How many times a day do you hear “I’ve gotta pee!”

And it’s contagious. If one needs to go, the other needs to go. Not at the same time. Not when it’s convenient. In fact, they have to go when it’s least convenient. They’ve gotta go when the food arrives at a restaurant. They were fine a second ago, but now that you’ve got to the front of the line at the [fill in the blank with any city office – passport, drivers licence, parking tickets] and they just can’t hold it for a single second.

Sometimes I wonder if ditching the diapers was really in my best interest…

But what about us? What do you do when you need to pee. It starts in your brain: I gotta pee. You insist – as you argue inside your own brain – that you can wait. You can hold it. You don’t need to go. Well, you don’t need to go that bad.

Says you.

You know very well that you need to go – that bad – because since giving birth (the second… third  time) you’ve got little to no bladder control. There is no difference, no degrees. You either don’t have to go, or you have to pee like Niagara Falls is pressing against your pelvic floor.

I looked it up. You’re supposed to be able to hold 14 to 20 ounces of urine for about 5 hours. With a Starbucks Venti coming in at 20 ounces, and a hair-trigger bladder muscle, we never had a fighting chance.

None of us have peed with the door to the bathroom closed for years. One of the littles needs you most just as you drop trow. There will be yelling, there will be screaming. There may even be another adult in the house, but it will not result in a closed door.

You pee fast and you go.

But what happens when you’re out? You’ve waited until you could get to a clean public bathroom – and that is about as much bladder control as you can muster.

Now, add to that the fact that you may have a baby strapped to your chest. And this baby may be hungry. You probably have one or two other littles that both want and need something completely opposite to what you need.

Now imagine all of that, but with an outhouse as your only outlet, because you’re a good parent and took your 4-year-old apple picking because you are trying to keep going with a newborn.

Um, yah. Sorry M. I just can’t get that one off of my mind. File that under “Things only another mother can understand.”