P is for Emotional Trauma due to Part-time Parenting

A girl learns from an early age that she best be looking out after her nether regions because any mishap in that area will mark her in the scarlett-letter, burn her to the stake, 'she's a damn whore!' kinda way for the rest of her life.

My experience happened earlier than most. I was six. And I managed to piss myself at school. And because I was even then fighting mixed messages from my mother who told me never to do anything half-assed, I created a deluge. I was wearing woolen tights, which meant that during a Canadian winter I was a virtual up-side-down urine pop.

It wasn't the pissing myself in front of my classmates nor was it smelling of wizz for an entire day that stayed with me. It was what the teachers made me wear that haunts me. My primary school had a special 'outfit' for accidents 'just like these'. Only noone oddly enough really ever pissed themselves. Except the poor kids. I dunno - you work it out.

No the accident outfit was a one-piece green jumper. And everyone knew it was THE PEE SUIT. It was actually pea-green, and in it I could smell the stench of a thousand lack lustred bladders that came before me.

I don't blame my parents for not coming to pick me up and save me from THE PEE SUIT. They did work a fifteen minute drive away after all. Fifteen minutes or twenty-seven years of trauma. Not much to work out there. And to any working mother I would say 'Don't worry. We only blame Dad for being so cheap.'

But still, do you know how embarrassing it was to get handed your clothes in a hermetically sealed plastic bag at the end of the day? It's like getting fired from the appropriate world.

I guess on some Oliver Twist level the whole experience hardened me. The nicknames I got weren't actually that inventive as pointing and shouting 'PEE SUIT!' was hilarious enough in and of itself. But the alphabet, like my relationship with my parents, will always be amiss by one little letter. L.