The bathroom wars

My house only has one bathroom. I thought that would be PLENTY when I bought the place because the kids spend six days a fortnight with their dad … and I literally had to beg them to take showers back then.

I got it soooooo wrong … a bit like how Fairfax thought it was an ace idea to spend half a billion dollars on new printing plants in Sydney and Melbourne in 1995 and 2006.

You’ve gotta think ahead.

Fast-forward to 2018 and Fairfax has finally offloaded those redundant plants for the princely sum of $55 million … and visits to my lone bathroom must be planned with strategic precision.

For example, I get up 15 minutes prior to waking the kids so can sneak into the shower.

My children literally spend HOURS in the bathroom. I never thought the words “I’m having a shower tonight” coming from both their mouths at the dinner table would strike such fear in my heart.

That’s three hours’ access to the facilities gone. Luckily we have a second toilet out the back or I’d be weeing in the bushes.

I accidentally left my book in the bathroom the other night and was stuck trawling through Facebook for the rest of the night to relieve the boredom while I waited for the water to stop running and the door to open again.

Those extended showers are accompanied by a loud soundtrack of music from the Bluetooth speaker they’ve hung in there. Actually, the music is quite entertaining, Tainted Love was blasting out the other night.

The bathroom has also become the prime location for teen and pre-teen youTube watching and telephone calls.

The youngest sometimes forgets to shut the door and I’ll stumble across her on the loo staring fixedly at her phone screen. I tried to scare her by telling her about the Chinese bloke whose rectum fell out of his anus after he spent too much time on the loo playing games on his phone.

She was completely unperturbed and just asked “What’s a rectum?”

(I swear, it’s a true story, the bloke was diagnosed with rectal prolapse and they had to sew it back in.)

But why on earth is the eldest having long, loud phone conversations – usually on speaker phone – in the bathroom instead of their bedroom? Can anyone shed some light?

I actually texted the eldest during last night’s conversation, saying: “I think you need to take him off speaker phone – I can hear every word he’s saying.”

That did the trick.

It’s a bit of a bore to beg to use my own bathroom and be endlessly banging on the door, screeching for children to GET OUT because we’re running late for everything.

Half the time I have no idea what the hell is going on behind that locked door.

Sometimes clues are left behind. The bathroom floor was scattered with red hair and bits of cardboard the other night, which I’ve sleuthed to be an impromptu haircut and a bit of artistry with a toilet roll insert, both accomplished using my nail scissors.

Messy.

But generally it’s a mystery, one that reminds me of an article I read about a waiter who got his work roster wrong and ended up alone in a room serving his boss and the President of Ireland while on ketamine.

At one point he writes: “Empires crumble and glaciers dissolve, stars die and oceans melt, out on the dusty planes of mother earth, hot bursts of young love gift the miracle of life; children are born, raised, stricken infirm and die of old age.”

Yep, I know that feeling. Well, not the ketamine bit …

Ah well, at least the kids finally smell nice. Though I could do without every square centimetre of bench space being taken up with the entire product ranges of Lynx, Brut and Schwarzkopf.

Song of the day: Rihanna “Stay”