LAS CRUCES – I’m trying my best to understand the brouhaha
about bathrooms.
But the recent state, national and possibly even Supreme
Court-level hubbub about who’s allowed to go where strikes me as way too much
ado about nothing very important, in the grand scheme of things.
Maybe it’s because I grew up in a family of five with three
kids, three bedrooms and one bathroom. I was reminded how typical that was,
recently, while watching Irene Oliver-Lewis’ new version of her touching and
funny “Cecilia-isms: Dichos de mi madre,” a play about growing up with her
large, loving, close-knit family.
And you had to be a loving, close-knit family to survive,
share and schedule life around one, shared bathroom.
It was not easy. There were issues of territory, privacy,
hot water and other pressing matters to be negotiated several times every day.
When dates or other special grooming issues were involved, sibling rivalries
could surface in dangerous ways. And then there were times of needs for long therapeutic
soaks clashing with – how to delicately put this – illness or desperate calls
of nature.
In fact, on dark days when the world is too much with me, I
have only to look around my little semi-adobe abode to feel instantly better.
Most of the time, I have three bedrooms and two whole bathrooms all to myself.
Life is working out well.
Then, I hear of laws and nationwide boycotts, all focusing
on the whether certain groups should be able to use particular bathrooms.
This is nothing new and the roots of such controversies
usually involve some sort of discrimination and fear mongering. The Civil Right
Movement focused on segregation that involved schools, housing, transportation,
employment and the basics of life, including access to public bathrooms and
drinking fountains.
Those of us old enough to remember the battles during the
1970s over the Equal Rights Amendment may have forgotten that opponents ominously
and sometimes downright hysterically threatened that the amendment’s passage
would result in, gasp, unisex bathrooms!
I think most women I know would have taken the risk for
equality in pay scales. It was the glass ceilings rather than the bathrooms
that had the most impact on our lives and careers.
In the meantime, though many seem not to have noticed, the
bathroom scene has changed.
When the popular sitcom Ally McBeal (1997-2002) made the
unisex bathroom a major plot feature, the concept seemed to generate more
amusement than alarm.
In the new millennium, family bathrooms, changing areas and
separate, specially-equipped bathrooms or stalls for the differently-abled
became common, and sometimes required by building code upgrades.
As a cautious, if not helicopter, mom and grandmom of boys,
I learned there are fairly simple ways to safeguard your kids. Take them with
you when they’re little and stay observant when they’re old enough to go to the
men’s (or women’s if you’re the caretaker dad of daughters) bathroom
themselves.
But I think it would be nice if the whole world would agree
on unisex bathrooms for all, whether multi-stall, a cluster of single restrooms,
or some combination thereof. (And it would solve many practical problems,
including the much longer stadium lines for the ladies’ room.)
There would likely be a civilizing, family-friendly
atmosphere that would discourage any of the behaviors, however statistically
rare, that loom large in the paranoid fantasies of some of our citizens.
And that civil ambience, in these ever-more-divisive times,
might remind us of the things unite us. We’re all human beings, and when you
gotta go, you gotta go. And, just as we did as families with limited
facilities, to keep peace and for the common good, we must learn to negotiate
on a daily basis to work things out.
S. Derrickson Moore may be
reached at 575-541-5450, dmoore@lcsun-news.com or @derricksonmoore on Twitter.
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