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1971 meets 2026 with wet pants and compassion. How’s that for an opener?

 Yesterday my adult child couldn’t wait for the bathroom while on an outing with her day program. Predictable, the accident, though the program had declined to let me store a change of bottoms there. As I drove south on the winding and windy back roads to deliver dry things, another incident sprang to mind.

We were a family of six crammed into a smallish camper for a summer in the belly of the early 1970’s while our new house rose before us like a whale beached on that forested land with a river plodding through it. There were two vernal ponds out back. I didn’t know they’d fill, in spring, with thrumming songs of peepers bouncing off the trunks of 1,000 trees enchanting my already fanciful young mind. It was magical place, I tell you, but that summer there were workmen all around mingling with my father and my brothers . If memory serves me they also hammered and carted lumber working to raise the new building that would never quite feel like home to me.

We had one tiny toilet—I think composting—in the trailer. One toilet for all those bottoms. We went in the woods when we could.

It was a warm day and I was inside the shell of the house exploring when the urge came on suddenly. Workmen all around
and I was 9 and timid, 9 and sensitive, 9 and prone to fear. I did not go outside and run into the woods, or check the camper to see if the toilet was free. Instead I closed myself into a rough wood-framed closet-in-process inside the growing construction and peed into my pants.

I think I crouched there awhile, humiliated, waiting for the sounds of those men to fade away, waiting for a chance to escape to the safety of the trailer, find some dry clothes. To hide the evidence of my accident.

Yesterday my daughter said I wet my pants and waited for my disapproval. There was none from me—there very rarely is. Just my arms enfolding her, speaking in soothing tones. Drawing both of them in for a long, tender hug—9 year old me, 33 year old her.

–Melinda

Thanks for reading. Photo by Dani Adkins on Unsplash.