Wednesday, March 08, 2006

When you gotta go, you gotta go

Yesterday, my kid and I are out walking our dog pack through the alley behind our neighborhood and we see one of the neighbors out in the alley, emptying her trash can.

It's the hairdresser wife of the neighbor from the last footnote of this post and I've only met her once before, and all I know of her is that she's a Republican stay-at-home-mom of three feral children, so I know that we've pretty much got nothing to talk about - I wave (because that's about as neighbor-friendly as I get) and prepare to walk on by, but this is the South and you never get off that easy.

She starts asking about the dogs and about my kid's school because she's getting ready to send her oldest simian child off to preschool soon.

Her kids (one I guessed to be about 4, and a pair of two-year-old twins) come squirrelling out of her yard to pet my dogs and start knocking over trash cans and I commend her on being able to handle three of them, so young, at home all day, and she kind of hems and haws and, in her own Southern way, let's me know that she really isn't handling it all that well. She looks like a woman who wishes Calgon would take her away for good.

Then, as we're debating the merits of public school vs. private school, I glance over at her oldest child who has taken a break from eating dirt clods to drop his jeans to his ankles.

Then he drops his superhero briefs.

Then he starts peeing. Right in the middle of the alley.

I was appropriately mortified.

My 7-year-old son, who thinks that fart jokes are the highest form of humor and Adam Sandler is some sort of demi-god was completely mortified and hid his head in my side.

The child's mother sighs, waits until he finishes and then reminds him to pull his pants back up. "He does that everywhere," she says. "The other day we were in the mall parking lot..."

And then I felt like the best mom in the world because my kid had never whipped it out and taken a whiz in public.

Labels: adventures in shitty parenting