The plight of women (and girls) in our unisex bathrooms…

(… especially with little kids in the building.)

The learning center isn’t big enough to facilitate separate bathrooms for men and women, and I’ve been noticing how consequential this has been for the women and girls who’ve had to use our two commodes. There’s actually a whole drama that centers around it. (It could be an NBC primetime!)

There may seem like two sides to the issue - that of Men vs Women. But hang onto your merry trousers, dear potty-goers! The situation is surprisingly more complex than that. Even more surprisingly, the whole Men vs Women issue is actually not an issue.

Every once in a while, and quite mysteriously, our upstairs bathroom is torn asunder by pools of piddle; on the seats, on the floor, behind the toilet base, and even on the roll of toilet paper! (Don’t ask me how we know it’s pee-pee and not simply water.) We have many suspects and past offenders that could pass as suspects… but there are two who irk us the most.

Mothers and the Pee-Pee-Poo-Poo Monster. (An explanation of the latter to come.)

What I found surprising (but probably shouldn’t have) was that women were causing a lot of the toilet seat wetness. It sort of defies logic, but there is indeed a logical reason. About 99.9% of our students have parents who moved to the United States later in their lives, having grown and spent most of their years in Mainland China. You’d be hard-pressed to find a toilet seat in Mainland China. Well, not so much these days, but the vast majority of facilities still incorporate the hole-in-the-floor style toilet, where you stoop and do your business (or, if you’re male, you stand tall and aim for the gold). Under these circumstances, women are used to hovering over the opening in the floor. This practice is carried over to the US, where the hovering causes unfortunate wetness all around. There may also be cases where women simply don’t want to make seat-contact (TP on the seat or not), so they hover for that reason, which is understandable… but I like to think that our toilets are pretty clean! That is… they would be consistently clean if people would stop peeing on and around them.

Worse is the Pee-Pee-Poo-Poo monster, a.k.a. T*****, one of our oddest little kiddos. He eluded us for quite a while during the learning center’s summer program, leaving trails of piddle but no other identifying clues… until we finally caught up to him! This second grader never fails to leave the bathroom a mess… and it’s not just the peeing.

No, he doesn’t poo the place up; I just added that to the name for affect :)

But he does consistently pee on the seat and around the toilet itself. One time we were fairly certain that he playfully (or maybe intentionally) left a wide, wet pool right next to the toilet. It stank like ginko berries! We eventually had to start a sign-out sheet for the bathroom, and when that didn’t yield results, we had to personally monitor the toilets. Not watch them pee or anything… just check the room after they’ve finished.

Twas a dirty, dirty summer.

-Ray

“Maybe humans are just the pet alligators that God flushed down the toilet.” - Chuck Palahniuk