The Potty Mystique, or Why Mommy Goes to The Bathroom. Without You.

Dear Mr. Baby:

It's not what you think.  We have been talking a lot about the potty lately, which you enjoy as a topic of conversation but not a nexus of effort (although you seem very approving of the accomplishments of Bear and Grinchy, who always but always remember to tell me when they have to pee or poo).  No, this is about the bathroom, itself, and what it represents.  And why Mommy likes it so much.  Without you. 

It is probably your complicity in its creation that it escapes your notice: the rain of flashing lights and chorus of sound effects and snippets of cheery songs, the balls and blocks careening off the walls, the swishing toys and perpetually swinging baby swing (no matter. how. many. times. you. stop. it.), the hundreds of bright, maniacally-faced animals that could pop up at any moment and scream HELLO, the frenzied reaching and running and stretching to catch whatever it is that is falling or whomever it is that is consuming small mechanical parts or digging shit out of his pants or standing on the arm of the couch with his arms outstretched and a devious grin on his face.  Or perhaps you do not mind living in what your father quite aptly dubbed ''the inside of a pinball machine."  But some of us, Mr. Baby, are feeling just a little overwhelmed by all the video-gamesque urgency with which minor to moderate emergencies must be attended to at what is, however unlikely it may seem, always the other fucking side of the house.  And the racket.  The goddam racket.

Enter the bathroom, a place whose charms have perhaps escaped you.  Yes, you have a fine appreciation of some things:  The paper, quaintly wound about a cardboard tube, which can be spun rapidly so as to cover the floor in waves of luxurious white, and - glorious day! -  which can also be turned to a lovely sludge by simply applying water.  The tubes, pressed squarely in their soft abdomens, that dispense a minty, blue paste, which can be smeared upon the walls, or the floor, or your face, or even on Fred if he unsuspectingly wanders in there.  A round bowl of water that can be made to spin and gurgle, and all the better, in which you can place objects and watch them whirl around, summoning hoards of screaming and frantic people to their rescue.  Oh the swirling! The gushing! The splashing! The goop! The cast of exasperated characters!  Yes, the bathroom is a fine place for a little chap.

But Mommy does not go to the bathroom for the toilet paper or the toothpaste, as appealing as these treasures are.  Not to unroll things or to dump water on the floor or to squeeze conditioner bottles to make fart sounds, not to dismantle the precarious curtain situation nor to use everyone else's toothbrush for both a twisted pantomime of tooth brushing and of cleaning the floor.  Mommy does not necessarily even go to the bathroom to use the oft-extolled potty.  Mommy goes to the bathroom because the bathroom is drenched in the white noise of running sinks and whirring fans, and because for up to ten minutes, no one can legitimately ask Mommy to leave.  Mommy goes to the bathroom just to be in the bathroom.  To sit, and close her eyes, and pretend that she does not live in an arcade run by tiny people with no sense of volume nor concept of how annoying it is to do thirty-five loads of laundry a day - even if it is automated - simply because someone learned the words ''wet'' and ''new'' and ''shirt,'' and contrives a situation requiring their use every ten minutes.

It's quite difficult to suspend belief and absorb the magical qualities of the bathroom, if they are being thwarted from the inside or the outside by my excessively cheerful and enthusiastic guide for The New Reality, who rattles the door handle incessantly, turns the lights on and off, and narrates, with a minimalist bent, the minutia of the world outside the door (e.g.: Fred, wet, Fred, wet, Fred, wet, mama, siusiu, mama, siusiu, mama siusiu, no, Fred wet Fred mama siusiu, on, off, on, off, on, off, on, off....)

Please don't worry, good buddy, you can catch me up in ten minutes.  I'm coming back.

Because I love you.

And because the window is really too small to climb through.