The Trampoline is the Mom Bladder’s Worst Enemy

As summer is upon us, mothers are faced with the yearly quest to entertain the kidlets on rainy days or when they bitch about the heat.

Lovely things like the Science Centre and the Royal Ontario Museum always make the list and we have added some more athletic pursuits because I love fun.

Really it is because I want ‘team bicker’ to get rid of their pent up energy so I can plop them in front of the square babysitter and look at Facebook with a glass of wine in the afternoon.

First attempt was laser tag. If I want to lose that bad, I will stay at the house and play on the Wii and not drop $80 or have to come up with a clever warrior name not containing the word ‘fuck’.

We have tried paintball. No. Just No. The welts on my neck, legs and arms were permanent and I can’t get any more bruises without having to tell people I am moonlighting on a pole.

We had the idea to go to Sky Zone, the trampoline park. What a fabulously smelly adventure this turned out to be. Hundreds of hot, sweaty pre-teens and teens in rented socks jumping wildly and slinging projectiles at unsuspecting patrons in the name of dodgeball.

Good fun.

I took off my sandals and adorned my threadbare foot fungus traps. I love fun and jumping is fun I reminded myself because I was wearing a sports bra. My giggle at first bounce was too loud for my children to stay with me so I traversed the foreign land on my own not caring to notice I was the only one up there who was old enough to vote.

I jumped only a couple of seconds before the inevitable happened. The drip. Two vaginal births and I hadn’t thought of that? I squirt when I laugh, blow my nose, sneeze, burp or say a word with a hard consonant for fuck’s sake. What was I thinking? Did you know it is impossible to look cool when you just pissed your pants in a room full of kids who haven’t had full bladder control for much more than a decade?

I told my kids (not really, because they were nowhere to be found and they were pretending I didn’t exist) that I was running to the ladies room. More like walking with my legs crossed but trying to not look like my legs were crossed. I looked down a lot while my bladder relieved itself a little more in the walk.

In a stroke of genius, the bathrooms were one floor down in the next building. 

The sopping up and dabbing of toilet paper on my moist undergarments had done the trick, or so I thought. But, I am no simpleton. OK, maybe I already proved I am, but I thought I was brilliant because I had a pantyliner in my purse.

After the long cross-legged walk to and from my rented locker, I finally had my sticky solution in place. It didn’t occur to me that the undergarments I secured my slender saviour to were still slightly damp. Certainly it will be fine. #Genius

I returned to the sweat pit and took two bounces before I filled my liner.

Back to the basement.

The liner had bunched and was now sticking to my inner thigh instead of my wet panties. A fuckload of good it was doing there.

So I did what every other woman would do–I quit while I was still able to stand on the street corner without someone putting a quarter in my coffee cup and discretely covering their nose. Actually, I didn’t think of that. Instead, I wadded up a sizeable amount of toilet tissue, flattened it against my nethers and proceeded with caution. 

I dodged back to the crowd of jumpers. I felt like the solution was working. The paper was drying out the nethers and soaking up the soppy mess. I was bouncing high enough to say “Whee” when it happened again. Wee, that is.

But this time it felt like it was running down my leg into my rented socks. How is that possible with my foolproof system in place?

That is when I saw it. The balled up wad of pissy paper bouncing alongside me on the trampoline. It was no longer protecting me. It was taunting me. 

I picked up the traitor with an “eloquent” seat drop, told no one in particular that I was done for the day and proceeded to make my way to the pit of despair one more time.

Even though I think Pavlov’s dog would have learned faster, I finally figured out that Sky Zone is a drop off zone only. Let my progenies wear themselves out, I am going to get back to Facebook and that glass of wine.