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.