A Mom Won't Clean The Bathroom After Her Husband Encourages Her Sons To Pee Standing Up
Usually they take turns cleaning, but she wants to know if it's unfair that she refuses to take on the extra mess.
Potty training kids is hard enough. There are accidents, close calls, and lots of messes. But even after you have your kid consistently going both number one and number two in the toilet, there are still plenty of obstacles and headaches to endure before you’re in the clear. For parents of boys (and let’s face it, for the partners of many adult men), this means dealing with the urine that goes astray when people with penises choose to “go” while standing up.
It means more work cleaning the bathroom, even when dealing with the most careful males, and, for younger kids with less aim and shorter attention spans, it can mean a lot more work cleaning the bathroom.
One mom of three doesn’t understand why peeing standing up even has to be a thing. She taught all of her kids to pee sitting down and hasn’t had any issues — but now her husband wants them to stand and she doesn’t want to deal with the mess. She headed to Reddit’s Am I The A**hole forum to settle the matter once and for all.
Here’s the deal: her house has three bathrooms: an ensuite bathroom that she uses, a half bath that is mostly for guests and hand washing, and then a main bathroom that is mostly used by her husband and kids.
So far, the parents have had their kids sit to pee, mostly, and it’s worked out fine.
“After we potty trained our sons I kept making sure that they were sitting to pee,” the poster explained. “They are young and don't really care. They can use a urinal when we are out somewhere.”
The issue started when a man from outside the family unit made a judgement about how her kids pee and her husband took it to heart.
“My brother-in-law was over last month and saw my oldest boy in the bathroom by accident,” she continued. “My sons don't lock the bathroom door yet because they don't want to get locked in... my brother-in-law made a joke about my son not stinking up the bathroom. My son told him that he was just peeing. For some reason my BIL took offense at this and started bugging my husband about his sons sitting to pee.”
When the standing started, so did the mess.
“My husband then started telling the boys that if they are only peeing that they should stand,” she said. “They boys don't have great aim but they make up for it with a short attention span. When I went in the bathroom after a few days of that it was gross. I turned around and walked out.”
She made up a new cleaning policy on the spot: no more taking turns cleaning the bathrooms. If he encouraged the boys to stand to pee, she wasn’t going to clean up the mess.
“When my husband got home I told him that he picked up a new chore,” she concluded. “He now has to clean the toilets, floors, and walls in the bathrooms the boys are using. He said that it wasn't his turn. I said it was his idea for the boys to stand to pee so he had to deal with the consequences. He did it but he is upset about me unilaterally making this decision. Like he did about the boys.”
Redditors from around the world read this mom’s story and the vast majority sided with her: she is not the a**hole here, it’s her husband. And women, especially, were adamant that standing up to pee doesn’t make a ton of sense unless you clean up after yourself each time.
“I will never understand why it's socially acceptable for boys and grown a** men to spray bathrooms like tom cats because they choose to stand to urinate,” one person wrote, to many up-votes. “It's unnecessary and unsanitary. Either aim better, clean up after yourself, or sit.”
“I told my husband that I didn't sign up for cleaning his piss off the toilet and floor for the next 50 years,” another person wrote. “He has been sitting ever since. Somehow he's still a man after over a year of sitting to pee!”
One extremely smart 9-year-old girl even got out a blacklight just to prove her point.
“I FINALLY very recently convinced my husband to sit to pee after over 14 years of marriage thanks to comments like these on Reddit,” wrote one fed-up woman. “I screenshotted a bunch of men talking about how they sit at home and how gross it is to leave piss sprinkles all over the floor/seat/walls and he’s finally listened and has sat down for the last couple of months. Our 9yo daughter even busted out the black light flashlight to show him how freaking disgusting standing to pee is just 3 days after fully sanitizing the bathroom!”
If you want the expert’s take, peeing while standing, at least while in the comfort of your home, doesn’t come with any advantages (other than that it has somehow been crowned “more manly”). On the flip side, peeing while seated can help you more fully empty your bladder while also keeping the bathroom more sanitary. Sounds like a win-win.
