Confessions of a Former Cry Baby!

The most embarrassing thing about me is my behavior growing up. As my kids have gotten older I've come to the realization that I was an enormous baby. Maybe I thought all kids were like me or something but it has only been in the last few years that I came to realize what a suck I truly was.

Let's start with my sleeping habits.

Let's see, I wet the bed until I was in Junior High School. I don't mean I peed the bed every now and then. I did it every single night. My Mom used to say I had a small bladder or it was because of some allergy or any number of things that would make me feel better about it, but I'm pretty sure that at least 50% of the time I woke up having to pee and just did it in the bed anyway. I don't know if I was too scared to get up or too lazy but I can clearly remember waking up and actually moving over to one side of the bed, pissing myself and then moving over to the other side and going back to sleep. My kids all stopped peeing the bed well before they turned 4. The worst part is that half of the time after getting out of the old piss sack in the morning I didn't have a shower before going to school. ICK!

Not only was I pissing myself, I also went to sleep with the light on every night. Not a night light. I'm talking about the main light in the ceiling. I don't know when this started but it went on until at least grade 7. My Mom would turn the light off when she went to bed but every single night I had that light on until I was asleep.

In addition to this I also spent many years sleeping with my head under the covers with just a small hole exposed in the blankets to breathe through. That way if some monster or murderer came in they wouldn't see me. What a baby!

How about scary movies?

Movies that freaked me out so bad that I went to bed crying include Raiders of the Lost Ark (the melting faces were too much for me), Twilight Zone - The Movie (That kid with the wishes freaked me out!) and Close Encounters of the Third Kind (I could have sworn that the sound of the trains a few blocks away was really a spaceship coming to take me away). These weren't even scary movies! No wonder my parents wouldn't let me watch The Shining. Sadly one day I did see a few seconds of The Shining at my friends house and it freaked the crap out of me (it was the two girls standing in the hallway). Even in Junior High I didn't have the balls to watch a real horror movie like Friday the 13th.

And then there is the crying.

I used to come unhinged at the drop of a hat. I was a real cry-baby over a lot of very small things. I can remember sitting in the coat closet bawling for a couple of hours one night because I was sick and my parent gave my 'Shmockey Night in Canada' tickets to my cousin. To make things worse I think I was in grade 9 at the time.

There are tons of other examples of this kind of thing but I can't remember any specific ones right now. Fortunately, I have managed to keep most of those memories buried deep in my subconscious because it still embarrasses me to think about them now.