Every once in a while I feel a level of vague guilt when I see that other parents do fun things with their children like doing crafts or going on outings or feeding them. Normally I can just ignore it but it occasionally mixes with just enough optimism that I think it’s a feasible idea for me to try it. This is a bad idea for several reasons. 1) My creativity and my patience are equal parts non-existent. 2) All the other parents are doing this stuff with children who are not mine and 3) Literally EVERY time this happens something goes terribly, terribly wrong. And I don’t mean that we spill something on the carpet and someone “accidentally” gets paint on the dog (this is just Tuesdays). I mean the entire event goes to actual hell and I promise myself that I will never do it again. And then I don’t keep my fucking promise because someone else wins a mom of the year award on my Instagram feed and that stupid feeling kicks back in.

Case in point. Someone told me that they opened this new amazing park downtown, which is about an hour drive from my house. So I thought, awesome. Kids like parks and I have kids so this should be some quick points. It was my last day off so I figured I would head out early, couple hours at the park, home in the early afternoon. Easy. We planned to leave at 9:30am.

At noon, we made it out of the house. (I don’t want to talk about it- that’s when I was actually planning on leaving anyways so shut up). It was a nice day and we were all driving along quite happily.  Everything was going along swimmingly. Then, all of a sudden, I realized that the traffic up ahead of me was not moving. And when I say not moving, I mean several people were out of their cars craning ahead to see what was happening and someone was cooking smokies on their tailgate on the middle of the highway. Turns out the universe found out I’d had another one of my bright ideas so it flipped a semi-truck and leaked diesel all over four lanes of a five lane highway. FOUR KILOMETRES AHEAD. So now I am stuck in a vehicle with my children and there is literally no way out. We spend the next 45 minutes inching along while I try and convince the children that the inside of my car is almost as good as a park.

At the 45 minute mark we are just past the halfway point. The pattern is as follows: drive 6 feet, stop for 9 minutes, inch forward another foot, change lanes because everyone else is driving past you and laughing, come to a complete stop, repeat. Then, the unthinkable happens. If you don’t routinely hang out with 6 year olds then here’s a fun fact…their bladders don’t come with any actual sensors. I think they kick in around 26 or something. Which means, they don’t ever just have to pee…they have to pee RIGHT now. And when your 6 year old has to pee right now and you are in minute one of the 9 minute stop and there are literally no highway exits between you and Satan’s latest practical joke on your life, there are NO solutions. There isn’t even a shoulder to stop on.

So now I’m frantically trying to decide if it’s appropriate to let your child get out of the car on a 5 lane freeway and piss on a median while the cars that are going the correct way on the highway are whizzing past at 140kms an hour. Most of my life actually comes down to will the ministry finally take the children if I do this thing? As I am doing the mental math Escher starts getting quite frantic in the backseat and is announcing that he is going to pee in his hands if I don’t do something. And then he found a tall, slim empty can and was trying to argue that he could pee in the can and was using the fact that it was a lemonade can to bolster his argument. So now I am yelling “ESCHER DO NOT PEE IN THAT CAN” while I am trying not to rear-end the car in front of me because we are now in the lane-switching portion of the cycle.

I am usually good at coming up with solutions when push comes to shove. In this case, I had nothing. Absolutely nothing. And now the kid is sitting back there sobbing “It’s coming” over and over and we are out of options. Fuck it. Can it is. So now the problem solving becomes how to use the can in the most effective way possible.

I backed the passenger seat back as far as it would go, put a blanket down across the seat and on the floor and told Escher to climb over the seats and perch on the edge of the seat with his pants around his ankles and aim VERY carefully and pee in the can.

He quite gratefully maneuvers himself into place and is perching carefully on the front seat clutching the can and his non-existent hand-eye coordination is kicking in so his little hands are shaking and he keeps looking ahead to see if I’m about to slam into the cars in front of me as we are inching along and I suddenly realize that the tip of his little penis is basically the same size as the can opening and there is a very real possibility that he is going to re-circumcise himself on the edge of a lemonade can on the freeway in my car at 3kms an hour so I am screaming “LOOK AT THE CAN FOR GOD’S SAKE JUST LOOK AT THE CAN!!” And my nine year old who is eternally helpful is just sitting in the back seat with her arms crossed announcing “He’s going to cut his dick off mom” which is NOT NECESSARY because I already KNOW this. And now Escher has stage fright combined with abject terror and he can’t actually go and then we hit a straightaway where we got to drive about 40 feet straight through so I am trying to watch the road and drive as straight as possible while Escher keeps exclaiming “Here it comes!!!….Oh no it went away again…” And I am literally yelling “ESCHER FOR THE LOVE OF GOD JUST PEE IN THE FUCKING CAN.”

This lasted for about 3 minutes. He eventually decided that he would just never pee again, (works for me) and that he could hold it indefinitely. Cue him pulling his pants back up and climbing back into his carseat. He left the can in my cup holder though. In case you were worried.

We then proceeded in the stop and go traffic for another 23 minutes. In total, it was 1 hour and 23 minutes to go 4 kms. And the worst part is that was not the end of the day. It did actually continue to go badly for another 7 hours or so and I would tell you about it, except just reliving this portion is causing my PTSD to kick in so I’ll have to tell you another time.

P.S. If you regularly post awesome things that you do with your kids on your social media can you just unfriend me and save me from myself? That’d be so so good.