Momfession #23: Out of the mouths of babes

I have never been the most graceful person. When I was six, I fell off of my bed and broke my arm. When I was 10, I walked into the corner of a locker after my swimming lesson, producing a giant gash and subsequent scar over my eyebrow. When I was about 12, I stapled my thumb. I have about a million ridiculous stories that I could tell you, while pointing out the odd scars that these incidents left behind over the years. As I grew older, my klutziness followed along nicely. At work, I stub my toes on file cabinets. At home, I burn and/or cut myself while making my family dinner at least once a week. I have become used to it all, and my husband just rolls his eyes every time he sees me holding (another) bloody tissue around my finger in the kitchen.

So when I jammed my thumb while getting undressed last week, it was par for the course. I didn’t think anything of it when I came downstairs to tell my husband that I was in severe pain from taking my pants off (in my defense, I was trying to get ready  for a child-free dinner out and I caught my thumb in the belt loop on my jeans while I was hastily getting dressed). That is, until my son came home the next day from school.

G: Mommy, my teacher hurt her thumb just like you!

Me: Oh, really? How do you know?

G: Well, she said she jammed her thumb and it really hurt. So I said, ‘my mommy did the same thing last night while she was taking her pants off!’

Me: Umm..what did she say to that?

G: Nothing. She was just really quiet after that.

I guess I need to remember that, although some conversations may seem perfectly normal within in the confines of our house, they don’t sound quite the same when retold by a six-year-old to his teacher the next day. Something tells me I should start keeping my incontinence stories to myself too. The last thing I need is for my son to be telling his class that “mommy peed in her pants last night when she sneezed.” Now THAT would be embarrassing.