Lately, I’m looking at
department store ladies’ rooms from a different perspective especially
when I shop with my daughter and her two babies, 6 weeks and 20 months. My
favorite is the one at my local Nordstrom. Who would have thought a public
restroom and its accompanying lullaby lounge for nursing mothers would prove
fascinating to a toddler four months shy of his second birthday?
Because he absolutely
cannot stay imprisoned in his stroller for the eons of time (his perspective)
it takes his mother to nurse a newborn, he wanders out of the lullaby lounge into
the bathroom and I follow him. He looks around for something to do and spies
the soap dispenser. His eyes light up. Having mastered the word water quite clearly, he insists on washing his hands.
I lift all 26 pounds of
him, balance his solid little body on my knee, squirt soap into his palms and
turn on the cold water. He carefully and thoroughly washes and rinses both hands,
repeating the word dirty several
times which I take to mean another squirt of soap. We repeat this more than
once.
Bored with washing, he
notices the paper towel dispenser conveniently placed at a level that makes it
possible for him to reach on his own. Thrilled with his discovery, he proceeds
to pull down the paper and tear it off the roll. He watches as I demonstrate the
drying of hands and the throwing away of the towel. He does a credible job of
copying me… again and again and again.
“Enough,” I say and he
agrees, his attention falling on the lock of an unoccupied stall. He pushes the
bolt back and forth several times and then attempts to close the door, testing his discovery. I follow him inside the stall where we spend an agonizingly long time locking and unlocking the door. Of course, this means another bout
of lifting, squirting, washing and drying.
A woman clearly not old
enough to have grandchildren applies lipstick over one of the sinks. She looks
at me pointedly. I imagine she’s thinking I don’t care about the trees we are wasting or maybe I don’t know that California is in the middle of a drought, or both. Actually I do. I care very much, but at this time, in this place, desperate means call for
desperate measures.
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