Yesterday was the big birthday bash at our family. Some of you here on the board know my story, that my fraternal twin brother and I were born on our Dad's thirtieth birthday. All my life October 27 has been the big family birthday event. Then, to stretch everyone's credulity, my husband joined our family a dozen years ago, and it turns out he shares the birthday too.
So yesterday we had the big annual shindig at our house. My mom and my brother's wife as usual took charge of making a party setting out of what would otherwise have been a potluck, and a big (by my standards) happy family gathering ensued. We had several friends over, packs of their kids terrorized the neighborhood, and love and laughter reigned everywhere.
Somewhere in the course of the afternoon, the guys drifted off onto the porch to discuss sports, war, politics, and women, and the girls sat around the living room and chatted girl talk. After a while, the topic of birthdays led to births and delivery stories, and I can't keep up there, since I have never been pregnant. Then those horror stories drifted off to child-rearing stories.
Out of nowhere my mom contributed her recollections of our family trip from Phoenix to New York with my brother and me in tow to visit my grandparents over the Bicentennial weekend in 1976. Her comments were more about us kids' behavior on the trip than about the visit. But that visit held a wondrous bright memory for me. It was there, on the very day of the Bicentennial parades, that I had gotten my first-ever enema.
So of course I couldn't keep my mouth shut. Maybe the Devil made me do it: I had to tell her I remembered something about that trip. "You and Grammie gave me an enema," I stated. "What was that all about?"
OMG, I said the e-word! I'm sitting there in a group with my mom and sister in law (who is a dear friend) and five other ladies ranging in age from 77 to 23. Some of these girls are wives of my husband's friends and I really hardly know them. But Mom, who is not a klismo, didn't turn red, she just told the story, relating it much as I have done on this board previously. Yes, she remembered the incident. I had last pooped in Phoenix, we'd now been in New York for three days, and she was going to do something proactive about it. To her it was just a simple act of parenting, a simple homeopathic solution to my problem. I could tell by the way she spoke of it that she still attached nothing sexual in any way to an enema. It was only to me that that moment became the beginning of a life-long love of enema pleasures. .
And I actually talked with my mother, in front of other people, about that long-ago moment. It had only taken thirty five and a half years to bring the subject up!
And now I'm thirty nine. Is there really life after forty?
Hugs,
Diane