, but they also have bald spots, so it looks like their locks are slipping off the backs of their heads. Their leather fringe and tie-dye remains—it just looks a little different when worn by crooked postures and paired with skull-topped canes. And they’re a little cranky for the fans who espoused peace and love and gratitude. That is, until the music starts.
We were having a great time, and then my son asked me to take him to the bathroom. If you haven’t been to The Forum, you should know that it’s a shit hole. I know it was once a cutting-edge entertainment venue, but now, admission ought to come with a few doses of penicillin.
The men’s bathrooms require you to descend three or four stairs. Descend is the perfect verb in this case, as these bathrooms have a hellish quality. If you think a lineup of urinals is gross, The Forum takes that indignity one step further—it’s just one long trough. So I told my son during the descent, “We get in, we get out. Don’t touch anything, and don’t make eye contact.”
We unzipped and let it rip, and it wasn’t a few seconds before things went sideways. In my periphery, on the other side of my son, a sixty-something-year-old Deadhead stared at us. My son and I were aimed at the trough, ya know, peeing, and the Deadhead was aimed at us, closer to my son than to me. And he was just staring, saying nothing. He reeled side to side, as if he was unsteady. Probably drunk, I thought.
But then there was also the thought that he was closest to my son, which was weird. Was he a pederast? Did he think I was a pederast? Had we unintentionally disrespected him? Did my son make accidental eye contact? Was I going to have to fight this hippie in the bathroom at The Forum, which would all but guarantee any number of staph infections?
Finally, I looked at him and said, “Can I help you?”
He sniffled and shook his head slowly from side to side. “Taking the boy to a Dead show… What a great fuckin’ father.” Then, hand to god, he wiped away a tear and ascended the filthy stairs, out of the bathroom. I’ve received my share of parenting affirmations, but this one is definitely, well, the most memorable.
We zipped up, washed up, and ascended the stairs ourselves. And then I had that thought—
The things we endure for our children.
We’ve endured ancient hippies. We’ve endured aggressive farts. We’ve endured bathrooms fit for a River Styx ferry. We’ve endured all the anxiety and excitement. And we’ll go on enduring as long as we have the privilege to do so.
Thanks for reading. A good many of you have pledged money to this little humor project, and I’m nothing but grateful for the encouragement. It’s likely that I’ll be monetizing pretty soon, so I’ll be releasing details in the next couple weeks. Free Subscribers will still get All Kinds of Funny, but paid subscribers will get more kinds of All Kinds of Funny. Either way, I’m glad you’re here, and I hope these stories and words get you smiling or laughing when they come your way.
If you enjoyed this story about family and parenting and haven’t read some of my others…
Are you there, Judy Blume? It's me, Norm.—The birds-and-the-bees talk goes sideways with no thanks to Judy Blume.
Manslaughter, Santa Claus, and a Hatchet—A new holiday tradition.
Bloody Towels—A story about gratitude.
Bats, Buttloads, and BB Guns—the shot heard ‘round the living room.
Throwing this out there again. If I’m ever going to take this show on the road, maybe read some on stage at, say, Carnegie Hall, I’m gonna need a little help. So if you’re the sharing sort…
"It was a fart that was trying to say something, maybe even start something." One of my all-time favorite lines. Should go in Bartlett's Quotations.
Only Becky can look gorgeous with a child clinging to her ass. Parenting in heels should be an Olympic sport.