Open Writing

“EEEWW. Yuck. He’s been eating blueberries again, Sandy,” said three year old Serena as she stood alongside me as I changed my baby son’s nappy. She was ostensibly there to “help” but she peered with such intensity that no-one could deny that she was really acquiring her first, innocent lessons in the nature of male anatomy.

Perhaps it was a lesson in food science too because, ever the intellectual, her next question was, “Why do blueberries go in blue and come out green?” Now there’s a conundrum. Whoever said “educate a mother and you educate a nation” forgot to say that it needs to be a tertiary education with several post graduate degrees tacked on the side.

I looked after Serena during the week and both she and I were both from predominantly female households. So it was that we learnt about the nuances and hurdles of male toileting together as we nurtured my son through to boyhood and set him on his way to independent peeing so that he no longer had to be emasculated by coming with us into the ladies’ loo. It was a learning curve (excuse the pun) for all three of us.

When it came time to teach him to pee standing up I made it more engaging for him by having Serena toss some ping-pong balls into the toilet bowl. He honed his prowess and showed off with glee by aiming for the balls and seeing how many he could hit with one stream. Serena was mightily impressed and rather envious that she could not compete.

One Saturday, whilst we were in a rather posh department store, I decided that it was high time that my husband took our son into the male facilities as an initiation into the ways of his gender – a sort of father/ son bonding session. I waited patiently in the corridor outside for what seemed like an eternity. Several men came out with bemused looks on their faces and I heard a bit of shouting going on inside. Eventually my flustered husband emerged, dragging our son behind him. Apparently, whilst my husband had had his back turned, our son had been washing his hands with the urinal cake and rinsing them in the water which washed down the wall of the urinal. That experience scarred my son and for several months he refused to use ‘The Rhino’, as he called it.

These difficulties paled against those experienced by the exasperated headmaster of my son’s primary school. He had two hundred of these gung-ho sprayers to try and control and he was not winning the war. A visit to the boys’ toilets was to be strictly avoided at all costs. Empty toilet rolls clogged the toilet bowls and regularly blocked the plumbing. There were stalactites of dried toilet paper blobs crusted mighty tight onto the ceiling, where they had remained since the students’ last toilet paper bombing fight. No matter how many deodorising blocks the cleaner placed in the trough, the place always reeked. He was not to know that the little darlings were peeing in the sinks. Not satisfied with this, they were having cross peeing competitions which proved extremely messy because, as any cross peeing athlete knows, one has to maintain equal velocity with one’s partner, which is quite a skill and as the pressure decreases, one inadvertently ends up hosing down the floor.

The headmaster organised for mini archery targets to be stuck onto the urinal, the idea being that give a man a target and it reduces the mess. This worked wonders for a few days until the novelty wore off and the boys started moving further and further away from the urinal, until they were standing at the entrance to the ablutions, seeing who could create the most impressive ‘Harbour Bridge Arch’. I am sure that this term is so perfectly descriptive that it needs no further explanation.

The situation worsened unexpectedly one night. The light above the urinal had accidentally been left on in the toilet facilities and hundreds of bogong moths, migrating in their 3,000km annual, nocturnal flight across Australia had been attracted to it. When the surprised boys came into the change rooms the following morning, moths were gathered in plague numbers all over the shiny contraption. With much glee and great inevitability, the young boys began to pee the moths off the wall of the urinal and down into the drain in the trough. When the traumatised creatures hit the urinal cakes they began to flutter wildly as these cakes are made from naphthalene, which also happens to be a moth repellent.

Word spread with the speed of a bushfire and soon most of the school was crammed into the toilets, shrieking and playing a new game called ‘Acid Rain’.

I have since heard that that headmaster has taken the unusual step of transferring to a girls’ school.

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