Embarrassing Stories

Tomorrow night, Ariella has her first camp sleepover. She's had lots of friends sleepovers, but this is her first industrial-strength one, with a schedule that includes "Movies all night long." While discussing the upcoming overnight this past Shabbat, I was reminded of an Embarrassing Story that happened on my first overnight at camp. It is so embarrassing that I still cringe thinking about it.

Naturally, I will now share this story with you.

First of all, let it be known that my counselor ("What's a counselor, Mommy?" Sorry, "madrichah,") wasn't ever going to be nominated for Most Compassionate Teenager of the Year. It was very obvious to all of us tweens that she was just there for the Boys. Now, Boys our age were sticking pencils up their noses and wrestling each other and generally smelling pretty bad, so we did not get this infatuation. But the point is, I did not have a particularly warm relationship with her, which might explain how the situation later got away from me. Literally.

So there we were, spreading out our sleeping bags in a big room. We all slept in the same room--it was a gym or auditorium or something. The counselors announced that if anyone needed a bathroom run, they were taking a group right before bed. There was no bathroom in the gym, so if you needed to go, someone had to accompany you. (Many of you probably see where this is going). I kinda had to go, but for some reason, still a mystery to me lo these many years later, I declined the offer. Before bed, the counselors reminded us that we were not to go to the bathroom alone; if we needed to go in the middle of the night, we had to wake one of them up to take us.

Fast forward a few hours. I am awoken from my slumber by the insanely terrible urge to pee. What to do? A normal person would have woken up a counselor and asked to go. Maybe a risky person would have snuck out alone. But I was (and am) an afraid-people-will-be-mad-at-me person. I was faced with two untenable choices:

A. Wake up my counselor (for whom, if you recall from earlier, I did not feel the warm and fuzzies), which ran the risk of being yelled at - "Why didn't you go earlier? What's the matter with you?" -  or at the very least getting grumbled and eye-rolled at.

B. Hold it in till morn.

Neither of these options suited me. Being left to my own devices, I....went. Right there in my sleeping bag. Relief, followed by oh-my-god-what-did-I-just-do??? I honestly can't remember if I changed or suffered through the night in cold pee-jays. It was one of the lower points of my tween years.

However, one parent's tragedy is her child's comedy, right? Needless to say, Ariella LOVED the story. (So did Donny. Apparently he had never heard it before. See? 12 years later, and the mystery is still there!)

She then requested an Embarrassing Overnight Story from Daddy.

Which I now present to you: Donny's family had gone camping. After swimming in the lake, he realized his bathing suit was full of lake dirt. So he changed and then decided to rinse his bathing suit. As he approached the bathroom at the campsite, it dawned on him: "Hey, I could rinse my bathing suit in the sink...OR, I could swish it in the toilet, which already has water in it!" And that is how Daddy came to wash his bathing suit in a toilet.

After the stories, Ariella was bursting. "I have to go downstairs! [To our neighbors.]" she exclaimed. "I have to tell these stories to Noa right now before I forget!"

Within two days, not only did Noa know the stories, but so did every girl in Ariella's bunk (sorry, "kvutzah") -- "I told all the girls in my kvutzah about how you washed your bathing suit in the toilet!!!" she told us excitedly, her face shining with unbridled joy -- as well as the children on her bus, in our neighborhood, the greater Modiin area, and most of the Merkaz. In fact, I would not be surprised if, as you were reading this, you said to yourself, "Oh yeah, pee in sleeping bag and bathing suit in toilet stories. Heard those already."

Anyway, now would be a highly appropriate time if any Loyal Readers would like to share their own Embarrassing Overnight Stories.