My mom has never liked wiping errant pee off the toilet seat. Though blameless in her sentiment, this resulted in a ban on lifting the toilet seat. This unnatural sanction was established not long after her bony butt sank into the seat-less bowl like a dipping sauce one too many times. It’s like yesterday in my mind: her fiendish screech, followed by a wailing animal howl to make sure the entire house knew the egregious injury done to her.
It’s now been 7 years since my dad urinated standing up. He walks into the bathroom, pulls his drawstrings past his scrotum, and sits down facing the water tank, with his dainty thighs clamped around the bowl. His face hangs low while his two child-sized hands steer the hose from which half my genetic material was forcibly ejected some twenty-six years ago.
Twenty nine years ago, he was a long-haired, guitar playing, dance troupe mongering, Trotskyite dilettante who fell in love with a fiercely ignorant country girl two years his senior. It all started with a ridiculous proposal to go swimming, and ended with his well-heeled family’s cruelly logical disapproval of their marriage. While his older brothers quickly spent the family fortune on medical school, being the sixth child in a family of thirteen ensured him a cheaper, lightweight academic future as an agricultural engineer.
Four years ago, my mom shoved her grimy, uneducated finger into his forehead and judged him the loser of the family. They were doctors except for him, a lowly engineer. He staggered back, his love for her did not. His face swollen with shame, he apologized, and went to the bathroom.