Cussing Out the School Counselor

The call I didn’t know I was making but regretted immediately.

Typically I am not the kind of person who embarrasses easily. I lay my life out for all the world to read. I’ve written tales from that one time I fell down a ski hill and lived to tell the story to that other time my brother gave me a golden shower.

These stories of life and love and all that is in between do not cause me unease because, at the heart of the thing, I believe it is stories like these that provide a glimpse into the beautiful humanity we all share.

The summer of 2020 was a difficult time for my family. My husband and I had been laid off work; our financial situation was rocky at best, and worst of all, the backyard pool we had purchased for our children was full of tiny holes. With the pandemic still raging, all of the pools in the area were closed, and my children were getting grumpy.

Summer in Southern Alberta is hot AF. Oftentimes with the temperatures reaching into the high 30s (in Celsius, sorry Americans, I have no clue what that is in Fahrenheit).

When you find yourself out of work and feeling financially helpless with your bank account overdrawn hundreds of dollars, the best thing to do is keep busy. I had decided that I would attempt to patch our pool with a roll of $5 pool tape I had found at the dollar store the week before.

This way, I could tell my children that I was doing something to amend their swimming woes and feel a bit more valuable during this downtime I was experiencing.

I started my patchwork job bright and early at 7 AM. It was already stifling hot outside. I kept myself relatively cool by wearing short shorts and a tank top while intermittently whipping myself with a cooled rag I kept soaking in the inch of water I had to keep adding to the pools floor to see if my patch job was working.

Spoiler alert: the dollar store patch tape was crap.

I had stuck my phone in the shorts’ waistband because, of course, this specific piece of womanly garment didn’t have pockets. Each time…

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