Wet Accidents: Memoir
I was a young kindergartener in the year 2000. It was spring. I distinctly recall this because it was not cold enough for me to wear a winter jacket, but it was not warm enough to not wear a coat at all.
I remember that I was dressed in a purple outfit that day. I had on purple leggings with a purple long-sleeved shirt.
The day went by pretty quickly. In an instant, it was already snack time. On this particular day, I was incredibly thirsty, and so I managed to drink the two water bottles my mom had packed for me in my lunchbox. I didn’t think that I’d have to go to the bathroom soon after, but that was my mistake.
After we had finished our snack time, my teacher told us that we would be taking a math quiz on the computers.
I logged into my assigned computer and started the exam. Within a few minutes of starting it, I have begun to feel urges to go to the bathroom. At first, I thought nothing of it. I had held my pee in before, and I thought I could just power through the quiz and go later.
Instead, the urge to go to the bathroom increased while I answered every question on the exam. My stomach started to hurt. I tried to get my teacher’s attention; every time I would raise my hand, I felt a small trickle of pee escape my body.
Any other reasonable person would have ran out of the classroom and gone to the bathroom. But at the young age of five, I was not a reasonable person. Instead, I was a stickler for rules, and to this day, I still am a stickler for rules;according to the classroom rules, you could not leave the classroom unless you got permission from the teacher. So, I followed this rule like it was the sacred word of God.
I raised and raised my hand feverishly, but to my demise, my teacher kept passing me by to help my other classmates. In fairness, she was an elderly woman in her 60s and probably did not hear my girlish cries; as she kept ignoring my hand, the strength of my lower body muscles weaken.
I glance at my teacher. She was helping out another student. I glance back at my computer monitor;I had a few more questions left. I look at my legs and cross them, hoping that maybe this action will stop the pee from escaping my body.
I tried to raise my hand one more time. My teacher passed me by and didn’t even look at me. I couldn’t hold it any longer, and I knew that I wouldn’t make it to the bathroom: so I let go.
It was like a river damn had exploded in the classroom. My pee was everywhere, and my poor purple leggings were soiled. I can’t remember if my classmates laughed at me or not, but I believe the classroom chatter dismissed into an awkward silence once my bodily fluids hit the floor. I ran away to the girls lavatory, and my teacher finally noticed and chased after me.
My teacher had called my mother and told her about what happened. Within a few minutes, my mom marched into the lavatory and found me hiding in one of the stalls. I am pretty sure she found me by listening in on my sobs.
While she helped me wiggle out of my soiled pants, she handed me a new pair of underwear and said, “You’re a big girl Emily! Big girls don’t pee their pants in kindergarten!”
After she had given me those remarks, I started to cry again. I felt my face getting red hot, and my throat begun to burn. After a while, my sobs turned into hiccups, and I felt a headache forming.
I sat in the lavatory for a while to compose myself. I thought for sure that my social life was over and that my classmates would make fun of me. My mom stayed with me until I stopped crying. I begged her to take me home, but she had to go back to work and couldn’t take the day off to stay home with me. So I walked back to the classroom, praying that my classmates wouldn’t ridicule me when I returned.
When I entered the classroom, no one made any remarks towards me. Everyone was busy doing other activities. They barely acknowledged that I had just peed my pants in front of them. It was almost as if I had dreamt the whole thing happened, but I knew it was real.
A few months passed by and I tried to see if anyone from my class remembered my accident. When I asked my best friend Tyler if he remembered, he just stared at me and looked at me as if I was crazy.
I can honestly say that I didn’t have any more accidents like this one further down the line in my life. No one from my kindergarten class remembers it happening, and so my social status remained intact for a while, or at least until my high school years; but that’s another story for another day.
From now on, I always make sure that I take as many trips to the bathroom as I can to prevent peeing myself in public. Sometimes I will make seven trips to the bathroom before I leave my home or go to bed because I don’t know when I won’t have a bathroom near me. Life is unpredictable that way.
I don’t chug down liquids unless I know a bathroom is nearby;sometimes I break the rules, and I leave classrooms without saying where I’m going, because I’m forever scarred from the time I peed myself in kindergarten.
Autobiography