I don’t think it is just me when I say that men have a relationship with bathrooms that women will never have. Some of my best ideas have come while seated on the throne. I have won almost 3000 games of solitaire and I am gaining mastery over Sudoku. Finally, the bathroom is my most cherished reading room where I keep up on the news, books, which influencer has recently had plastic surgery, and the comics.

However, the relationship with my bathroom has changed over time. For example, does anyone else now find it necessary to do stretching exercises before doing your bathroom paperwork? The greatest changes have certainly pertain to my bladder. When I was young, I didn’t visit the bathroom nearly as often as I do now. Why, I could have a few Guinness before bed and still be able to sleep through the night. Now, even if I am only dreaming of having a Guinness, I am immediately roused with the need to bathroom.

The evolution of my bladder has two key aspects. First of all, it appears that my bladder has shrunk, requiring me to go more often. Secondly, once my mind is notified of the need to go… I need to go! There is no more waiting till half-time, or at least the next commercial. “What did I miss?” is now one of my most common phrases.

The biggest bathroom challenge that I’ve been forced to face as I age is the need to go in the middle of the night. First of all, I don’t want to get up. I am comfy in bed and I will perform a variety of bed aerobics to try and find a position that will fool my bladder into thinking it is OK. Then, when I finally resign myself to the inevitability of getting up, I must address the multitude of challenges of trying to go to the bathroom without waking up my wife. You see, if I wake her up, she may not be able to get back to sleep, a fact that she will to remind me of for the next several hours and throughout the following day.

So, in going to the bathroom at night I must face an obstacle course just to get there:

• First, I must get out of bed without waking her up. Now, when you are a weight challenged fella like myself (we don’t like to refer to ourselves as overweight or fat) this is no small task. Heck, just my departure from the mattress can result in a spring effect not dissimilar to a rogue wave. So, I have to disembark from the bed slowly, so that the mattress can adjust over time. This is no small challenge when you are hardly awake…
• OK, now I am standing up in the dark searching for those objects in the room that my brain has established as markers on my trail map to the bathroom. I must use my bat sonar skills to locate the wall, the corner of the mattress, the cedar chest, the dresser, etc. until I finally arrive at the bathroom door.
• Once in the bathroom I must shut the door to reduce noise, but I must shut the door as quietly as possible. Closing the door slowly and turning the knob so that it doesn’t make any noise when it connects with the door jam.

If I have successfully trekked from the bed to the bathroom. and have closed the door, my challenges are still not over. I still can’t turn on the bathroom light as the light will seep under the door into the bedroom. So, I am left with the need to pee in the dark. I feel around until I am confident that I am facing the toilet. The goal is to send out a small scouting party to target the water in the bowl without making too much noise. Once the bowl water is located, I adjust the stream to hit the porcelain slightly above the water line (Ha, silence!). If I am successful in doing this, all that remains is to repeat all of my steps back to bed and hope that I can go back to sleep.

HOWEVER! As I have aged, I have discovered that I cannot fully rely upon my ability to calculate angles, and my nozzle setting is not always reliable. Right, or left, turns directly out of the tap do happen. I realize that something has gone wrong when I start to hear a splattering sound on the floor… or my foot starts to feel like it is standing in the shower. Great, I have now made a mess on the floor, in the dark! I must clean it up but I still can’t turn on the light. To add to my dilemma, I need to point out that this is my wife’s bathroom. I have been assigned the bathroom in the hall while she controls the bathroom adjacent to the bedroom. I am given visiting privileges to use her bathroom for essential overnight needs only. OK, so here I am in the dark in my wife’s bathroom. What can I use to clean up the mess? The only answer I can come up with is the hand towel next to the sink. Hopefully I can clean up everything and dispose of the evidence in the laundry hamper, which just happens to lie on the path back to bed. When my wife questions me in the morning about where her hand towel is I can use the patented male answer, “Got me”.

So, I clean up everything, hide the evidence and get back in bed… whew! Unfortunately, I have yet to get away with this offense to her bathroom. Inevitably, in the morning she will say, “so, you peed on the floor of my bathroom last night.” I will feign insult and shock at being subjected to such an accusation. “What makes you think that I peed on the floor of your bathroom?” To which she will invariably offer up evidence of a missed puddle or a spot on the rug. Caught, I attempt to show that I am contrite but will always have to face the additional threat of future, more severe repercussions should I ever use her towel for this purpose again. Upon consideration, I have decided that should I be faced with a similar situation in the future I will use my night clothes for the clean up. I think it is far less likely that she will notice me in my underwear when she wakes up in the morning…

One last note for the ladies. I know what your thinking, just sit down on the throne and you can avoid the risk of a mess. Ladies, peeing standing up is part of being a man! If you insist that we sit down what part of our manhood is next? Will you deny us the right to burp in public? Will you insist that we sit with our legs held tightly together? Will you demand that we relinquish our control over the remote control?! NO! I am a man and I will stand with pride… and buy you flowers as an apology for being so crude.

Dave