The Awkward Girl's Guide to the Week | In Which There Is Audience Participation

If there's a hell, it involves enforced rap battles. And so did my week, funnily enough...

Last week, my husband broke his toe at the park.

“But how?” I asked, as he hobbled into the living room, wincing in pain with every step. “How on earth did you manage it?”

“I was doing an obstacle course,” said Terry, as if this should be obvious to me. “With Max and his friends.”

“Max and his friends are five,” I pointed out, a trifle unsympathetically. "How did they build an obstacle course so dangerous that you’ve managed to break your toe on it?”

(He’d also scraped both of his elbows and both of his knees. But that was the least of his problems.)

“It’s not broken,” said Terry, peeling off his sock to reveal a very obviously broken toe. “It’s just really badly hurt. It’ll be fine.”

But it was not fine.

Because it was broken. I was absolutely sure of it.

Nevertheless, Terry insisted all was well with the toe, so I took him at his word, and, the next morning, I showered as usual, then went down to make Max’s breakfast, my wet hair in a towel.

That’s when Terry hobbled downstairs and told me he was going to be unable to take Max to school that morning. You know, on account of the broken toe?

“It’s not broken,” he insisted, almost crying with pain. “It’s just excruciatingly painful, that’s all.”

Terry continued to insist his toe was “absolutely fine” for a further two days. Then, on Saturday morning, he woke up to find that the swelling had finally gone down enough for him to make a full inspection of the foot in question.

“I think my toe’s broken,” he announced, appearing in the kitchen like Banquo’s ghost. “In fact, it almost definitely is.”

And it was.

Who woulda thunk it?

Other than me, and everyone else who’d seen the toe at that point, obviously?

[Totally unrelated photo by Earth on Unsplash]

It’s one of his smaller toes, so unfortunately there’s not much to be done about it other than wait for it to heal: and not to make this all about me (She said, cheerfully making it all about her…), but Terry’s current inability to walk has meant that I’ve basically had to be Terry this week — in parenting terms, at least. Which has been tons o’ fun naturally, because Terry is the “social” parent, who normally does all of the people-facing parenting jobs, while I’m… well, I’m the weird parent, I guess. Who hides at home and doesn’t always recognize her neighbours when she sees them out of context.

(True story: before Max was born, we once received a Christmas card from a neighbour, addressed simply to “Terry and family”. And it was me. I was the “and family”, in that sentence. But because I am a terrible person who had made absolutely no effort to integrate, no one had a clue who I was. I think of that time as “the good old days”…)

But this week I have had to become the social parent (I know, poor me. Why did Terry have to get all the fun, with the broken toe?), which is why, on Tuesday night, I found myself attending a ‘rock concert’ at Max’s school, without the company of the person I usually rely on to act as a buffer for my innate awkwardness, and help make me look somewhat normal.

At some point during this performance, Max had to go to the bathroom, so I snuck out of my seat to accompany him, and that turned out to be the best decision of my entire life, because when I got back to the hall, I discovered that four of the other parents and grandparents had apparently been selected at random to live my worst nightmare.

They were being made to participate in a rap battle.

I kid you not: A FREAKING RAP BATTLE.

With no warning or time to prepare. Just pulled out of the audience and made to perform for what was basically the entire village. (And that’s not just hyperbole, by the way: we live in a tiny village, so something like this is the event of the year. Everyone was there. Well, everyone with working toes, obviously.)

When I say this is my worst nightmare, I am, of course, exaggerating. Anything involving crabs is my actual worst nightmare. (And, okay, death, and war, and homelessness, and all of that much-more-important stuff that is obviously far worse than anything I’ve mentioned above, please take that as read.) But being forced to participate in a public rap battle is a pretty close second, so I spent the rest of the performance in a state of extreme anxiety, terrified that they’d do it again, and this time, the finger of doom would be pointing squarely at me.

That night, I had a nightmare in which I was doing the school run in just my dressing gown, with nothing underneath, and since then I’ve spent a lot of time worrying about what I would have done if I had been selected from the unfortunate audience that night. Because, one thing I know for sure is that I could not have styled out a rap battle, the way the parents on the stage did. I could not have stood up in front of the assembled villagers, plus every single child and teacher in the school and all of my neighbours, and dropped some beats. Or, you know, whatever it is you do in these situations.

(They were given words to read — rap — so it wasn’t technically a REAL rap battle. But still. This is intolerable, people. Intolerable.)

But then, what could I have done to avoid it? If I’d just straight-up refused, I’d have been a po-faced spoil-sport, and Max would have been embarrassed by me. But if I’d got up and given it a try, I’d have literally died… and Max would still have been embarrassed by me.

What I’ve taken from this situation, then, is that, going forward, my child is most likely always going to be embarrassed by me. In light of this, I’ve begun counting down the days until Terry’s toe heals, and he can resume Social Parent duties, and I’ve also updated my list of Things I Will Spend the Rest of My Life Attempting to Avoid at All Costs, which now includes:

• Crabs

• Rap battles

• Role play

• Icebreaker games

• Any kind of “improv” based activity

• Karaoke

• Comedy shows (because of the risk of audience participation)

• Magic shows (see above)

• Panto (Just because I hate it, tbh.)

• Staying in a hostel, or any other kind of accommodation where you have to sleep in dorms and don’t have any privacy.

• Lifts (in case they break down and I end up stuck for hours with an Other Person. Because I just know I’d need to pee at some point during that time spent stuck in the lift, and can you even imagine how horrific it would be to have to pee in front of a stranger, then sit there with the pee still in the lift with you, like a giant puddle of shame? Can you tell I’ve spent quite a lot of time thinking about this situation that has never happened, and probably never will?)

In conclusion: the worst thing about parenting is still all the people you have to talk to, but now it’s ALSO all the rap battles you might find yourself forced to participate in.

And those are words I never expected to have to write.