Piss Pot

Where America is bigger, bigger, bigger and more, more, more, Norway is bigger on mountains, but in general, less is more over there. Smaller homes, smaller malls, smaller loaves of bread at the grocery store, and so on. Or at least this is how I remember it from my summers as a young person.

My grandparents house resembled a dollhouse. Perfect little rooms intricately decorated with velvet covered sconces, hand embroidered doilies under the glass figurines on carved side tables. A tiny, narrow twisting staircase led to the bedrooms upstairs, all with slanted ceilings and very little room for anything but a bed. My brother and I shared a room across from my Mormor and Morfar for many, many summers. And of all the amazing memories I have of those summers in that quaint and beautiful house, there is one that comes to me EVERY single morning since we have lived in my mom's basement in upstate NY.

The piss pot.

I know my grandparents had a different name for it...something with 'tisse' because that is the Norwegian word for pee. Most people know them as 'chamber pots.' My grandparents had a 'grown-up' sized one and there was a smaller one, with a cute childish painting on the side for my brother and I. As I said, in Norway, things are smaller - one bathroom on the ground level was the only bathroom in the house. So, I suppose, to save yourself from falling down the steep staircase at 2 in the morning, my grandparents procured these "pots." They were kept under our beds and if we used them in the night we were to leave them outside our bedroom door to be emptied in the morning.

Now...having spent most of my childhood time in America, where we had a bathroom on each floor, this notion seemed almost barbaric. I remember a five or six-year-old me thinking this was an insane expectation...sitting on a pot in the upstairs hallway in the middle of the night...to pee! Crazy! And yet...I vaguely recall breaking down one night and doing it...I have an even fainter memory of my Mormor's approving 'I told you so' face in the morning when she collected the pots to take down stairs.

Oh...to have a piss pot now. You see, the arrangement we have at the moment is such that Finn's crib is RIGHT NEXT to the basement bathroom door. It is also pretty close to the stairs that creak and lead to the upstairs bathroom. SO, every morning, around five, I wake up with a pretty strong urge...and knowing little Finn will wake up for good if he is disturbed anytime past 5 am, I am forced to hold it...in a sort of sleepless/sleep state....dreaming of a piss pot to appear under my side of the bed. What a silly predicament.

And I am not complaining. No sir. I have found myself a perfect little house down the road with a bathroom sufficiently down the hall from Finn's to-be bedroom. But I think it is worth noting and sharing with the world that currently, every morning I am lying in my bed thinking of my grandparents' piss pot.