STFU Parents: Should Parents Put A Lid On Pee Talk On Social Media?
Halloween is next week, which means that this week’s column is part of a long tradition of “gross columns” on Mommyish. In the past, I’ve focused on the squeamish stuff that truly grosses most people out — like placentas, bath poop, and my personal favorite, kids painting the walls with their own crap — but this year, I wanted to make a subtler point about bodily fluids. Namely, let’s talk about pee. On its face, or rather (ideally) in a toilet bowl, pee is really no big deal, right? We all do it several times a day, and if you have a baby or a small dog, there’s a good chance pee has touched many of the surfaces in your home, if not at some point covered your physical self. We’ve all become pretty desensitized to pee, and most of us have peed on the sides of highways, in the woods, or perhaps in our pants if we have a nice, good laugh. Who cares? It’s just pee!
Except, the thing is, it’s still kind of gross. But because parents are dealing with kids whose bladders are the size of a Lego, their perspective is skewed. Their whole day can be consumed by changing diapers, asking their child if they have to pee, cleaning up urine trails on the kitchen floor, and/or lightly jogging out of grocery stores and children’s museums after discovering their kid’s accidental pee puddle. Parents of little boys make jokes about “golden showers.” Parents of little girls are impressed by their lack of interest in sitting down. Most parents don’t even hesitate to make mention of these things on social media, because hey, at least it’s not poop they’re posting about. At least it only comes out in one color. What’s the problem?
Well, the problem is, I don’t want to know about your kid’s peeing habits anymore than I want to know about your dog’s peeing habits or your elderly relative’s catheter issues. It’s not that these tidbits wouldn’t be appropriate for lightly-soiled conversation in person, but online, what’s the point of Pee Talk? Can’t you just tell everyone your kid peed in his potty for the first time without uploading the picture? Can’t I go on with my afternoon not knowing that your kid just peed for four minutes straight while singing his favorite choo-choo song about trains? I know that my friends’ children are more interesting than that, so why not just put the lid down on the Pee Talk and flush?
Sometimes, however, when I scroll through the sub-folders in my Pee folder, which say things like “Bath Time,” “Potty Pics,” “Potty Charts,” and “Peeing Outside,” I wonder if I’m alone in thinking that Pee Talk is TMI. I mean, sure, the hundreds of people who have contributed to that folder thought the examples they sent in were gross or unnecessary, but how many of us REALLY think it’s bad form? “If it’s yellow, let it mellow” is an expression related to toilet flushing, but should I be more mellow about pee posts, too? That’s the question I’m posing for you pre-Halloween readers today. Check out these examples of parents who let the pee posts flow and let me know your thoughts in the comments. But please don’t say “hey, at least it’s not poop,” because we all know that poop posts are gross. This week, I’m focusing strictly on “Number One.” Here are five things not to discuss about your child’s urine on social media.
1. What It Smells Like
Part of the reason this is gross is because we all know what “asparagus pee” is about. It’s discolored, it smells like ass, and it could easily be used as a sensory torture device. Add to all that the notion that a child has been wearing his diaper for 11 hours, and you’ve got yourself a recipe for something highly unsavory. I appreciate Jennifer’s sense of humor, but no menu joke is going to replace the unsavory stench I imagined upon reading her status update.
2. What It Looks Like
“I think so lol” is the trademark parental rationale concerning the posting of potty pictures. The question “Is this appropriate?” can be answered “i think so lol” about as readily as the question “Is this disgusting?” can be. No one needed to see the proof that young Laura *really* peed; Amanda’s friends would have believed her either way. She just wanted to take this opportunity to show off her baby’s pee, plain and simple. See how it’s sitting there in the potty? Just yesterday, Laura couldn’t do that. Can you even handle the level of awesomeness that this urine puddle represents??
3. How Frequently You Change Your Pee Sheets
We’ve seen this before in a blog post about Christine’s sheets, and I feel the same way now as I did then: Whether or not you choose to wash your sheets after your child pees on them is on you. I don’t let other people dictate how frequently I wash my hair, so I’m not trying to tell anyone how often to peel their pee sheets off the bed and give them a quick wash. But I do recommend keeping that little secret to yourself. It’s actually NOT a secret that parents walk around in public with their kid’s leftover snot, pee, and vomit smeared on their clothes, but that doesn’t mean it’s really worth discussing on Facebook. Unless you just want everyone to know that you’re sleeping on pee sheets.
4. Your Kid’s Pee Stream
As I mentioned in the intro, I have an entire folder of pictures like this one. It’s not that I don’t think they’re kind of funny or cute; it’s just that when you’ve seen one kid piss in the woods, you’ve pretty much seen ’em all. I feel weird about the number of images that match this one that have been sent my way. Pictures of teeny tiny butts, pictures of toddlers standing at urinals that are five times their size, pictures of little boys peeing on driveways, in gardens, and, yes, in the woods. I get it, it’s “adorable,” but must these images get posted online? They’re not especially scandalous — the black circle on that picture isn’t covering up anything that shouldn’t be exposed — but they’re also not worthy of a worldwide audience.
5. That Your Kid Can Fill A Gatorade Bottle With Piss
I’m trying not to make a Rhett Butler joke in response to this woman’s kid being named “Rhett,” but when it comes to pictures of Gatorade bottles filled with hot piss, frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn. Maybe it’s the fact that the bottle is almost full, or the fact that it looks so much like the original product, but something about this close-up picture and caption make me queasy. Also, how many bottles does the average dude pee into in a lifetime? I was under the impression that it wasn’t a very common practice until I read the part in Tina Fey’s book in which she describes male SNL writers pissing into jars and leaving them around for weeks on end. Maybe they all had mothers like Rachel. Maybe there are even Gatorade-sponsored bottle pissing contests for adolescents that I’m not aware of. But if that is indeed the case, I’m off better not knowing about them. Rachel’s pee picture of her son’s accomplishment is plenty for me. And at least she kept the lid on it in a literal sense.
