Monday, October 31, 2016

Baby's First Halloween

For the first eight years of my life, I lived in Australia, where I hear now Halloween is actually somewhat celebrated. In the early eighties however it was not, and my mother (Canadian by birth and transplanted by marriage) was dreadfully homesick for this North American holiday.
I remember clearly my mother trussing me and my sisters up for the end of October, though it made no sense to me as a little kid, I thought it was just another reason to play dress up, and I wasn't going to complain. My Mum even went around to the neighbors and asked that they have a couple of treats on hand for her kids so when we marched up their steps and bawled "Trick or treat!" at the tops of our lungs, there were freddos and caramello koalas to flop into our pillow cases.

It never really made sense to me though. My mother didn't insist on cooking a turkey at Thanksgiving, and she didn't seem to mind that it was hot at Christmastime, but Halloween she missed, and so she went to all this trouble to enjoy it with her bewildered offspring.

It wasn't until we moved to Canada in the early nineties that I understood the torch she carried for the holiday. We weren't wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, and we lived in the middle of nowhere-seriously, our bus ride to school was an hour each way; we were the last stop-but my Dad made a bunch of scarecrows, and we constructed costumes out of the dress up box and trick or treated down a street about a two miles away. Yes. We only trick or treated one street. Because we lived so far away from civilization, there were probably only a dozen or so kids who trick or treated in the area, and so the adults would give you a ridiculous amount of candy. After about eight houses, we'd barely be able to lift our bags.

These are some of my fondest halloween memories. Even though in Canada, you had to wear longjohns under your costume and there was the chance that the festivities might be cut short due to snow, I remember how some people decorated their houses so elaborately they felt like real haunted houses, with huge figures bent over steaming cauldrons, twinkling orange lights, flashing strobes, sticky spiderwebs, and speakers crackling with haunted house noises and random screams.

Around the second or third house, you'd become infected by the hysteria of the spookiness, and you'd start squealing and shrieking at every little thing, running down steps after collecting your candy, and tearing through shrubs and hedges cluttered with plastic caution tape convinced that there really was something chasing you.

I was thirteen when we moved to the states, and so I only trick or treated one halloween here (technically). At the age of fourteen, I declared myself too old and began helping my Dad with the scarecrows and in the guise of a kindly fortune teller or friendly witch, I dedicated myself to handing out the candy to the kids who braved our driveway.

No, I was never cool enough to go to an actual halloween party.
In fact, I didn't go to haunted houses, hayrides, or my first actual halloween party until college. Sadly, I didn't even know they existed because I had just assumed that once you were a teenager you put aside these childish things.

It's funny, when I think about my adolescence, I used to self impose all kinds of weird "rules" about growing up. Things I was supposed to give up or put away because I had outgrown them, that nobody would have minded, let alone noticed, if I'd kept my interest in.
As an adult, I have actually dedicated a lot of my time to recapturing those thrills of childhood and embracing the innocent joys of the holidays and the things I used to take pleasure in.

It's not an act of rebellion. I don't do it defiantly.
I do it because I think we talk ourselves out of joy almost constantly.
We laugh at people who are too excited or too involved in things as though they're missing some vital adult component, when in reality they're having a much better time than the person who disparages the fun as immature or juvenile.

One of the things I am thrilled about, as a parent, is sharing in the delights of the holidays with my babe. Especially this one.
My husband helped me lift the last vestiges of restraint I had about celebrating with abandon, and in the decade we have been together, I cannot think of a Halloween we have not marked with elaborate costumes, tons of treats and trickery, lots of decorations, candles, parades through graveyards, chicanery, and spooky tales traded with friends.
Leave aside the fact that we live in Salem, MA, the halloween capital of the Northeast.
It's impossible to ignore the magic of the season here.

And this year, I am very grateful for that because for the first time in a long time, my energy to enjoy this festival of creepiness is practically zilch.

I remember last year. Eight months pregnant, I dressed like a black widow and we handed out candy on a friend's porch right in the center of historic Salem. It was glorious. Afterwards, we walked the pitchblack backroads to another friend's costume party and drank punch and ate some bone cookies and I reminded myself that this would be so different when the baby came.

I have never been so right.

The last three weeks have been a miasma of teething and sleep regression.
In the last seven days, he has started his day at 3am on two occasions, 5am on three, and has yet to allow me to sleep through the night. That's right. At almost eleven months postpartum, I have yet to sleep more than three consecutive hours.

We are at the beginning of the fourth week of this nonsense, and I have been up since 4:30am.
My Beard has a costume for his work Halloween party and a different costume for handing out candy tonight. I didn't realize that I hadn't even thought of a costume for myself until yesterday.
This will be the first year I haven't dressed up for Halloween in memory.
I'm sure I could run down to CVS and grab a cheap make up palette and make myself into a sugar skull or a zombie or something, but as the babe has a habit of whacking me in the face and teething on my chin, make up doesn't seem like a wise idea.
I haven't carved a jack 'o lantern. I bought a bag of mini snickers last week and crushed it in three days while trying to nurse the babe back to sleep during the midnight screaming times.
I haven't been apple picking, hayriding, or haunted house traipsing. The closest I've come is the daily walks I take with the baby which I've been extending longer and longer so I can enjoy the various local cemeteries in all their autumnal splendor.

Tonight, I will swathe myself in black, cradle my babe in his bright red onesie with his devil horn hoodie, and help the Beard hand out candy on our spiderweb sticky porch.
Maybe I will watch Hocus Pocus in the midnight screaming times.

I will try really hard not to think about the halloweens past that were spectacular, and I will try not to think of the halloweens in the future when I am taking the babe trick or treating, or working with him on his costume, or baking treats for his class at school, because I look forward to all that weirdness. I really do.

I will try to enjoy sipping hot apple cider on the porch in the cold, moonless night, and remind myself that life is funny, and I could always be thousands of miles from my New England home in the city where I was born, where the world is exploding into a tropical spring, and Halloween is more devised to sell cocktails than a thrill you get in the pit of your stomach as you watch clouds move darkly past a church steeply and think perhaps you see something solid, something ragged and familiar, streaking through the fog.


Wednesday, October 26, 2016

A Brief Thought on Mindfulness and why it can go straight to hell.

Sitting at home, watching Baz play with a sock, and wondering how the hours of the day just fritter away...
Why the fuck is mindfulness en vogue of all sudden?

It's as if on top of everything else we're supposed to be doing, we're now also supposed to be "living inside the moment", "relishing the fleetingness of time", "appreciating our here and now".

Does anybody else suck at this?

I mean, sometimes I'm not too bad.
I watch the sunrise or feel the softest little breeze, or actually slow down when I'm housing ice cream and let the sweetness melt on my tongue for a moment, and yes, I've got it, I feel good, it's lovely, and I am happy to be alive, to have a corporeal form that allows me such things as physical pleasure.
But there are other times that we shouldn't be mindful.
We deserve to get swept up.
Like kissing.
Am I the only person who has ever just ruined a make out session by suddenly getting stuck in her head?
Instead of being all, "oooh this is so nice and lovely and tingly and might be headed towards more nice lovely tingly things..." I got stuck in my head, and thought, "Oh this is a mouth, this is a squishpit full of round, polished bone things that I have to avoid lest I suddenly forget everything I ever knew about kissing and accidentally become a dentist who diagnoses with her tongue" or "why do we do this? I think I read somewhere that kissing originated during pagan marriage rituals where the two newlyweds placed their mouths on top of one another's to symbolize giving one's beloved the breath of life. If this is true, then isn't making out some form of pointless struggle? Am I currently fighting with this person attempting to breathe them full of my air as they strive to fill me with theirs? Or are we literally sucking the breath out of each other?" or (and this is a favorite) "huh...mouths are weird. My mouth is inside a mouth right now. Oh fuck...I'm supposed to be swept up in this. Come on Jess, get all jiggly in the knees again, think about how nice a face this person has, how delicious their skin is next to yours, and how magical the gift is-is a mouth a mushy mouth mouth mouth, flesh, gums, esophagus, stomach, intestines, this mouth leads to poooooooooop! AAAAAAAAAH STOP THINKING ABOUT POOP AND GET BACK TO THE NICE KISSY FEELINGS WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY BRAINNNNNNN?!?!?"

Yeah...
so mindfulness isn't always the best practice.
It's great if you rush through life and then don't understand why you didn't enjoy more of it, but I sit here, and I watch a baby playing with a sock, and I think, maybe it's a bad idea to tumble down the rabbit hole of thinking how much I love this baby, how precious he is, how soon I will be packing him off to college where he will disregard his socks all over a dorm room floor, and then I will die, and he will die, and dead mouths don't maul socks.

Maybe it's better that I just take the sock away, and play with him instead.

Wednesday, October 19, 2016

The Long Distance Relationship You Live In

Dear Diary,

I am starting this post like a diary entry, perhaps inspired by the terrifying character of Amy in Gone Girl, who writes seven years of fake entries to fool the police. Tell me I didn't just ruin the book for you. The book does its own work for me there.
Perhaps because anytime a woman begins writing about her relationship there is something at once secretive, nostalgic, and confessional about it.
When faced with the subject of "our husband/partner/wife" we all get a little dreamy. You know, when we're not picking them apart at the seams.
I am making many assumptions, but let's soldier on.

I am in a long distance relationship after all, and there are miles to go before i sleep.

Beard and I met when I was a never-been-kissed nineteen year old.
We spent two and a half days killing time while our best friends
(who had met on the internet back in 2000. This was a BIG DEAL. I came along mostly to ensure that whoever this boy was who was coming all the way from Virginia to meet my gal pal wasn't going to chop her up and bury her in a camp site. I'm pretty sure my future Beard came along with his best buddy as the ultimate wingman), flirted obnoxiously, and we rolled our eyes.

A few years, and Myspace comments, later, found me living in an apartment in San Francisco, trying to figure out my life as a twenty three year old with a liberal arts degree and some encroaching idea as to my own irrelevance. It found my Beard newly single and lonely in his apartment in Virginia.

We began sending idle emails, that turned into phone calls, then visits, and after about four months, I moved away from the Pacific to "see where this was headed."

We've been together ten years now, married for seven, and we've been apart no longer than a week since.

Let's be honest, Long Distance Relationships work because we know the climate is temporary. There is an element of excitement and urgency to pining away like some kind of teeny-bopper, composing emails at two in the morning, or falling asleep with their voice on the phone at night. The giddy stomach dropping sensation of getting a text from across the miles that says, thinking of you takes on more meaning, because you aren't there to fan the flames. You actually have to pop into their head at random, as though they genuinely like you or something.

LDR's are the romantic ideal really. You listen to songs apart that have meaning for you together. You take yourself on long walks and wish they were there to slip their hand into yours. You look in the mirror and make faces, or talk out loud about the future you want to have with them. You're constantly on the lookout for little items and trinkets you can mail to them. After visits, you pull out the swiped hoodie or t-shirt you stole from their laundry, and you sleep with it, because it smells like them.
You do a lot of swanning about as they say.

And it's all SO FRAUGHT with emotion because you're figuring out, based on these phone calls, these visits, these little amuse-bouches of love, whether you want to buy the whole goddamn restaurant. It's tricky and scary and so very bittersweet. Eventually one of you has to make the plunge of moving to the other, and you have to put the relationship to the test.

Can we actually stand each other now that we have to be around each other all the time?
A lot of relationships get this far, and then collapse in on themselves because after all the build up, the real thing just can't compete.
It's one thing to be dying on the end of the phone line, sexting your brains out, and crying into your morning latte because they aren't there to share it with you, and it is entirely different to be with that illusory magical romantic human when he/she farts, gets food poisoning, doesn't take the trash out for weeks on end, forgets your birthday, picks a fight with you or horribly all of that at once.

Somehow, Beard and I survived the transition.
The first year we were still kind of in LDR mode. We hid all our ugly habits from one another. We never fought. We cuddled a lot and watched "Oh I don't care, whatever you want is fine, baby" for hours. I put make up on every morning, threw away my ugly pajamas and underwear with the elastic band all stretched out, and made his coffee first every morning.
He dressed the gothy way that had hooked me, kept his hand permanently glued to my lower back, and constantly asked if I was okay. He texted me "I miss you" while we were at work. He sent flowers to the coffee shop where I slung espresso on our anniversary.
We generally swanned about a lot still, but all over each other. I'm sure it was revolting for anyone to watch.

Then we moved to Massachusetts.
We had trouble finding jobs and blew through our savings pretty quickly.
I was surprised at how living in New England made me feel as though I hadn't done anything since high school, and when the best job I could find was making bread at a local bakery, I had the quarter life crisis I'd been putting off for a year to be stupidly smitten.
Beard had more trouble finding work, and when he finally did it was a corporate retail job that treated him like garbage. We had to move to a cheaper apartment on the shittier side of town. We had to put off getting married because we couldn't afford a wedding. We both started cracking, and showing our cracks, and it was hard.

We had some ugly fights.
We both said things that made the other person look at them like they were a stranger.
We left the room sometimes and didn't come back for a few hours so we could get our heads on straight.
Some nights we went to bed so angry we couldn't even touch feet in the bed.
Some mornings, we opened the fight back up again, and didn't know how to close it.
But we also learned.
We adapted.
We didn't give up.
I think that's part of the LDR turning into the LTR*. You know you're both in it for the long run, so you don't try to "win" at fights. You wait until the inferno blows over and you try to approach the shitty situation rationally. You have a safe word.

That's right, a safe word.

When we are having a fight, and one of us realizes it's getting out of control, or it might be about the fact that one of us is really stressed or tired, or we just know that this is going to be the time we say something so hurtful there's no apology in the world that makes it better, one of us says,

banana

Yes. That's right.
One of us invokes the rule of Banana. And no matter what it is we are fighting about, we both have to drop it. We both have to walk away.

I don't attribute my marriage lasting seven years to the Banana Rule, but I attribute a lot to that development, let me tell you.
If you are in an LTR and you don't have an anger safeword, make one. Make one now. You'll thank me later.

Anyway,
so what's the point?
Why does it matter that my LDR turned into an LTR?
Because we've come full circle my friends.
And having a baby has put me and my husband back into the same situation that started it all.

The night feeds and wakings are typically my jam because I don't have to go to a 9-5 and make pretty with actual humans. In fact, if I feel particularly shitty after a bad night with the were-baby, I don't even have to shower, but Beard has to clean up, nut up, and show up every day, so I get those night hazards.
Typically, we have about ten minutes in the morning, while he fills his travel mug from the dregs of the coffee pot I have already crushed because I've been up for two hours. The baby is in his high chair cooing and eating puffs or bits of banana, and I get in a decent hug before the gent heads out the door. We sort of look at each other filled with a deep sense of melancholy knowing that this is the most coherent we're going to be around one another for another twenty four hours, and then off he goes.
Most nights he gets home by 6pm, which is about an hour before Baby bedtime. In fact, we have eaten, bathed, and possibly even read a book by the time Daddy walks through the door. Our final bedtime moments are spent watching Daddy eat dinner (which he does while attempting to visit with the baby, and I slide in any important things I need to say like: hey we have a doctor's appointment on Saturday or I picked up your prescriptions here they are et cetera).
By seven, I am attempting to rock and nurse the baby to sleep. We trade off for the hour it takes to actually accomplish this, and then I am confined to the bed, where I sometimes indulge in an hour of looking at instagram and being disgusted by how beautiful everyone else's life looks in comparison to my milk-soaked, nonsense existence.
Beard comes to bed after the first hour of the day that he's had to himself, which i assume he spends either crying into the toilet, speed eating turkey jerky, or watches the vilest horror movie he can possibly find to make himself feel better about his life in comparison to being chained to a radiator by a demon infested hooker who keeps eating pieces of his genitalia.

We saw each other more often when we lived on opposite sides of the country.
We are in a long distance relationship.
Somehow, over the last ten months of me staying home with baby (and contributing a meager bit of moolah from the writing classes), and Beard going forth into the world and bringing home the old school bacon, we have devolved back from our advanced degree in commitment directly into the weirdness of the LDR.

Exhibit A.
We text.
Yes, this is 2016, everyone bloody texts, but we text each other shit like
I miss you.
or
It was hard to say goodbye this morning.
and
I miss feeling your hand on my lower back.


Exhibit B.
He sent me flowers on our anniversary.
To the house.
Then he texted me to go outside and check if an amazon package had arrived for him. It was a genuine surprise. Red roses. Yeah, that's right. Fucking red roses.
I loved them.
He also got me a Halloween present, which he hasn't done since we first moved to New England some eight years ago. A whole host of very spooky Hocus Pocus paraphernalia. Just out of the blue!
Delightful.

Exhibit C.
We send each other bits and bobs on social media.
Last week, my husband, who balks when I use the word feminist and constantly argues with me about the fact that while white, middle class men are the bane of human existence, white middle class women are pure evil (and he's not wrong), sent me an incredibly cool article from The New Yorker about Shirley Jackson's life as a domestically abused housewife and her genuinely creepy response to oppression through writing.

Seriously, it's an amazing article. Here's the link:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/17/the-haunted-mind-of-shirley-jackson

I also send him links to things like the scariest amusement parks in the world, or Halloweentowns that actually exist in Middle America, or they just discovered a new room in the fucking Winchester house! No, really they did...

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/09/new-room-discovered-winchester-mystery-house/

Anyway.

The trick of the LDR is to moon a bit.
Be a little romantic, and if that means being dumb, be dumb too.
Because it won't be long before the kid is sleeping in his own room, and we're forced to spend all the time together again and remember how human, fallible, and annoying we are, so in the meantime, being goofy kids who are sighing over their window sills because they don't get to spend every night asleep in a treehouse together is pretty nice, and it reminds me what's waiting for me on the other side of this strange haze of new parenthood, and what's waiting for me is a pretty great guy that I might like to see more of.

Monday, October 10, 2016

Perspective is Nine Tenths of The Law



There's a lot of crazy in the world right now.
A while back I had to cut my facebook feed down so that I wasn't constantly being barraged by horrific and disturbing images and news stories.
This doesn't mean that I unplugged from the world completely. In fact, I still read a number of news sources every day, however, I like to be able to filter how much I am beaten over the head by a story.
I do not need to be convinced of wars, climate change, natural and man made disasters, terrible events, and a siege of clowns.
Yup. A siege of menacing clowns.

Sigh.

I am convinced. I am an educated adult who has been living in the real world long enough to know that all that stands between me and abject poverty is a series of poor decisions and some bad luck. I know the only thing that stands between me and a natural disaster is luck, and a little geography, but mostly luck. I know that the only thing that stands between me and the millions of people staring into a the barrel of a news camera after losing someone, or recovering from an attack, or any of the things that happen to everybody in the world in their life at any given moment is pure goddamn luck.

This is why I am grateful for a lot of shit.
Yes, #grateful makes me gag almost as much as #pumpkinspice, but practicing "mindful thanks" is part of the psychotic optimist way I live my life, and it's how I keep the rolling tide of bone crushing depression from eating my will to live. LOL. WE HAVE A LOT OF FUN HERE GUYS.

Yesterday it poured rain.
Like from about halfway through Saturday night until early Monday morning fucking pooooooouuuuuuring. I, like a lot of psychotic optimists, need sunlight. I really really do. I know I'm ruining any chance at goth girl cred I ever had in my entire life by saying this, but I cannot stay stuck inside in the dark all the time. It was fine when I was seventeen and devouring novels set in the 1700's, 1800's, and early 1900's. Sure I could wrap my long tresses around me and gaze forlorn out the window as I lifted my cup of tea to my lips and pretend that I was "otherworldly" and "born in the wrong decade" and whatnot, but I also didn't have a lot of friends, rarely spent time doing anything other than reading or listening to music in the dark (actually miss that part quite a bit), and I was miserable.
I kept waiting to be older so I could get to the good part of my life.
You know, the part where I run through a deserted castle in a gossamer nightgown holding an inexplicably light iron candelabra as my twisted, yet devilishly handsome, beloved grapples with some awful secret he's only just revealed to me, and I simply must dash to the moors to come to grips with who and what I love.
Just the average notebook dreams of a teenage girl really.
Jess & Dr. Jekyll 4-EVA.

Well, I'm here.
If you're a weirdo like me and you read a lot about the dying, you find out that most people have these very important thoughts during their last days on earth.

1. They wish they'd taken more chances.
2. They wish they'd slowed down a little and not worried so much about "what was going to happen tomorrow" instead of the loveliness of "what was happening right then".
3. They pinpointed their thirties and their forties as their happiest decades.

After reading many articles where these three things came up again and again, I decided (being that I am thirty four), I had better get to observing the joy in the here and now.

This is more easily said than done, am I right?
We're so programmed by society, culture, school, workforce, all of it to constantly be worrying if we're hot enough, rich enough, cool enough, informed enough, cultured enough, enough of a mother, enough of a partner, enough of an employee, etc etc etc.
With all that going on inside our heads is it any wonder that we can't focus on the moment and spend all our free time roaming around on our stupid phones either trying to find invisible creatures so we can feel something akin to instant gratification and satisfaction in our autonomous lives? Is it any wonder that people are freaking out about celebrities instead of climate change? It's all distraction.  It's all there designed to make us feel less than and reach for the nearest quick fix that with just the easiest click of a mouse or swipe of a card allows us to pay someone else to give us a glimpse at satisfaction.

We constantly seek escape from our lives because dwelling in the moment means taking the moment for everything it contains. Yes, there will be fear, inadequacy, that nagging dread that somehow, you are doing this life thing wrong, but you also might be surprised by how alive you feel by allowing yourself to feel all of these things and then letting them pass. What comes in their wake? What happens if you embrace that momentary weakness, let yourself feel like you aren't something? Perhaps what comes next is the feeling of what you in fact are.

I was on the train on Saturday morning headed into Boston to teach my current writing class.
I was given a six week long course in which I am supposed to inspire and help my students manufacture a new, fresh story every single week.
My joy at teaching this class during this period of time is abundant.
Whether my students like it or not they have been bombarded with writing prompts about ghosts, haunted houses, ghouls, and general spookiness.
YOU CAN'T JUST GIVE ME A CANDY BAR AND NOT EXPECT ME TO EAT IT PEOPLE!
So I go into work on Saturdays with about eight short scary stories under my arm. I ride the train with a nice hot coffee in my hand, and I purposefully use this baby-free time to go through all the things I like about my life and generally wallow in them. That's right, wallow like a pig in my blessings.

It would be easy to spend the forty minute train ride checking facebook and instagram. It would be easy to spend it checking my lipstick and wondering if my coffee cup is smudging it. And you know what, sometimes I do that. Sometimes I spend ten or fifteen minutes doing those things exactly.
But then I force myself to turn off my phone and stare out the window.

I allow myself to space out, and if I start worrying about bills, belly rolls, or baby futures, I force my brain to start a list of good things that happened this week, and I just add whatever the hell I want to the list.

As I was making this list on Saturday morning, I was staring at the salt marshes, watching as their edges were slowly eaten up by more and more urban sprawl, when I happened to glance up at a plane in the sky, and a tiny little chunk of rainbow caught my attention.

I looked more intently, and I realized that this perfect little hunk of rainbow was just sitting there. It wasn't a trick of the light, or a crack in my sunglasses. It was a perfect little prism suspended between two clouds and with the sun shining through it right then and there, I got to see it.

Stuff like that, my friends, is what I call a present.

I wondered if anyone else could see it. I thought about glancing back at all the people on the train. Was anybody else staring raptly out the window, or were they all going to be diddling their phones and fixing their hair, impatiently tapping their feet and waiting to get into the city?

I decided not to.
It didn't matter if the tiny rainbow was seen by every single person, or if it was experienced solely by me.  
That's the glory of perspective.
It's yours. Maybe the rainbow was only visible from the exact place I was sitting at that exact moment. Maybe it was there all day. Maybe it was only for me. Maybe everyone who rode the train saw it.
It doesn't matter.
Because I saw it, and it made my heart feel a little lighter. It reminded me of magic, existing everywhere all the time, and how it really is observable if you pay attention, and actively push back against the darkness.





Saturday, October 8, 2016

She's a Pistol.

Okay, I know I'm anxious.
I know I come across a wee bit fearful, neurotic, cautious, or what have you, but my biggest fear isn't random masked intruders, possessed crib mobiles, or razor blades in apples.

It's pissing myself.

Let's shoo all the twenty somethings out of the room a minute, because the odds are good that if you're in your twenties (and you haven't either had a child or a serious drinking problem) wetting your chonies is something you've left far behind. It's a distant memory of that humiliating night when you were eight and had to get out of bed and wake up your parent-you know, the one who was least likely to shame you-and hushedly explain that you needed new pajamas. Maybe you were on a really long car trip, and you tried to tell them to pull over so you could go at the Burger King, but Mom wanted to push on to the next exit, and you had "an emergency" involving six thousand baby wipes, and a car seat that would never smell quite the same again.
Regardless, it was a while ago. You can tell it as a funny story at parties now and laugh.
For me, that story was when I was about seven years old.
My family used to go on little walkabouts on Sunday afternoons.
We'd pull on our sneakers, pile in the car, and Dad would get us to some pretty beach or trail or national park. We'd hike around for an hour or two and then split a large Cadbury's Fruit and Nut at the picnic tables.

Quite droll really.
On this particular Sunday, it was a bit chilly and raining, but not so heavily as to deter our patriarch. So we pulled on wellies and sweaters, and off we went.
I should mention that at seven, I was the eldest of the three children. My younger sister was 5 and the baby of the family was a little over a year.

We ventured out of the car at a little clearing with some pretty cliffs and forest to explore. I had a suspicion that I needed a bathroom, but I was a little too nervous to ask my parents to load us all back in the car and find one. I had very little experience peeing in the woods, but I was tenacious, and so I scoped out a copse of trees where I wouldn't be seen, pulled down my pants and attempted to squat.
This was the first time I became aware of a peculiarity particular to my anatomy. The piss stream, rather than adhering to those plebeian laws of gravity and going straight down onto the ground, shot out of my body in a magnificent, steaming arc right onto the wadded up jeans and undies around my ankles.
I watched in horror as the treacherous piss soaked my supposedly safe garments, feebly swiveling my hips to lessen the tragedy, only to find the motion more efficiently drenched every last inch of dry material on the ground.
By the time my bladder was empty, I was staring down the choice of either emerging from the woods naked from the waist down and drawing every human in my family's attention (and any unlucky hikers' to boot). Even at the tender age of seven, the humiliation was too much to bear, not to mention the wrath of my Dad, who blessed (cursed?) with an unmatched sense of smell had managed to convince my young mind that he could smell my farts when I was just thinking about letting one go, and that I would be left by the side of the road should I ever release one in his presence.
I'm still not entirely sure that was an idle threat.
So I did what anyone would do in this situation.
I tugged my saturated clothing back up my legs, feeling the already cold pee soaked denim rashing up my legs and around my hindquarters.
I swaggered out of woods like John Wayne to confront everyone with a lie and pray that I could walk until I dried (impossible since it was raining...remember? ah the incorrigible hope of youth...).
Luckily, my parents and youngest sibling were on the other side of a large rock face and it was Alex, who looked up from poking some fungus with a stick to see her elder sister red faced and soaked to the bone scuttle out of the trees like a demented, emotionally vulnerable crab.
"Jessie?" Her brow knit quizzically.
I immediately confessed.
"Daddy's going to kill me!" I blubbered after revealing my shame.
She reached out her little hand and took mine, looked me deep in the eyes, and committed an act of solidarity I have never seen matched in my life.
"No, no he won't," she said, and I watched, as my perfectly dry little sister, pissed her pants on purpose.
I watched the growing wet spot on her jeans with a growing glow in my heart.
"But-" I whispered. "You'll-"
She cut me off with a wave of her hand.
"He can't be mad at both of us," she said.
Perfect kid logic.
At this moment, my mother came around the side of the rock to see what was keeping us.
She took in the situation. Both her daughters soaked to the bone in piss, holding hands and smiling at her while valiantly fighting back tears.
I might be applying this look in hindsight, but I'm pretty sure we saw something like horror dawn on her face, but before she could react, my father came around the rock with our youngest sibling in his arms.
"What the?"
And all hell broke loose.
There was no chocolate to be had on this day. The pissing day.
Instead, we were unceremoniously lashed back into our car seats. I was made to put my raincoat on my seat so my shame would not soak into the fabric of the car. Alex stuck out her chin defiantly, but stayed stoically silent.
I wept openly, hot tears of mortification.
My father was still releasing his own stream of unrelenting curses, oaths, and slights about disgusting children and filthy habits and a good day ruined, as my mother tried in vain to smooth his mood and smile encouragingly at all of us.
She is a spectacular woman who knows piss, like everything else, dries and disappears eventually.
It was at this pivotal moment, when I truly wonder if my father was contemplating leaving his family on the side of the road rather than drive in a piss flavored air pocket the hour back to our house, that the youngest member of my family decided to completely fill her shorts.
A sound akin to time itself being ripped apart with a box cutter, tore through the car, and suddenly the vaporous, ephemeral scent of piss was replaced, actually, obliterated by the warm fragrance of baby poo.
We drove home in silence.

As an adult, I see both sides of the story.
Scrubbing piss and poo out of three sets of clothes sounds pretty miserable, being trapped in a vehicle with the zoo of odors we must have been emanating sounds just as awful, but now I have other things to worry about.

Over time, I learned to live with my strangely angled urethra. There were one or two mishaps after a night of one too many glasses of wine where I forgot to angle down properly, and I paid for those lapses in wadded up kleenex.
It is only since I gave birth to my son that I have noticed things have gotten somewhat...
how shall i say?
Dire?

Now my piss arc not only goes out, but it veers severely to the left, a fact I discovered during the incredibly sleep deprived early months of motherhood every time I went to the bathroom, if I didn't lean forward far enough, I actually shot over the seat and hit the floor.

I have only just recently gotten used to having to sit on the toilet side saddle like women in the early 1900's rode horses.
On top of this, if I do forget, and my arc streaks far and true, I find myself in the identical situation of my seven year old self, watching in horror as my pee soaks the pants around my ankles and forsakes the perfectly decent toilet I am perched upon.

All this to say, karma, my friends, means something entirely different when you become a parent.