I’ve reached the height of parental chagrin. It’s quite pitiable really.
You might as well know that my bladder doesn’t work right. As in at all. It’s a dysfunction that I earned giving birth to my oldest. He weighed in at almost 10 pounds and came sporting a monstrous head (and a full head of hair, gorgeous eyelashes and a fantastic complexion, but we’re not talking about his virtues right now).
So I ended up with what the medical professionals refer to as a prolapsed bladder. That’s their nice of way of telling you that it fell out and that the hundreds of stitches you’re about to get to solve that, and the other damage that was done, will do nothing to restore proper functionality.
This is no secret. Anyone who knows me or has randomly seen me at the grocery store, knows that there are just some things I can’t do; at least not without taking drastic measures to avoid looking like a 2-year-old who was too busy watching Sesame Street to be bothered with something silly like using the bathroom. You know -- things like sneezing or stepping off of a curb or running. We’re essentially talking about everyday life here and sometimes it just doesn’t go quite right for me.
Well, my oldest turns eight this month, so it’s not like I don’t have a ton of practice dealing with this issue or that my kids are somehow unaware of the situation. They know and they use it to their advantage. Typical conversations go something like this:
“Hey Hunter, come in here and unload this dishwasher, please!”
“Why? You can’t catch me anyway!”
Or even better:
“Hey Mom, I’ll race you to the car! Oh wait . . . do you have a diaper on?”
Is this kid serious? I won’t tell you how loud he said that last one in a crowded Walmart parking lot.
But as much teasing as I get from my oldest, nothing prepared me for Avery.
My baby follows me into the bathroom basically every time I go in there. I can’t escape her. She’s almost catlike in her ability to be two steps behind me at any given moment. She acts like there’s candy stuck to my backside that she’s trying maniacally to get.
So she sees the pads I have to wear to do any form of exercise whatsoever and blurts out, “Your biaper!?” No, that’s not a typo. That’s how she says it. And I most certainly didn’t misunderstand her. What the heck! She’s barely 19 months old. I don’t need this.
I resolved right then and there to never exercise again. I mean, sitting on the couch all day eating Doritos has its perks. Have you tried the Spicy Nacho flavored ones? They’re fantastic. And hey, Twinkies made a comeback, so there’s that option as well.
Of course, then I remember that I’d physically given birth to these four children who are giving me this inferiority complex, which reminded me that if I sat on the couch all day munching on their Halloween candy, I’d be forced into buying new jeans in no time at all. So I had to reconcile this and I knew it. I mean, sure, even my four-year-old can jump on the trampoline without wetting her pants. And yeah, my one-year-old thinks that her and I share a pack of diapers. Okay. But still there had to be something to bring me back to that feeling of at least relative superiority.
And then it happened. My six-year-old son came bounding into the bathroom. I was kneeling on the floor bathing his little sister.
“Hey Mom! I accidentally peed on my face!”
If you read my blog, you know that this announcement was followed by hysterical laughter. First of all, how does a person accidentally pee on their own face? And secondly, regardless of the fact that an extremely talented urologist is going to have to take a shot at fixing my bladder someday, there’s no chance in heck you’d ever catch me peeing on my own face.
So Mom inches her way back to the top. I guess I can save the Doritos for another day.
