The Moment My Front Window Became a Full-HD Jumbotron for My Penis

I didn’t expect to end my Tuesday with my pants around my ankles, my kids laughing like it was open-mic night and my wedding tackle shining proudly in the front window for anyone walking a dog after dusk. I figured I was just coming home from work, grabbing the boys, helping a neighbor string up some Christmas lights, wolfing down Chick-fil-A and, at long last, getting a quiet minute to myself. But it turned out that the quiet minute was really just my body announcing, in no uncertain terms, that I absolutely had to poop.

I’d barely gotten my body into that precarious equilibrium where your intestines unclench, your breathing evens out and the whole lower half of you starts negotiating the terms of release. The kind of moment where your muscles finally say, all right, we’re doing this. That’s when someone slammed on the bathroom door hard enough to shake the drywall. I snapped upright and yelled the standard dad line, stretched across a full octave: “WWWWHHHAAAAAATTTT?”

From the other side: “Dad, my little brother is at the top of the ladder and I can’t reach him!”

There was a beat where nothing in my head connected. Then a picture snapped into place. Earlier, the cleaning lady asked for a ladder to reach the ceiling fans. The little step stool from the pantry was missing, so I dragged in the six-foot ladder from the garage. When she was done, she folded it and leaned it against the dining room wall. I remember looking at it and thinking, oh wow, that could be dangerous. Which, of course, it now had become.

I shot upward on instinct. I figured I’d have a chance to come back in a minute, finish the job, wipe, regain some dignity, all that. So I didn’t bother pulling my pants up. I believed this would be a quick rescue and return, but nothing is quick when your pants are cinched around your ankles.

So I lurched into the hallway in that awkward half-run, half-stumble you only see in panicked parents and people trying not to trip while holding in bodily functions. My older three kids saw me burst out of the bathroom and immediately fell apart laughing. They were pointing, shouting, “Dad, we can see your penis,” as if they had unlocked a joke so powerful it short-circuited their sense of decorum. Peak entertainment.

I shuffled past them, focused entirely on not letting the toddler fall, and only when I stopped did I register where I’d landed. I was standing right in front of the giant front window. The automatic curtains were wide open. They’ve been open a lot recently, because our four-year-old Rottweiler has figured out how to open them when we’re at work so he can sunbathe and bark at cars.

And so, that means my neighborhood got the full, unedited view. Me, socks on, pants at my ankles, everything else bouncing in the reflection while I braced myself to catch a kid who thought climbing a folded ladder was a good idea. A whole evening of parental heroism (or failure if you consider that I should have put the ladder away hours earlier) framed perfectly in the front window, broadcast for anyone out walking a dog, and probably the lady who asked for help handing Christmas lights.

I’m sure there’s a chestnuts joke in here somewhere…