“Excuse me. Were you just in the washroom?”
“Yes.”
“Well, could you please not pee all over the place.”
“I didn’t even pee.”
“You peed all over the wall and floor and seat.”
“I said I didn’t pee. I was just washing my hands.”
“But there’s pee everywhere.”
“I didn’t pee. I just washed my hands.”
“Yes, but you peed on everything.”
“I…said…I…did…not…pee!”
You’d guess, as a stay-at-home dad with five year-old twins and a nine year-old boy, this was a conversation between one of my kids and me. But that’s where you’d be wrong. Rather, this was a dialogue that took place between me and a janitor while my daughter, Amelia, and my wife, looked on. As did everyone else in the waiting room of a children’s medical health centre to boot.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
First off, I’ve been a stay-at-home dad for nine years. It has been a humbling experience, somewhat akin to facing a Category Three Hurricane. The level of daily devastation wouldn’t look out of place in a Die Hard movie. And my kids say such sweet things to me like, “Dad, your armpits smell like ear wax,” or “your feet stink like old milk,” or, on one particularly, sweltering summer evening when I was walking around the house in only boxer briefs, the other twin, Julien, told me, rather bluntly, “Dad, I like you better with pants on.” Oddly, that’s something my wife also likes to remind me of. As for how our kids know what all these rancid things smell like is a testament to their boundless curiosity and quest for knowledge, secure in the belief that the more disgusting something is the greater the opportunity for learning. How they identify all these horrible smells with me is just pure imagination on their part or so I like to think. Admittedly, I have been known to skip a few too many showers in the mad rush hours that make up my days, shuttling kids about with the kind of manic fervor comparable to a border collie called to work at the height of sheep-shearing season.
So, good old-fashioned anxiety and my own general sloppiness can run high at our house on any given day. Our oldest son, Eli, is so afraid of wasps and bees he wears his goalie equipment out into the backyard on hot summer afternoons. And as messy as our kids are, I’m even messier since they use my clothing as Kleenex to wipe off peanut butter, jam, ketchup, chicken nugget grease or mucous, not necessarily in that order. Which, in turn, is partially the reason for my run-in with the Pee Nazi. Amelia, twin of Julien, has this thing where she simply elects not to speak to people sometimes. Although with friends and family she’s a regular chatterbox. Some professionals have deemed it extreme shyness, some something else but I just call it smart thinking. There is many a person I’d rather not talk to and I wish I had her willpower to just stare at them disconcertingly and keep my mouth shut instead of babbling incoherently like a nervous chipmunk after consuming double espresso shots. At preschool many parents would say, “Amelia won’t talk to me,” and I’d reply, “Don’t take it personally. She probably just doesn’t like you.”
Thus, there we were in the children’s medical centre just to dot our i’s and cross our t’s in the world of doctor specialist follow-ups when little did I realize I’d be called upon to mind my P’s and Q’s in a waiting room full of kids, all equally as capable as me of peeing willy-nilly in every nook and cranny, either for fun or lack of aim. Concerned about my sloppy appearance when meeting a ”specialist” (the word always makes me think of a hired assassin), I retired to the bathroom to arrange my comb over and check my clothes for stray food chunks.
I returned to the waiting room, settled in cheerfully and only moments later the janitor cornered me and so began the great pee debate. I couldn’t believe I’d be called to task when a kid, two seats away from me, was using a rolled-up copy of OWL Magazine as a battering ram on his mother’s leg. My money was on him when it came to aimless peeing but then I was the last seen leaving the scene of the crime by a janitor who seemed to think she worked for a CSI team. When I stressed, in a loud voice that I did not pee on the floor, I could tell she didn’t believe me and I pictured myself being dragged off screaming, “I did not pee on the floor,” over and over again while my wife and daughter looked on.
In the end I don’t know which kid did the dirty deed. I looked at them and they looked at me but all I saw were perfect poker faces couched in innocent denial and runny noses. Which only leads me to believe that whoever the culprit was, any of these kids would make a great politician.
This was our first entry into our Daddy Blogger contest, written by Mark. Please make sure you vote on your favourite dad bloggers throughout the month of September!