The Upside of Peeing Your Pants

It’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when.

Photo by Irene Strong on Unsplash

Ok, let’s get real here. Hands in the air if you’ve peed your pants and your age is not a single digit. Don’t be shy, get those hands in the air.

Hmm. I can’t see you so it’s tough to estimate a percentage, but I bet a lot of you out there have peed in your pants before. If your hand is in the air, you can stop reading since you already know what I’m about to say.

If you’ve never peed your pants or you’re lying that you’ve never peed your pants, keep reading.

Spoiler alert, this doesn’t turn into a kinky pitch for golden showers or any kind of pee related sex. But what I am going to do is convince you that sometimes, the horrible, most embarrassing things in life are actually freeing.

We exert a lot of energy trying not to embarrass ourselves. But really, once you learn to survive embarrassment like a champ, life gets a lot easier.

I peed my pants while I was teaching a class of 25 eighth grade students. I didn’t plan to do it, but it happened anyway. My class was doing a science experiment where they had to do 25 jumping jacks. They were being giant babies about it, so to nudge them to action, I challenged one of the boys to a race.

We stood at the front of the room and I instructed half the class to count my jumping jacks and the other half to count his.

Although I knew that I had recently given birth to a baby, my head was in the game and I was only focused on one thing: winning.

Until I became focused on something else — the warm river of urine that I felt flowing down my leg after the fifth jumping jack. My pace slowed, but I didn’t quit. I kept jumping, and the pee kept coming.

When I snuck a glance downward to survey the scene, my heart leaped with joy. I was wearing a denim skirt with leather boots, and the pee was running right down my leg and filling up the boot. Despite my full bladder emptying, there wasn’t one yellow drop on the white tile floor!

I could have done a lot of things. I could have called the office and asked for someone to come watch my class while I got cleaned up. I could have taken half a personal day and gone home. I could have run out of…