Mirror in the Bathroom

Because of some recent praise regarding my fathering skills, and Father's Day (a bullshit holiday if ever there were, no doubt created by a consortium of card and tie manufacturers,) I'm going to share my most infamous Father of the Year moment of 2008.

Our story starts six months in the rearview. December 2008. That is when the shit hit the fan when it quite literally hit our hallway floor. My Lovely Bride hit me with the news as soon as I walked into the house after a long day at work.

"The Boy(s) are afraid to go to the bathroom!" She complained.

Knowing why they were scared, and finding it somewhat funny, I smirked and said, "Really."

"Yeah, Really!" She said, clearly pissed. "Wy was so scared to go into the bathroom that he shit on the hall floor today!"

No shit, I thankfully thought. If I would have said that out loud, no matter how great the pun, my Lovely Bride would have knocked the shit out of me.

But why were the Boy(s) scared you ask? Scared bad enough that Wy held his shit so long that when he could hold it no more, he didn't make it to the bathroom.

The reason was quite simple. That bathroom has a large mirror, and I, their dumbass father told them the legend of Bloody Mary over our Thanksgiving trip to Oklahoma.

Seriously.

In my defense, I didn't have them do Bloody Mary. I want to be very clear about that. I told them in the minivan. You can't do Bloody Mary in a minivan.

You see Dear Reader, The Boy(s) and another Boy, a good friend of the family who is the Elder Boy's age, had been pumping me for ghost stories as we drove up Turner Turnpike from Norman, Oklahoma to see my Grandma in Sand Springs, Oklahoma. I'm not sure what got us on scary stories, but they wanted me to tell them some, so I did. Goofy ones. Bulldog Man. Hook Man. Some that I made up. They weren't that scary. Being Boy(s), they kept trying to one up each other in not being scared by my goofy stories. Eventually, I exhausted all the stories I knew, and ran out of ideas to make up new ones. Still, they kept at me, relentlessly, to tell them one more scary story. That's when I remembered Bloody Mary.

"Have you guys ever heard of Bloody Mary?" I asked.

I could see the Elder Boy and Wy Wy giving me a blank look in the rearview mirror. Our friend, D said, "That's a movie."

"I don't know," I said. "Maybe?" I later found out that there is a movie with that title.

"Well Bloody Mary is a great way to freak your friends out," I explained. "It's not real."

That's not revisionist thinking either. I truly did state, from the get go, that Bloody Mary was NOT real.

"What you do is, you get someone to go into the bathroom, close the door, turn off the lights, so it's dark, and make them close their eyes and turn around in circles in front of the mirror, ten or so times while saying, Bloody Mary, Bloody Mary."

I looked in the rearview mirror and saw that all three of the Boy(s) were captivated.

"Then, you stop them in front of the mirror and they open their eyes and they see Bloody Mary in the mirror. But it's not real. It's the power of the mind. Or suggestion." I explained.

"The legend is that Bloody Mary is this ghost that can be summoned in the mirror."

"Really," they all said. Laughing. Acting tough and cool for each other.

"Yep," I said. "It freaks people out. But it's not real. It's just a trick."

I went on to tell them about the time Hurst and I did Bloody Mary to his big sister Tracy. We had to be 10 or so, and she was much older. Maybe 17 or 18. We got her to do it and she was so freaked out, that she clawed me bad enough to bring blood trying to get out of the bathroom. She actually ran into the closed bathroom door.

They all had some follow up questions. Kept asking me if it was real. I kept saying it was not real. It was a trick. One they could play on their friends, or at least know about so they wouldn't get it played on them down the road.

I thought everything was cool.

Everything was not cool.

I'm an idiot.

I didn't realize the enormity of my mistake until Wy shit on the floor. Up until then, I had thought it was kind of funny that they were scared, and in a very tough love kind of a guy way, figured it served them right for acting like they were tough, when they were all scared. But when Wy shit on the floor, the shit really did hit the fan.

My Lovely Bride was pissed. Bad.

Which was bad enough. But the fact that the Boy(s) were so scared made me feel even worse. I immediately went into spin control. Trying to rationalize with them. Explain. Stress how it wasn't real. I even took them in the bathroom, with the lights on, to show them how you did it, just to show them that it wasn't real.

The Boy(s) spent the next week or two urinating in the backyard. If they had to shit, they would try and convince the other one to join them in the bathroom. Safety in numbers I guess. If they couldn't do that, they would coerce Ruby the dog to go with them. They'd pay careful attention to not look in the mirror which is pretty hard to do with our bathroom's set-up. And If they couldn't get someone to join them in the bathroom, they would try and use our bedroom's bathroom which has a mirror that is too high for them to look into.

Again. My Lovely Bride was pissed. BAD.

Eventually I realized all my rational explanations weren't going to work so I got on the internets and did some research on child fears and stumbled upon what I thought was a great idea. I'd give the Boy(s) a talisman.

So the next day, I got into the attic and dug through some of my belongings to find some old silver dollars my Grandparents had brought back from Lake Tahoe in the 1970s. I figured these big coins would do the trick and be something the Boy(s) had never seen. I gave them each a shiny silver dollar and explained that the coin was their talisman, and if the believed in it, it would protect them from their bad thoughts.

"Bloody Mary isn't real," I said. "But your fear of her is, so believe in this coin and it will protect you from your fear."

Fuck me. I'm an idiot.

Wy lost his coin less than 12 hours after I gave it to him. When he realized he had lost it, he freaked out about not being protected. Thankfully, I had more silver dollars and gave him another. He kept up with this one for awhile and it helped, some. The only problem was when he had to leave the house. A few days later I got the sad report that he had an accident at a friend's house because he was scared to use their bathroom.

Then I had the Elder Boy. Our deep thinker. He didn't believe the coin would work. Thought that it wasn't real.

"Dude,"I said, clearly flustered. "Bloody Mary isn't real. But you are freaked out about it? Why can't you believe this coin can protect you from your bad thoughts?!?!"

And this Dear Reader, was our life, for weeks.

As they say, time heals all wounds, including the grievous mistakes of a dumbass dad. Eventually the Boy(s) forgot about Bloody Mary. Occasionally it would pop up in a funny way. Like the time I was explaining what a Chelada was to a friend and compared the taste to a spicy Bloody Mary.

"Bloody Mary!?!?!" They both said, wide-eyed.

"Not that Bloody Mary." I said to the Boy(s).

The friend gave me a curious look.

"Long story," I said.

So, even though I feel it is a sham of a holiday, let me say, Happy Father's Day to me. I'm sure the Boy(s) and My Lovely Bride got me some small gift. The thing is, they didn't need to get me a thing. My gift today is that the Boy(s) are no longer afraid to shit in our main bathroom. They'll even go it alone. Sans talisman, which are long gone, lost in the detritus of their rooms.

And My Lovely Bride's gift, I'm ashamed to admit, is the best. A few weeks ago, she screwed up, in what will probably be her Mother of the Year moment of 2009. And this mistake has given us a new irrational fear to deal with. A fear that has eclipsed the Bloody Mary incident of 2008.

Until I BLOG again...Just a thousand reflections of my own sweet self, self, self...