Take it from me: ALWAYS use the bathroom before you go to bed.
Even if you’re exhausted to the point where you’re dragging yourself to your mattress to hibernate–stop and drag yourself to the toilet first.
It was a lesson I had to learn the hard way after facing one of my most embarrassing moments in life.
This particular embarrassing moment occurred in college. I was getting a taste of independence for the first time ever and I was taking full advantage of it. As luck would have it, my hippie roommate lived so close to campus she went home damn near every other day to see her boyfriend. That left our room to my boyfriend and me, and he pretty much moved in on the weekends. We literally acted like that teeny tiny room was an apartment. We’d toast our bottles of juice, dine over Subway sandwiches and Sun Chips, and watch cable into the wee hours of the morning. That was date night for a couple with meal plans and no jobs.
I should probably add that this was all during first semester of freshman year. By second semester those Subway sandwiches caused a big weight gain and those late nights caused my GPA to drop, so I had to get it together…
But until I had that wake-up call, we were booed up and I was going out of my way to impress him. Even for bedtime I dressed up cute and wore my hair to bed in a way that I know caused a lot of breakage. It was all short shorts and high ponytails for me. As an 18-year-old in my first relationship since high school, with my first college boyfriend, I didn’t want him to see me looking anything but cute.
But he did. In fact, he actually saw me looking quite gross.
One Saturday morning we were cuddled up together on a tight twin mattress. I was knocked out, dreaming about something very random. The only part of that dream I can now remember is picturing myself walking into a bathroom, sitting down on a toilet, and peeing.
Unfortunately, I allowed the dream to get a little too real, and before I knew it, I was feeling something hot and wet running down my legs. Yes, I peed in the bed. Those cute short shorts? Covered in urine. To make matters worse, I didn’t let a little bit out, but rather, most of what was resting in my bladder. And did I already mention that we were laid up on a twin mattress (not even a twin long)? What ran down my legs ended up creating a gross puddle that we were both now laying in. The shock of it all jolted me awake, and there wasn’t an excuse or a lie I could think of fast enough to explain how it all happened.
But I knew how it happened. I went to bed needing to use the toilet after one of our many juice toasts, yet I didn’t bother to go to the bathroom. To be quite honest, I held that urine in because I’m a weirdo. Before I read up on urinary tract infection, I used to like the way it felt to go to bed with a full bladder. The tingling sensation was, oddly, a pleasant one for me.
Anyway, a few seconds after I sat up, frozen in shock, my boyfriend finally woke up. He was confused and grossed all the way out:
“WHAT THE F**K?! Yo! What the f**k happened?!”
As he freaked out, I sat there in silence. I sat there in silence because I didn’t know what to say. I also sat there in silence because he didn’t need a diagram to figure out what happened. Bruh, I obviously peed on myself.
Noticing my embarrassment and feeling sorry for me, my boyfriend stopped freaking out and said, “It’s okay. It’s okay. We’ll just clean it up. Don’t worry about it, okay? We can clean it up.”
Thinking back on it, if he would have acted a complete fool about the whole thing, not only would I not have blamed him, but I’m sure I would be much more scarred by such an experience. But despite his immaturity at times in our relationship, he displayed a great deal of maturity as we gathered up my sheets, opened up the windows, cleaned the mattress and flipped it. Unfortunately, all that support and maturity didn’t carry on throughout the rest of the relationship, but that’s another conversation for another day…
But I can say now that his support during such an embarrassing moment has allowed this story to be one that doesn’t necessarily horrify me like it used to. Instead, it makes me laugh just a little bit due to how preposterous it is.
Looking back and thinking about that massive mess, I learned to chill on my water intake before bedtime and I now use the bathroom before going to sleep. Even if it doesn’t feel like I drank much. I know that not everyone has that toilet dream or finds themselves in motion in bed based on something they’re dreaming about (I’ve literally kicked my legs like I was running during one odd dream), but hey, don’t play yourself like I did. It’s better to be safe and dry than sorry and wet.
