I need to get ahead of this story before my family goes blabbing it to the world, so here it is. We were in a swimming pool last week, just me and my three kids. My son said he had to pee, and my daughter told him to get out and go in a bush nearby. This was a private pool, and a private pool area. No one would care.
“Just pee in the pool!” I told them all. “I’ve peed in here like five times already.”
***RECORD SCRATCH***
“Wait, really?” my daughter asked me. Already, I knew I’d made an enormous tactical error. I, a grown-up, thought my kids would be down with pissing in a private pool. The water was treated, and the “they use a chemical that turns red if you piss in a pool!” urban legend had been debunked for them many years prior. I figured I was safe to make this confession. I didn’t even think of it as a confession. In fact, I may have been actively urinating when I said it. I may have quietly thought to myself, “God, pissing in a pool feels AMAZING” while in the act.
“Did you really pee in the pool?” my daughter asked.
“Uh, no.” That answer didn’t satisfy the jury. All three kids burst into laughter.
“You’re lying!” said one.
“You peed in here!” said another.
“EWWWWWWWWWW,” said all three.
“Did you really pee in here five times?” my daughter asked.
“Uh, no.”
“YES YOU DID!”
“This is bullying. I am being bullied.”
Keep in mind that I have seen these kids piss hundreds of times in my life. I have had them piss ON me (not by request). I am no stranger to their excretions, nor they mine. I’ve pissed next to them in bathrooms, in the bushes, and in the ocean. And they’ve seen me piss with the door open. They’ve smelled my farts. They’ve heard me make ungodly noises while having a prolonged bowel movement. We’re tight like that. Nothing is off-limits.
Except pissing in a pool, it appears.
I tried to reassert my dad-thority in the midst of this crisis. “Do NOT tell your mother about this,” I warned them. “You know what happens to snitches here!”
“We are SO telling Mom,” they cried.
“No you are not.”
“We’re gonna tweet it!”
“Stitches. Stitches for the lot of you if you—”
“MOM!!!!!!!!”
My wife came over. The jig was up. I was fucking dead. The kids screamed that I’d defiled the pool, and she gave me The Look.
“Did you really piss in the pool, Drew?”
With all the dignity I had left, I gave her the best answer I could think of.
“No.”
