+
upworthy
Family

Mom refuses to clean the bathroom after her husband tells their sons to pee standing up

She has a good point.

standing while peeing, parenting, kids
Canva

Who would want to clean that up?

There are only a few reasons why a man would cling so hard to maintain the right to stand while peeing, and they’re all far from logical. After all, sitting while urinating is not only less messy, it could prevent certain health issues.

One reason could just come down to sheer laziness. Standing while peeing is a habit so deeply ingrained one simply can’t be bothered to try new things. Or it’s quicker and easier, though that also seems debatable.

But the other, more prevailing cause is that peeing while standing up is so closely linked with the notion of masculinity. Because…it’s how the cowboys did it in the Wild West, I guess?

Saying (or writing) these things out loud, it’s easy to see how ridiculous these arguments are, especially when other people are left to clean up afterward. Urine is bound to go at least a little astray, even with the best of aimers. Put children into the equation, and you’re basically dealing with Jackson Pollock.


This is why one mom is taking a stand against the pee stand. Over on Reddit’s Am I The A**hole forum, she shared how her kids previously had zero issues peeing while sitting down.

“After we potty trained our sons I kept making sure that they were sitting to pee,” her post explained. “They are young and don't really care. They can use a urinal when we are out somewhere.”

Everything was fine until the woman's brother-in-law came to visit and took issue with the arrangement. He started “bugging” his brother about his nephews sitting to pee. So her husband pulled an about-face and began telling the boys that when they only pee, they should stand.

“The boys don't have great aim but they make up for it with a short attention span,” the poster quipped. Though she usually stuck to using her own bathroom, after a few days she ventured into the kid’s bathroom and, to no one’s surprise, “it was gross.”

This prompted the mom to initiate a new cleaning routine. Her post concluded, “When my husband got home I told him that he picked up a new chore. He now has to clean the toilets, floors, and walls in the bathrooms the boys are using. He said that it wasn't his turn. I said it was his idea for the boys to stand to pee so he had to deal with the consequences.”

via GIPHY

The verdict was fairly unanimous: This woman was NOT the a-hole. In fact, lots of other women felt the same kind of frustration and met it with similar retaliation.

“I will never understand why it's socially acceptable for boys and grown a** men to spray bathrooms like tom cats because they choose to stand to urinate,” one person wrote. “It's unnecessary and unsanitary. Either aim better, clean up after yourself, or sit.”

“I told my husband that I didn't sign up for cleaning his piss off the toilet and floor for the next 50 years,” added another. “He has been sitting ever since. Somehow he's still a man after over a year of sitting to pee!”

Luckily, peeing while sitting down is starting to be viewed as something beneficial rather than emasculating, as more men worldwide adopt the practice. Perhaps even more would be on board if they were responsible for clean-up.

Community

How to end hunger, according to the people who face it daily

Here’s what people facing food insecurity want you to know about solving the hunger problem in America

True

Even though America is the world’s wealthiest nation, about 1 in 6 of our neighbors turned to food banks and community programs in order to feed themselves and their families last year. Think about it: More than 9 million children faced hunger in 2021 (1 in 8 children).

In order to solve a problem, we must first understand it. Feeding America, the nation’s largest domestic hunger-relief organization, released its second annual Elevating Voices: Insights Report and turned to the experts—people experiencing hunger—to find out how this issue can be solved once and for all.

Here are the four most important things people facing hunger want you to know.

Keep ReadingShow less
Pets

Family brings home the wrong dog from daycare until their cats saved the day

A quick trip to the vet confirmed the cats' and family's suspicions.

Family accidentally brings wrong dog home but their cats knew

It's not a secret that nearly all golden retrievers are identical. Honestly, magic has to be involved for owners to know which one belongs to them when more than one golden retriever is around. Seriously, how do they all seem have the same face? It's like someone fell asleep on the copy machine when they were being created.

Outside of collars, harnesses and bandanas, immediately identifying the dog that belongs to you has to be a secret skill because at first glance, their personalities are also super similar. That's why it's not surprising when one family dropped off their sweet golden pooch at daycare and to be groomed, they didn't notice the daycare sent out the wrong dog.

See, not even their human parents can tell them apart because when the swapped dog got home, nothing seemed odd to the owners at first. She was freshly groomed so any small differences were quickly brushed off. But this accidental doppelgänger wasn't fooling her feline siblings.

Keep ReadingShow less

A guy passes out on his bed eating pizza.

A 29-year-old woman had a baby girl, and after a brief maternity leave, she had to return to work. She couldn't afford childcare, so her husband, 35, reluctantly agreed to watch the baby while she was at work.

“It’s important to know that he’s been unemployed since 2021,” the woman wrote on Reddit’s AITA subforum. “He receives benefits. It’s also important to know that he’s extremely lazy. He doesn’t cook, clean, or help out in any way. I was nervous about leaving her home with her father, but I had no choice.”

The mother had reason to be worried about leaving her baby home alone with her husband, but in the beginning, things seemed fine. “When I came back from work, she was clean and sleeping. The next few times I came home, he was either playing with her, feeding her, or out for a walk with her. I was happy,” she wrote.

Keep ReadingShow less

A boy doing the dishes.

A 41-year-old mom with 3 boys, 12-year-old twins, and a 10-year-old, pays them $10 daily to do their chores. However, their pay is deducted $10 if they miss a day. The boys have to do their tasks 5 days a week, although it doesn’t matter which days they choose to work.

“This system has worked swimmingly for us since it started, the boys have always complied with completing their chores,” the mom wrote on Reddit.

Her 12-year-old son was getting ready to play Fortnite with a friend and told him he’d be ready in 15 minutes once he finished his chores. When the boys started playing the game, he told the friend he was in charge of dusting and sweeping the stairs, to which the friend responded, “It’s a good thing my parents don’t make me do girl chores.”

After learning what the friend said, the mom told her son that chores are genderless.

Keep ReadingShow less
Photo by Omar Lopez on Unsplash

Women do better when they have female friends.

Madeleine Albright once said, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women." It turns out that might actually be a hell on Earth, because women just do better when they have other women to rely on, and there's research that backs it up.

A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that women who have a strong circle of friends are more likely to get executive positions with higher pay. "Women who were in the top quartile of centrality and had a female-dominated inner circle of 1-3 women landed leadership positions that were 2.5 times higher in authority and pay than those of their female peers lacking this combination," Brian Uzzi writes in the Harvard Business Review.

Part of the reason why women with strong women backing them up are more successful is because they can turn to their tribe for advice. Women have to face different challenges than men, such as unconscious bias, and being able to turn to other women who have had similar experiences can help you navigate a difficult situation. It's like having a road map for your goals.

Keep ReadingShow less

Derrick Downey Jr. has been dubbed the 'squirrel whisperer.'

Most of us who live in the U.S. are used to looking out a window or walking out our front door and seeing squirrels. The cute, fluffy-tailed rodents often appear perfectly pettable, but they generally scamper away when humans get too close.

That is not the case for TikTok creator Derrick Downey Jr., however, as he has not only befriended his neighborhood squirrels but goes all out to help them live their best squirrel lives.

Downey shared a video in May of 2022 in which he chats with a couple of squirrels on his porch while feeding them and offering them water. That video received over 26 million views and kicked off a whole series of videos showcasing the adorable antics of Richard, Maxine, Hector, Consuela, Norma (may she rest in peace), and Hood Rat Raymond. He's built Richard a house, rescued Maxine's babies, mourned Norma's transition (to wherever squirrels go when they die) and more.

People can't get enough, and who can blame them? Squirrels are the best (when they're not tearing up your patio furniture and stealing cotton for their nest, as Downey has experienced.)

Keep ReadingShow less
Education

Voice recordings of people who were enslaved offer incredible first-person accounts of U.S. history

"The results of these digitally enhanced recordings are arresting, almost unbelievable. The idea of hearing the voices of actual slaves from the plantations of the Old South is as powerful—as startling, really—as if you could hear Abraham Lincoln or Robert E. Lee speak." - Ted Koppel

Library of Congress

When we think about the era of American slavery, many of us tend to think of it as the far distant past. While slavery doesn't exist as a formal institution today, there are people living who knew formerly enslaved black Americans first-hand. In the wide arc of history, the legal enslavement of people on U.S. soil is a recent occurrence—so recent, in fact, that we have voice recordings of interviews with people who lived it.

Keep ReadingShow less