How bad am I at small talk? Let me tell you about vaginal dryness … | Polly Hudson
TThe importance of December 31 is well documented, but no one ever talks about the anxiety of July 22. Or 23, or 25, depending on where you live. But although the date can vary, the soft-lovers are surely universal. The end of the school year is a strangely deep moment.
This one also strikes in our house, because our son is about to finish primary school. It’s poignant and nostalgic – was he not just a baby yesterday? However, there is part of his comfortable little school that I will not miss.
Children tend to return home by secondary school, so my pick -up days will end and – Hallelujah! – My spectacularly failed experiences will fail to speak with a small conversation with other parents while we expect, my cheeks burning with shame. The school should set up a plaque in memory of all the occasions when I died inside.
Over the seven years, my child is there, I had very good friends. But let’s be honest, especially I got to know the people with the people with whom the only common ground is that our children are the same year. Without the fact that we all had sex at a similar moment 11 years ago, our paths would never have crossed. Although I have been delighted that it came to my mind, because if I got it earlier, there is a good chance that I would have announced it in the first conversational lull at the gates of the school.
The collection is the same every day. Even if you are desperately trying not to take the attention of whoever
You greet yourself with “Hello” and “How are you?”. From time to time, the gods smile at you and it will flow with rain, or snow, or a little hotter or colder than usual for the time of the year, you could therefore draw 30 seconds. But then there will be a break. And I guarantee you that I will fill it. Apparently, it takes four seconds for a silence to become uncomfortable, which does not ring long, but if you count aloud, it is an age for two people to stand together without saying anything. I panic after less than two seconds.
It is as if all the information I have ever consumed was deposited in my brain in an imposing battery, with the most recent on the top and the easiest to reach. There is a gap in the cat, so I panic and I go out everything that is closest. I congratulated someone for her pregnancy who just turned out to wear overalls as a fashion choice. Another time, I supported myself so closely in a corner of “joke” serial killer – “I’m not sure … although that’s what a serial killer would say” – that the other part seems to be actively afraid of me now. And once, because I had watched a documentary Davina McCall on menopause the previous night, I spoke of severe vaginal drought, in order to end a silence with a virtual unknown and do things less clumsy. To say “vaginal” to someone you barely know in broad daylight, Stone Cold Sober is a big decision. Maybe there are other words that would be worse to follow him than “drought”, but I can’t think of much.
Do not confuse my Modus Operandi not to have a filter, which seems daring and intentional. It is accidental and anxious, a horrible knee reaction. It seems uncontrollable.
Sometimes, when I replay these embarrassing moments again and again in my head during the existential crisis of that white night, I realize that I remembered without any doubt than it was. Not here. The woman I said to the vaginal dryness would seem to want the playground to open and swallow it. She probably avoids me to date, but it’s hard to say because I am too busy avoiding it. Imagine how excruciating it will be that we are talking about. Imagine what I could say next.
Well, when a door closes, another opens – pay attention to high school parents, I come for you! (Not in a series in series, honest.)
Polly Hudson is an independent writer
