{"id":332,"date":"2017-08-20T19:12:33","date_gmt":"2017-08-20T19:12:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/?p=332"},"modified":"2017-09-11T20:07:47","modified_gmt":"2017-09-11T20:07:47","slug":"a-cup-full-of-pee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/2017\/08\/20\/a-cup-full-of-pee\/","title":{"rendered":"A cup full of pee"},"content":{"rendered":"

8\/20\/17<\/p>\n

Yesterday, a Saturday\u00a0about a week before my 45th birthday, I found myself driving around town with a container full of pee in my car cup holder. Pee as in urine. Not like in a travel mug, but one of those sample\u00a0cups with lids they give your kids at the pediatricians office\u00a0because they squeezed you in on a weekend morning during triage hours. And then your kid refused to<\/del>\u00a0couldn’t pee\u00a0after\u00a0trying for an hour-and-a-half\u00a0while you and the rest of the doctors’ office staff waited, patiently. So then\u00a0you have to take the cup home for her to fill in the\u00a0fantastical safety of her own glorious bathroom. You decide to drop your kid off, do ALL the grocery shopping since you were\u00a0forced out of your house already anyway,\u00a0come across every person you’ve ever met as you shop in pajamas, get home, yell for help unloading, pick up said kid with the cup of urine, drop her at a birthday party by noon (which is very early to start a sleepover party but God love those parents), before driving the sample back to the doctor’s office. And then when you get there the parking lot is strangely sparse and you remember the doctor told you they closed at 11:30 so please, please, please try to pee before you leave.<\/p>\n

Your husband is out of town, you left the 11 year old in charge, this is the weekend after the first week\u00a0back at\u00a0school (I don’t remember my first weeks of school ever being so intense for my parents), and the weekend before this one was spent squishing in\u00a0one last kamikaze family road trip because summer was too short, and\u00a0you feel tired. By you, I\u00a0mean I.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Cup for pee, not a latte.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I idled in the parking lot for some time wondering if I aught to muster the strength to tentatively knock on the door of the closed office to offer the cup of pee to whomever answered; if it would do any good –or was it a federal crime–to leave the cup of pee in the building’s\u00a0package delivery box; also, what is the expiration time-table for a cup of pee? When I realized the pee would most likely be no good by Monday morning when it would be discovered by an early arrival to any of the several businesses housed in the building, and that I’d be leaving a cup of pee with my daughter’s full name written on it in a public space, I sadly reversed and drove home, defeated.<\/p>\n

Life doesn’t turn out the way you expected.\u00a0\u00a0How did I end up\u00a0in Colorado, driving from here to kingdom come carrying around an unhelpful, tardy\u00a0urine sample that’s not even mine?? Any blurry halation effects, brought about through old camera tricks\u00a0that made your future imaginings nonspecifically\u00a0glowy at age 25, consolidate into a very\u00a0sharp focus of logistics\u00a020 years on.\u00a0My husband and I are now in full charge of satisfying all 5 of our children’s “Hierarchy of Needs,” plus more needs that Maslow didn’t even fucking think of: like the need to be in Ireland for work for a week at a time at the start of the school year and soccer season. And less, glamorously, like chauffeuring urine to a birthday party.<\/p>\n

But then today I woke up early and felt like taking Max the dog for a walk: came back inside, ate and felt oddly very nourished after not feeling so good yesterday. I got some encouraging emails from some friends to whom I’d somewhat haphazardly sent my blog the night before out of boredom\u00a0and a self-dare. Things clicked along\u00a0pretty pleasantly\u00a0throughout the morning, cooking breakfast for my boys, making contact with family and friends. No rush, no stress; it was kinda -dare I say- nice<\/em>? On my way to pick up my daughter from her sleepover I stopped at Starbucks, and the guy in front of me at the drive-through had paid for my coffee, so I paid for the ladies behind me even though that made my latte-run twice as expensive. As\u00a0I quickly drove off, praying to the introvert gods that those ladies wouldn’t catch up with me to say thanks, my chest inexplicably tightened\u00a0and my eyes filled with water.\u00a0“The world can still be\u00a0good<\/em>,”\u00a0came a whisper, “Pee and all<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

The eccentric dad of my daughter’s friend offered us several\u00a0forks-full of\u00a0his many varieties of homemade sauerkrauts, which I graciously accepted and washed\u00a0down with latte,\u00a0even though I’m not a huge fan. He sent us off with a large, pungent mason jar full,\u00a0which I will present to my husband when he gets back from his work trip next week. Mike will be home\u00a0in time for us to go to a concert for my birthday weekend, where we will be the oldest persons in attendance. But age has some silver-linings because we don’t even need to worry about remembering to find a babysitter, because at long last we have a 14year old and, legally, they can’t arrest us for leaving\u00a0her in charge. So\u00a0there’ll be more concerts in our future.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Latte, not pee.<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Dump the pee, wash out the cup and hope you haven’t contaminated it, if that’s a thing?<\/em> (I don’t know, I’m not a doctor.) Try again Monday. Without sounding too trite, if that’s at all possible–and actually, no<\/em>, now that I see where this is going,\u00a0it’s not possible but I’m still\u00a0writing it–I’m going to try to view that cup of pee as half full.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

8\/20\/17 Yesterday, a Saturday\u00a0about a week before my 45th birthday, I found myself driving around town with a container full of pee in my car cup holder. Pee as in urine. Not like in a travel mug, but one of those sample\u00a0cups with lids they give your kids at the pediatricians office\u00a0because they squeezed you …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-332","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-childhood","category-the-book-of-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=332"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":348,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/332\/revisions\/348"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=332"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=332"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scribblemescribbleyou.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=332"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}