The Conspiracy to Keep Women Busy®: When You Can’t Even Go to the Bathroom Without Being Interrupted
I’m told that for mothers, the bathroom is their favorite room of the house—where they can get away from people. Or can they?
Every mother talks about this. Losing your privacy the moment you have kids. You’re in the shower, or you’re on the toilet, and it’s at that very moment that somebody in your family finds out that they really need your help with something. I couldn’t have been five minutes earlier, it couldn’t have been five minutes later, it had to happen at that moment.
And while I do hear of the occasional stay-at-home dad complaining about this issue, for the most part, it’s pretty obvious that when both parents are in the house, the kids will always, always, wait to have their emergencies when their mom is on the toilet.
With all due respect to emergencies, when only one member of the family is subjected to these demands, the message is quite clear. You, the mom, do not have the same basic rights other people do.
You do know that being able to do bathroom stuff without being interrupted is a pretty basic right, I hope? After all, none of you here would knock on the restroom stall at work to ask your manager for some critical piece of information, would you? You could be fired for such behavior, and rightly so.
But if we were to listen to every parent on the internet, we would easily get the impression that keeping kids out of the bathroom while we use it is completely impossible. After all, do you know what might happen if a crawling-capable toddler is left securely placed in their crib while you go and pee? It might cry! And at that point, you would just know that you are the worst mom ever for not giving that kid what they wanted exactly the moment they wanted it.
I have managed to escape most of this problem, but even so, I’m not immune. I can clearly recall the time that I was in the bathroom, the family couldn’t get in because I’d locked the door1, so they were calling to me from the other side, and the entire charge was being led by—my husband. That’s right, not even the kids. Sure, it was their distress over something that was prompting his actions, but he was the one banging on the door trying to talk to me.
Being a nice person, as all women are told to be, does appear to dictate that one shouldn’t actually ignore people if someone’s life is on the line. So I did listen long enough to make sure it wasn’t anything of that nature.
After a few seconds, it did become obvious that though my husband wanted an answer right away, so that he could get the kids off his back right away, he in fact did not need to get an answer right away. Nobody was going to die; the house wasn’t going to burn down. In fact, in terms of their growth and development as people, what my family needed at that moment was to realize that their questions could wait, and that a person in the bathroom should not be interrupted for that particular level of problem. But were they able to reassure themselves with these facts? Apparently not.
So the next thing I did was pretend that I couldn’t hear him. A slight stretch of the imagination, you might think? After all, he was right on the other side of the door. I did put the fan on, so that the noise blocked out the sound of his voice a little. He kept trying to ask me things and eventually gave up. After I had quietly taken my time (I was tempted to actually clean the toilet bowl as well, just to belligerently take a little longer, but I resisted), I went back into the dining room where my family members were assembled, and calmly and transparently explained to them what I’d done, and that I intended to do the same thing in the future. They stared at me rather blankly, but they haven’t since attempted to interrupt me in the bathroom again.
I am completely astonished that it only took the one time. I don’t know how persistent your family members are. (Mine are persistent too, I guess just with other things).
My off-the-cuff thought is: prepare yourself to do this at least twently times before anyone’s brain registers anything.
After all, they all have a program running in their head that says, “When I bang on the door of the bathroom, mom will stop mid-pee and deal with my issue”. It could take quite a bit of repetition to dislodge that assumption and replace it with a different set of expectations.
What I would greatly prefer is that I could explain to my family members how frustrating and dehumanizing it feels to have them believe that I should drop everything, even basic bodily functions, to attend to everybody’s needs and wishes. In this dream, I would issue the explanation, the family would suddenly come to an understanding of what it means to respect my right to use a bathroom uninterrupted, present me with lots of sympathy, and adjust their behavior accordingly.
But that’s just not how it goes. For whatever reason, my family members will always see their urgent wish to fix whatever problem has come up so much more clearly than they can understand the frustration that I am attempting to explain to them. Either they’ll nod and seem to understand, or they’ll stare at me in confusion, but will they remember my frustration? No. What they will remember is that they banged on that door, and that I responded by coming out, or letting them in, and giving them what they wanted. And that recollection will set them up next time to bang on the door again.
What we have here, for the mom who is being interrupted in her bathroom activities, is a reluctance to say no to our family. We don’t want them to put us in a position where protecting our privacy means we have to push back. Especially on a repeated basis.
At this point, a lot of well-meaning self-help advice would claim that we only have ourselves to blame for constantly saying yes to our family members and then wondering why they keep expecting us to say yes. Certainly, saying yes to a request and then begging family members to not make that request again, doesn’t seem to work. Except, of course, with an entire society ready to think badly of us for every instance where we say no, it’s really not that surprising that we find saying no difficult. And if saying no isn’t expected behavior on our part, maybe that’s how invading the bathroom when we’re using it came to be considered reasonable to start off with.
As you can see, though, there is hope. I declined to rush out the moment my family members wanted something from me. I didn’t wait for their permission to decline their request. I didn’t wait for them to understand. I was sufficiently frustrated that I decided I was in the right with my wish for privacy, whether anyone else on the planet agreed with me or not. And I am still alive today, and my family still likes me.
Advice for solving problems and making our lives better frequently follows the following pattern: Realize we’re doing things a certain way, and do something different.
Sounds easy, doesn’t it? After all, no matter who thinks badly of you for wanting your privacy in the bathroom, please know that you are actually still right! It’s really just that standing out against the world in your lone singly held opinion that opposes everything else we’ve ever been taught is quite fatiguing.
It really would be easier to say no if we women weren’t carrying a lifetime’s worth of pressure that constantly reminds us of what bad people we are if we say no – to anything at all.
It would be so much easier to push back on the family members invading the bathroom if we could confidently continue believing that we are perfectly good enough people and will not lose the approval of all our favorite people in the process.
Allow me to offer you hope on that score, also.
Firstly, your family members are not actually likely to dislike you for saying no. You are a favorite person to them, they love you to bits, and their affection for you is resilient enough to withstand a no from the other side of a bathroom door. They might cluelessly wonder about why it’s such a big deal to you, but while they work on getting their perspective-taking skills in order, the fact that this is what you want is authoritative enough. You and your wishes are authoritative enough.
Secondly, your friends are not as likely to think badly of you as you might fear. If anything, at least some of them are secretly wishing that they could get up the courage to say no from inside the bathroom. By all means keep note of whether anyone outright condemns you. That way, you can reserve any future bids for sympathy for someone else.
- I wondered afterwards how this would have gone in my family of origin, where none of the internal doors had locks. I might have resorted to a handkerchief wedged under the door, or bought a door wedge for that exact purpose! ↩︎
