Last night while waiting in the check-out line at Walmart, I farted, completely against my will. I wasn't actively trying to stop it because, to be completely honest, I didn't know it was coming. It just hapened. If you have ever been, lived with, or spent a great deal of time with a pregnant lady, this will not completely shock you. If you think pregnancy is all glowing complexion and the beauty of new life, I'm sorry to have to break it to you, but there are stinky parts too.
Pregnant or not, if you happen to accidentally fart around people, it's embarrassing. The times that this has happened to me, I play dumb. I act like nothing happened and hope I'm the only one who hear/smelled anything. Sometimes I might be right, other times people might just be polite enough to ignore it and vacate the area. Very few times will people actually call you out on this in public situations. Last night when this happened to me, there wasn't a noise to worry about, and there wasn't a room-clearing stink, but let's just said my fart added a certain aroma to the area around me. I was the last one in line, so I only had to worry about the people directly in front of me, which happened to be a mom and her son. He was about 6 years old and they were sort of joking around and talking about this and that. A few moments after I noticed the smell, the mom leaned over and whispered something to her son. Kids at that age don't always understand that when you whisper something too them, it's because you don't want the people around you to know what you're talking about, so instead of whispering anything back, he replied to whatever she said with "It wasn't me!" The mom motioned for the boy to keep his voice down, then whispered something again, to which the boy replied in the same volume, "Mom, I didn't do it!!" At this point, I could no longer pretend my tootling had gone unnoticed, but I certainly wasn't going to fess up either when I had a perfectly good scapegoat standing right there! This was the end of the mom's conversation with the boy over the topic, so I just minded my own business and pretended nothing happened.
I was telling this story to my mom later that night and we agreed that there is a definite pecking order when it comes to blame for farting. As far as I'm concerned, if a stink is discovered in the room, and someone makes mention of it, the order of blame goes as such: dogs -> young boys -> grown men -> old people -> women. I'm not saying this is the most likely order for finding out who the actual offender is, I'm just saying this is the order in which blame should be assigned. If you were to chart this progression of blame, I'm not sure where pregnant women fall, but I am pretty sure that if you were plotting actual guilt, we're probably pretty close to the top.
2 comments:
I think pregnant women are near the very bottom of the list when assigning blame. If I was in an elevator with a pregnant woman and she tooted, I would probably just assume I did it.
Sometimes I feel sorry for little boys. They are so easy to blame for small mischiefs, like farting, even when they're innocent. I think this makes them very mistrustful of other people, especially adults. Like one time at the supermarket I saw a boy and his mother pushing an empty shopping cart. They were about to go into the restrooms together when the boy asked, "But mom, who's going to watch the cart?" The mom said, "No one is interested in our empty cart. Just go to the bathroom." The boy gave the cart one last wistful look before heading in. If I wanted to, I could have undermined all of the authority that mom had built up by simply navigating the cart through a few random turns and abandoning it in some out of the way place. She's very lucky I didn't, because I was a little boy once.
I had never thought about the blame placed on little boys and what that must do to their trust level. Do you feel like boys are more likely to be guilty of these little things, or do you think they're just playing to the expectation that they be trouble makers who like to play in dirt?
I think how likely someone is to blame the pregnant lady is related to how well they know the lady and whether they've been around a lot of pregnant women before. Speaking from personal experience, if my husband and I were in a crowded elevator (perhaps populated by a little boy, a old lady, and a blind man with a seeing eye dog) and it became obvious that someone had farted, Daniel's not going try to blame me then and there in front of everyone, but he would probably suspect me first and ask to verify his suspicions when we were out of ear shot.
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