Monday August 04, 2003 at  4:26 PM

Of Divots & Dribbles

Appearing in  Domestic Bliss  &  Photography

Never a man given to hyper-modesty or physical embarrassment, I have however always maintained a certain decorum when it comes to the intersection of body functions and toilets. Although the more European among you may dismiss such behavior as prudish, with the exception of Melanie Griffith in “Something Wild”, I have happily gotten this far in life having never witnessed the opposite sex on the toilet. It is a streak I intended to maintain.

An unintended consequence of such urinary privacy however, is that it has left me somewhat unprepared for my daughter’s transition out of diapers. Unlike my son, where I clearly held the home court advantage, potty-training a little girl reminds me that I am not only the visiting team but that the locker room has been set up for a different sport.

Until now I had lived with the naive assumption that girls, and presumably grown women, naturally urinated with a sufficient trajectory and force to separate them from their fluids in a relatively tidy, hygienic manner. I had assumed that porcelain divots were the natural state of things. Thanks to parenthood however, I now know that such a feat requires a maturity and muscular development often found wanting in toddlers.

It appears that without proper concentration and application of pressure, the female urinary experience can easily degrade from porcelain divots to dribbles. While this goes some way towards explaining what happens to all the toilet paper, it also provides me with one more excuse for keeping potty time, private time.

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