Some Days You Win, Some Days You Lose, Some Days You Just Get Pee on Your Shoes

I’m not sure why, but I am a person who gets lost. I’m very organized and careful, but almost every time I try to drive to a place I’ve never been, I get lost. I think it’s a combination of over-thinking and not trusting myself. During the month of September, almost every week-end day has involved my trying to find some random soccer field hours away from my home for my daughter’s travel soccer games. Last Saturday was no exception. We left 15 minutes late, and then, of course, I got lost. I spent the entire hour and a half ride about to pee on myself but unable to stop because we were already late, and I knew we would get lost, making us even later. After going the wrong way a couple of times and then driving past the field with NO SIGN (who does that? No sign at a soccer complex?), we pulled down a rutted dirt road into what looked like a grass field to find a few ratty looking soccer fields. I begin to panic as I look around for bathrooms and see NO BUILDINGS. My daughter jumps out and runs. I see another parent, who is a teacher at my daughter’s school and who I don’t really know all that well, (at least not well enough for what I end up saying in front of her later), sitting in a chair reading beside her car. I ask her about bathrooms; she doesn’t know. I sigh and begin to traipse across the field to the edge of the woods.


“Woods” is a loose term for what this briar-laced, poison-oak infested bog was. I lowered my head and charged through briars scrapping at my face and hair for a few feet. Have you ever noticed how thick trees and shrubs look from the outside looking in and then how thin they look from the inside looking out? I lowered my head and charged through more briars until I felt like people couldn’t see me. By this time, if some squatting didn’t occur very quickly, I was going to be sitting in stinky, wet pants for a very long time. So, in a rush and without looking, I squat in poison oak and pee on a mound of dirt from which everything that comes out of me runs directly onto my new tennis shoes. I am a college-educated, 45 year old mother of two teenagers squatting in a bog, peeing on my shoes. It does make you wonder where you’ve gone so wrong. I do the only thing I know to do. I hike up my poison-oak dusted panties and march my pee-soaked shoes through briars and mud and emerge from the "woods" looking like Swamp Thing with briars and leaves clinging to every part of me and with pee and mud on my shoes.  I get back to the parking lot, where I see a port-a-potty right beside my car. I look at the teacher/parent and sputter, “Mother Fucker. There’s a port-a-potty right here.”

Some days you win. Some days you lose, and some days you just get pee on your shoes.