Tuesday Reminiscences

A long time ago, my mother and I were talking about our creativity, or lack of it. I have a lot of talents in this life, but creativity is just not one of them. "I'm a good copier," my mom said. "People think I'm creative, because I can copy other people's ideas really well." Same for me. Bridget has Flashback Fridays, and I think this is a good idea, so I'm copying it. But, it's going to be on Tuesdays, because it's a boring day where I have nothing else to do.

This Tuesday brings us back to Mother's Day, 2006. I was 7 or so months' pregnant with Lillian and my belly was pretty big. For my present, Tyler planned a picnic up in Poly Canyon's design Village, a place where architecture students can build their senior projects, or something like that. It's beautiful and really cool.

The Design Village is about a mile down a wide dirt road which can only be accessed by car if you have the code to the gate which one of our friends (Liz?) obtained at some point during our college career. How Liz, or whoever it was, got this code is still very much a mystery to me. Code in hand, we drove right up to the entrance, unloaded our picnic and hiked up a little ways until we found a nice spot to put our blanket down.

We were there for about 5 minutes before Nature started pressing down on me. Pollen started working itself into my system which, as it is known to be irrational like that, began releasing massive amounts of histamines into my blood stream. The mucus. The itchy eyes. And, the sneezing. Oh, lots and lots of sneezing. It started small, and then I couldn't talk. I sneezed probably 200 times before we decided to pack it in.

The sneezing wasn't really the reason I decided we needed to go, IMMEDIATELY. Well, not the sneezing alone, but the sneezing wasn't really helping my... stress incontinence. I already had a baby resting it's head on my bladder, and now my diaphragm was putting even more pressure on top of that, and I just couldn't do it. We hadn't been married for that long, so I wasn't all that comfortable with saying, "We have to go because I'm peeing my pants and I can't stop," besides, I thought he would be able to take one look at me and see what I thought was obvious. It was probably the most embarrassed I had ever been in front of Tyler. I just kept saying, "we need to leave, we need to leave. Pack up faster, we have to go."

On our hike down to the car, we passed some people going up and I was probably quite a sight: 7 months' pregnant, sneezing uncontrollably, face beet red from embarrassment, and wet pants. Right then, I wanted to die.

Tyler, in his usual this-is-no-big-deal-we'll-figure-this-out manner got us back into the car, and took us home where I immediately went our bedroom to change and hide for the rest of the day.

I was so mortified by this that it wasn't until two years later, Mothers' Day 2008, that I could talk about it. I brought it up and was talking about how incredibly embarrassing the whole incident was and Tyler said, "You were embarrassed that you couldn't stop sneezing?"
"No," I answered. "I was embarrassed that I wet my pants."
"YOU WET YOUR PANTS? No wonder you were so upset." That whole time, he had no idea. I guess it wasn't as obvious as I thought.