One of the great milestones of adulthood is the moment you realize you no longer have to ask anyone for permission to do anything. You want a snack at midnight? Done. You want to stay up too late watching something you’ll regret? Nobody’s stopping you. You are a free, autonomous human being accountable only to yourself and the general rule of law.
And then you have kids.
And then you are right back to asking for permission. For everything. Including the most basic functions a human body requires.
It is a genuine mindbender to find yourself raising your hand — metaphorically, and sometimes literally — to ask your partner if it’s okay for you to go to the bathroom. If you can take a ten minute shower. If you can have five minutes to exist without being needed by someone. Somebody has to have eyes on the small humans at all times and if it’s going to be you that means it cannot currently be you in the shower so you check in, you hand off, you negotiate your own exit from the room like you’re planning a covert operation.
You get the approval. You make your move.
And then, without fail, within approximately ninety seconds of the water turning on, two small heads appear in the doorway.
Mom. What are you doing.
I’m in the shower, buddy.
Are you naked?
Yes. Go find Dad.
Okay.
They do not go find Dad. They linger. They report back with updates.
Mom I found something.
I’ll be out in a few minutes, go ahead and—
It’s a frog.
That’s amazing, I’ll come see it when I get out.
Okay.
Two minutes pass.
Mom are you done yet.
Almost.
How almost.
You finish your shower. You towel off. You begin the process of getting dressed which is its own supervised event. And here is the part that gets me every time — this is not enough for them to go back to whatever they were doing before you interrupted their entire afternoon by taking a shower. They will sit. On the couch. On the floor. On the edge of the bed. Wherever they can position themselves to maintain direct line of sight to the bathroom door.
They are watching to make sure you follow through on your words.
You will follow through. You made a promise and they have excellent memories selectively deployed against you in moments like this. You will get dressed, you will be escorted — and I mean escorted, they are not leaving without you — across the house and into the yard where a frog is waiting and where you will react with the appropriate level of enthusiasm because honestly it is a pretty good frog.
This is the thing nobody tells you before you have kids. You don’t just lose sleep and free time and the ability to eat a warm meal uninterrupted. You lose the casual, unremarkable experience of taking a shower alone and coming out of it on your own timeline.
Every shower now has an audience, a progress check, and a debrief.
Worth it. The frog was genuinely impressive.
What’s the most basic thing you now have to ask permission for since having kids? Drop it in the comments — I need the solidarity.
Mud & Mayhem 
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