When you’ve got to go, you’ve got to go…

‘The Marion Mom’ By Dorothy Wilson

My senior year at Marion High School, I drove my blue Jeep Cherokee down to Exit 1 to support the football team selling fireworks.

My brother and I scoured the selections and purchased as much as our limited budget could stand.

As we exited the tent, I asked, “How do we get back to the interstate?”

There was only one road in. Hard to get lost.

Go ahead, make your jokes, hardy-har-har.

Dumb blonde girl asking an obvious question. But I might remind you, in 1997, there were no smart phones. I had no GPS. I had no Waze or Google Maps. I was just a relatively inexperienced driver who had no experience on Exit 1 and liked to be sure of things.

Especially in front of half the football team.

Well, one of the coaches saw an opportunity to have a little fun. He first asked me what I was driving, and when he saw my 4×4, he pointed the way opposite of the road.

I’m not even kidding!

He sent me down a muddy path that circled around an overpass pilon and passed by the stand again on my way to the actual road.

I trusted him, of course, because he was an adult.

Shees, if only I knew then what I know now.

Only in the throes of sliding around out of control in the mud did I realize the man pranked me because I looked gullible.

I was embarrassed, shaken up, and furious to be made the butt of his joke.

At least my trusty 4×4 kept us in one piece.

This familiar embarrassment threatened to return during tennis season this year when I felt nature’s tug during one of my daughter’s outdoor tennis matches at Marion High School.

After discretely surveying the situation and seeing no obvious way to relieve one’s self, I asked, “Where are the bathrooms?”

The West Memphis tennis coach, a personal friend of mine, pointed to the boys’ football building and replied, “You have to go in that building.”

My eyes widened. For a woman with stenosis, he might as well have asked me to run a marathon as to trek that distance.

I mentally calculated the time required to hop in my vehicle, drive home, do the deed, and drive back, potentially losing my close parking spot. I decided I would be cutting it close to seeing my daughter’s match.

So I determined to haul it up to Egypt.

I tugged on the door I thought I had been told to open, “the blue one.”

(Insider tip: they’re all blue. #facepalm) I smelled it before I saw it: the boys’ football locker room.

There were no bathrooms here. Not to the left or the right.

I surmised all locker rooms have toilets, though, so, seeing as it was empty, I took a tentative stroll around the large space.

Still alone, I spied the facilities: a throng of urinals (no, thank you) and a set of stalls, all without doors.

I hastily assessed my situation: my full bladder was only getting fuller; my back burned from the exertion of walking here once, much less if I hightailed it all the way back to the tennis courts to ask for more specific directions a second time; and the locker room was currently unoccupied.

I weighed the time it would take me to relieve myself against the odds that the team would return from practice during that time.

I decided to go for it.

Interestingly, one’s bladder seems awfully uncooperative in this time-sensitive and highly urgent state.

But I did it. No one interrupted my, um, compromised predicament.

When I finally returned from my voyage, I innocently asked again, “Where did you say the bathrooms are?”

He repeated his instructions, right down to the blue door. I said, “Hmmm, all I found was the football locker room.”

“Oh, no, not there,” he said. “You walk in, turn left, and there’s bathrooms down the hall.”

Well obviously, what we have here is a failure to communicate. Because my blue door did NOT lead me to a hall of gloriously private porcelain thrones.

Or he pranked me. I don’t easily embarrass now that I’m almost 40. Zipper down? Laugh it off. Baby poop on clothing? No big deal.

Falling flat on my face in front of a crowd?

Own it and post it on Instagram.

But I can nearly guarantee you that I would have flushed crimson red and stuttered my way out of there in a jiffy if I even caught a whiff of a gang of juvenile boys entering the room.

I probably would have also deleted all my social media accounts if anything happened to be caught on video.

Marion Schools are doing a lot right. They currently serve breakfast, second breakfast, and lunch. They accommodate students with jobs through online courses.They closed multiple entrances in the name of safety.

But they can’t provide even a porta-potty for their hours-long tennis matches?

I remember our motorized trek up Pike’s Peak in Colorado last December. They tell you to drink plenty of water to battle altitude sickness, but an obvious by-product of that is the need to answer nature’s call.

So the park had provided bathroom stops every so often. They looked like presentable, modern stone buildings with modern facilities.

It wasn’t until I sat upon the commode in the inattentiveness caused by routine, that I spotted the difference. A brisk, swift wind from beneath the john greeted my warm skin, causing a gasp of discomfort.

It was a porta-potty in disguise, somehow connected to about 8,000 mountainous feet of porta-potties to create a windy, odiferous system.

Stiff breeze to the tushie? Check. Stank like the stankiest? Check. Doors? Check, check, check.

I gratefully used every one of them.

If only Google Maps had a “nearby bathrooms” option, I think it would help eliminate a good chunk of my personal potentially embarrassing situations.

And that’s no joke.