The Pot

I grew using a chamber pot.  But we just called it 'the pot'.  In fact, once I got a certain age, I was responsible for preparing it for the night, taking it upstairs, and then taking it downstairs and cleaning it in the morning, for re-use that following night.

My mom had me put in chlorine bleach mixed with water every night before taking it upstairs.  You may wonder why we did this. Well, we had no upstairs' bathroom for one thing.  The second thing is I had a lot of problems with my urinary tract system when I was a little girl growing up, plus I was a bed wetter on top of it all. I think Mom may have thought if I had a place to go to the bathroom close to me (right outside my bedroom door) it might help. It didn't - but it was much appreciated anyways rather than running downstairs and across the house to the far corner of the utility room at night in the dark!

Eventually, I stopped wetting the bed, and I had years of respite from urinary tract problems (to return later in life, but that's another story).  Mom and Dad built on and had a new downstairs' bedroom.  I was upstairs alone, a teen...no more pot.

But I have never forgotten sitting way down on the cold rim of that old iron/porcelain pot many a night those many years ago.  At the time, it seemed perfectly normal.  It was the way it was...