Office Confidential

For the post on Eastern State Penitentiary, click here.

Summer’s the season for Mason jars around our house. Not for canning vegetables or brewing sun tea. For storing urine. There, I said it. The straight truth from a working mother.  From June until August when my kids are on summer break, I go to work with my briefcase on my shoulder, and a quart-sized jar in my hand. That’s because I work in the bathroom-free bonus room over our garage. If I were to dart home to use the loo while the kids are with the sitter, they’d freak out when I turned around and headed back to work. Especially my four year-old, who’s still trying to grasp the concept of time. To him, something that happened five minutes ago is “yesterday,” and something we’re doing after his nap is “tomorrow.”  Saying I’m just back for a minute and will be home at lunchtime is too abstract. He’d watch me walk out the door again and start to cry. With my tiny bladder, it’s too much to ask of him, the sitter, and me. Instead, I rock a strawberry-motif mason jar, like I’m the spawn of Jethro Tull’s Aqualung and Paula Deen.

Six years into parenthood, I’ve faced the fact that urine management is a big part of my job. I wasn’t always so accepting. When my first child was born, I railed against my BBSIS (bursting bladder/sleeping infant syndrome). Desperate for my baby to sleep, I’d drive her around town, all the while chugging water so I’d be hydrated enough to nurse. Forty-five minutes into our cruise she’d fall asleep, just as my bladder was exceeding its maximum psi. What to do? The sound of the carseat unclicking from its base was enough to wake her up, let alone the roar of a flush-valve toilet in a tiled McDonald’s bathroom.  Eventually I surrendered to the dark side of motherhood and became a C.P.U. (Copious Public Urinator). Church dumpster enclosures, school heat pump pads, private boxwood hedgerows, you name it, I peed by it. I had a whole routine, down to muffling the click of my seatbelt as I unbuckled and rebuckled the latch. In my mind I carried a 3-D map of discreet places in town where I could relieve myself in broad daylight without waking my baby. To my knowledge I never got busted, though it wouldn’t surprise me if some Sunday schooler saw the blinding white flash of my butt by the Bingo sign.

My husband sometimes gives me the ‘you’re-being-a-drama-queen” look when he sees me packing up my computer and Mason jar for work. He takes for granted the fact that he can come and go to our house for bladder relief without incident. I tell him it’s different with primary caregivers, it just is. When we were adding onto our porch a few years ago, my children would spy me out the window talking to the contractor and start to wail. The crying would start out loud and then dampen when the sitter hurriedly closed the door. It’s plain hard to focus on anything with two ruddy, tear-streaked faces pressed up against the glass. On several occasions I heard my children approach the porch, so I hit the dirt mid-sentence. When the coast was clear, I got up, brushed off my clothes, and ignored the builders’ pitying looks. What choice did I have? If mothers have eyes on the backs of their heads, then kids have mom-motion detectors all over their bodies. Radar love.