Peeing in a Cup

Rejected by Havre Daily News as "Yellow Journalism".
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Peeing in a Cup


We’ve all had to do it at one time or another in our life—pee in a cup. For many of us women this ordeal likely started with pregnancy. For you men, perhaps the inconvenience began when you entered military service or later in life, to check the health of your prostate. The doctor or nurse handed you a miniature alcohol towelette, of dubious value, along with a tiny paper or plastic cup and sent you into the sanctuary of a miniscule cubicle with directions to void. I will not burden you with further details.

So that’s how this tribulation began for most of us—in the doctor’s office. Not so for my four year old granddaughter Annie. She hatched the idea on her own. Had she been eight, she would have flushed the evidence. Instead, her mother found a teacup sitting on the dresser, full of pee.

“What’s this?” Mom asked.

I rolled my eyes. I don’t know why she asked that question when she already knew the answer. It is a well-known fact of child psychology that by age four all children answer redundant questions with either “I don’t know” or “I didn’t do it.”

“I don’t know,” Annie answered.

“Why did you pee in the cup?” Mom continued. Dumb-mother-question number two.

“I didn’t do it.”

The next day Mom found a cereal bowl filled with pee on the kitchen counter. Same questions. Identical responses.

The following day Mom found Annie out in the yard, panties hobbled around her ankles, arching her back and aiming an uncertain stream in the general direction of an azalea bush.

Her mom asked me what to do since Grandmas are well-known repositories of wisdom.

Once I wiped tears of laughter from my face, I responded. “Annie is in daycare with two boys her age, right. I’m sure she has seen them do it. She is probably just trying to figure out where it comes from and how it works. If she can figure out how the boys pee, then she can figure out how she pees. Boys’ plumbing fixtures are so much more visible, easier to understand. Shoot, she might have been in a panic about hers. It is healthy scientific experimentation. Ignore it.”

“But why in a teacup?”

“Why not? It was probably in the dish drainer, easy to grab. What about her father—does he ever go out on the deck at night and . . .”

“Mom!”

“Hey, I’m sure he does; it’s a man thing. They all have this universal urge to whizz outdoors. It’s probably a residual need of the male animal to mark his territory. I wonder if she has seen him. You know, every little girl wants to be just like her Dad.”

“I shudder to think,” my daughter said.

“You’ve got to think about these things. I just got this mental picture of Annie peeing off the deck when she’s sixteen, wobbling in high heels, prom formal hiked up around her waist.”

“Mom, mind your mouth.”

“Oh, Honey. Annie is in an exploration phase. I guarantee it won’t last long. Unless, of course, Freud was right.”

Sondra Ashton
HDN: Looking out my back door
http:montanatumbleweed.blogspot.com
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