Dear Prudence,
My husband and I just moved into a full one-bedroom apartment built onto my in-laws’ house. All parties involved are really excited for this arrangement, including me! I’m running into one uncomfortable issue with my brother-in-law, “Ben,” who also lives in the house.
Whenever Ben finishes using a toilet, there are sizable smears of poop left on the seat.
My MIL stations Lysol wipes in the main upstairs bathroom (Ben’s primary one) and a few years ago placed a small “Please clean up after yourself” sign there, but neither has had an impact on the mess. And there are no tools to deal with the mess left on other toilets in the house. When the bathrooms get cleaned, it’s my MIL’s doing. The family approach to the issue is to just clean the toilet before you use it with whatever’s available, and that it’s just a fact of living with Ben.
Ben is autistic, and while there are areas of his life where he’s operating like a fully capable adult (he’s 29 and works in an office full-time), there are a lot of key ways he’s bolstered by still living at home. Ben is very stubborn and it takes monumental effort to get him to change anything about his life, big or small. It’s not clear to me what of my in-laws’ bolsters are in place because he truly needs help managing parts of life because he’s autistic vs. what is in place because it’s easier for my in-laws to keep taking care of him than fight to push him towards more independent living.
For the years that I’ve just been a visitor in the house, I haven’t felt like it was appropriate for me to say or do anything about the toilet issue. I work full-time remotely and am going to be setting up my office upstairs in the main part of the house—my in-laws generously invited me to do so since there’s not a good working space in the attached apartment. So my closest toilet is going to be the one Ben primarily uses and is most often the messiest.
When it’s boiled down, this is mainly a convenience issue for me—I can absolutely just go the little bit of extra distance to the apartment to use the toilet in my husband’s and my space. But I am still wondering if this new arrangement with my family opens the door for me to have a direct conversation about this, and ask Ben to start cleaning up after himself. I’m really cognizant of being invited to live under this roof and I don’t want to rock the boat by assuming I have the full story of what my family needs—or asserting my comfort above those needs!—just a few weeks in.