CHILDREN, MAN. Are you feeling me? I’m about to go positively Bombeckian on your ass.

Nietzsche is still leaving me occasional piles of existentialism around the living room. I am trying to take care of her, since she is very old and sick now, but still very sweet. Her purr box works and she still sits in my lap while I read when I lift her up. Most mornings I carry her down to where her litter box is and she goes. Some mornings nature calls before I get up and the stink waves come into my room and wake me up. I tried having a litter box upstairs, but it didn’t work–I was too faint of heart to be woken up every morning by the worst cat shit smell I have ever smelled. I think I would rather be woken up by a crying baby than a smell, seriously.

So I was laying in bed this morning, and I thought I smelled it. “Here it comes,” I thought. “It will only get stronger now, I might as well get up.” I put on my dealing-with-early-morning-crises robe, which is, naturally, covered in poodles. My cat sat on the edge of the kitchen, looking up at me eagerly. “FOOD HAS FOOD THYMES ARRIVED AGAIN?” I was roused by an imaginary smell. I dream of litterboxes now, I really do. I picked her up and gave her a little squeeze and she purred. “Let’s go, Lady,” I said, and carried her downstairs, setting her near her box, which I keep as tidy as a country club sand trap now.

The children were getting dressed in their rooms, miraculously not squabbling through their doorways and across the hall. I was downstairs anyway, so I popped into the downstairs bathroom. Holding my pee on waking up from anywhere between 5 minutes and two hours is not something that ever occurred to me would happen until I spawned. It is relatively rare now that the girls are older–that was more of a baby thing, really. It cannot be just me who does that, right? Please?

Since this is a split level, everything is pretty much mirrored on both levels, and it is rare for me to use the downstairs loo. I inhabit the upstairs, which is close to the kitchen, important for emergency ramen fits. I can look outside my bedroom window and see the weather, and the naked janky pear tree, and what my neighbors are up to. They are disappointingly respectable, even Moon Pants.

So of course I usually use the upstairs bathroom that connects to my room, which makes it the Better Bathroom, somehow, in the children’s minds. I keep it cleaner because guests are more likely to use it. I remember as a child, wanting to be in my mother’s bathroom, but why? My bathroom is even almost the same ghastly color scheme–a peachy pink Formica with gold faucets and fixtures. Both were probably built at the same time, on opposite sides of the country. I wanted to be in there because it smelled like her; her perfumes and makeup and things were in it. Sometimes she was in it, and I would hover around below her, taking water, fragrance, or hair spray shrapnel as I noodled around on the floor.

The downstairs bathroom was a bit of a scene. No toilet paper. Still no hand towel, which I noticed last weekend and then forgot about, because Hey, it is not really MY bathroom. Someone else will notice and replace it, surely.

“Girls,” I said, looking in at them through their doorways. What a delight to be able to yell at both of them at once. “There is no toilet paper and no hand towel in your bathroom. How are you…making it in there?” Blank looks. I tried again. “What do you do in the middle of the night if you have to use the bathroom?” I asked Franny.

“I use your bathroom,” she said.

“YOU,” I said to Strudel. “What do YOU do when you poop and you wash your hands? Where do you wipe them?” I KNOW, I KNOW, a LOT of generous assumptions there, especially with the number of abandoned solitary brown trouts I find still.

“Okay, girls. Upstairs is MY bathroom. You may use it when you are upstairs. When you are down here, please use THIS bathroom. You are responsible for the toilet paper and hand towels in it.” I gave them both meaningful looks, the one that says “RIGHT NOW before you forget PLEASE.”

Strudel trudged upstairs and I pricked my ears to hear what she would do as I changed out of my robe and into some clothes for the day. I heard her walk into my bathroom and open the cabinet.

“What are you doing?” I said.

“Getting toilet paper,” she said, in her sensible reasonable tone, not impolite, just patient.

“That is extra for when I run out,” I said. “Do you know where I keep the household toilet paper?” She shook her head. “It’s in the linen closet.” Blank stare. “The closet you hide from your sister in.”

“Oh.”

“Yes, and it is next to the hand towels.”

So the bathroom is reprovisioned, for now, until the toilet paper is used up and someone makes off with the hand towel because they need a cape for their stuffed badger. The road to civilization is long, long, long, and really, no one cares but me up in my sparkly upstairs domain which you can see the floor in, and my shiny bathroom with the barfy fixtures that you can see your face rendered in appalling disco gold in. And sometimes I think, why should I bother, if they are happy living in relatively-minor levels of filth and chaos? Really, I am the odd one here. I don’t have an answer to that.