Dear Luciana,

I never know which bathroom to take you into.

The other day you made it easy. And by easy I mean you gave me no choice. Ten minutes on the potty at home. Nothing. We get to the pool, we’re about to step in, and you look me dead in the eye and start pooping. I can see the bulge.

“Luciana, Did you poop?”

“Noooooooooooo!”

“Luciana. The poop is right there.”

“I pooped.”

Men’s room it is.

Fifteen minutes to clean it up. There is no good surface in a men’s room. There is no good anything in a men’s room. The changing table looked like college kids had used it for a beer pong table. Dry pee on the floor. I decided to changed you standing up, holding my breath like I was defusing a bomb.

The men’s room is the standard right now. Gross, but accepted. Nobody films you for walking a toddler past a row of urinals.

The women’s room makes more sense for you. Not because the men’s room scars you. Nothing dramatic happens in there. Eventually you will be using the women’s room. However, I don’t want the first time you ever set foot in a women’s room to be by yourself. And having a random friend or family member take you in isn’t good enough either.

That would have been Mommy’s job.

I saw a video of a dad who took his daughter into the women’s room. He got crushed. Thousands said it was fine. But the loud ones win. The loud ones call the cops on a man in a women’s bathroom. The thousands who get that a single dad is just doing his best are on the internet shaking their fists. Which doesn’t help me.

Some places make it easy. Disney World has a family bathroom every fifty feet and a changing table that isn’t a bio-hazard. Those places I don’t worry about. It’s everywhere else. The pool. The gas station. The places where your only two options are gross or viral.

So. The gross one. Always the gross one.

Right now it works. You’re little. But you keep getting bigger. There’s a year coming, I don’t know which one, where a girl your age in the men’s room is not something I want to deal with. And a man my age in the women’s room is always one bad angle from going viral. Both doors are the wrong door. Which kind of wrong just depends on the day.

I’m not the first single dad to deal with this. But I’m annoyed by how annoying this is.

For now, you get the gross bathroom. We’ll see what happens when you’re six and we’re at the airport.

Besitos,

Daddy