I vaguely remember this, but apparently right before the world ended on New Year’s Eve I pulled out my laptop and started to write an update. I managed a full paragraph and a whole page of bullet points, which I will now attempt to flesh out into an actual recap of what happened that evening. Ironically, I had entitled the update as “not that high”, with a subtitle of “How I started 2012 being date raped by a 4-year-old” – as it turns out, only one of those was true.

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It was quarter to 2am after the New Year officially began, and the small child should have been in bed. It was a special occasion, though, so everyone ignored the loud and aggressive child – because it was New Year’s Day, or because everyone felt sorry for the kid who had spent the last 75 minutes wailing for his mother who couldn’t be retrieved because she was busy having bathroom sex. Whatever the reason, the small child was left to his own devices in a room full of drunken adults at the end of a long evening. No one watched him, and more importantly, no one watched the table full of delicious and highly potent chocolate truffles.

After the small child ate his fill of 2am chocolate, he descended upon the remaining horns on the ground, leftover from our rowdy countdown into the new year. Blowing the horns as loud as possible became a hilarious new game, one that was not appreciated by all due to the babies who had FINALLY gone to sleep. Ali confiscated the horns, but they were everywhere – so she handed them to me so I could basically lay on them and keep them out of reach of the small child. I was on my stomach with my spinning head in my arms, so I gathered all the noisemakers unto my bountiful bosom and resumed my pre-bedtime dozing.

Small child was having none of this, though.

He wanted those horns, and he wanted them now. He forced his way between my arms, blindly grasping and scratching to find the horns hidden under my boobs. I tried to tell him NO, but he was way too hyper to listen – over and over again he shoved his small sticky hands with sharp evil baby nails right into my cleavage and groped around for treasure. On one hand, I was aware that my breasts were receiving more action from a neglected 4-year-old than they’d seen at all in the last quarter of 2011 – but on the other hand, this was painful and highly inappropriate in ways I was not comfortable with. When I firmly clamped my arms down in an attempt to keep him out of my tits, he began tugging on my head with a finger in my eye socket and yanking on my clothes. I’d raise my head to get his fingers out of my eye, and he’d dive right back into my boobs to dig around some more.

Shan tried valiantly to help me, but she had no authority over the small child and he knew it. He ignored her completely, along with my pleas then demands that he stop right now. I did manage to tweet for help, which almost cost me an eye and didn’t actually help at all – the small child was pointy, hyper, out of control, and hurting me quite a lot. I finally gave up and threw all the horns out from under my chest in an attempt to get him to leave me alone, but it was too late – the game had gone from “get the horns” to “beat up this person”, and it was ALL BAD.

To make matters worse, the small child’s mother was ten feet away while all this was going on. She was in no shape to deal with her son, though – she was rocking her youngest back and forth; looking wistfully off into the distance and oblivious to the chaos happening around her. I later learned that she wasn’t just rocking but attempting to feed the baby, which made me Clue into Lactation and the horrible realization of what just happened – but I’ll let you figure that out for yourself; the dawning horror is not something I want to deprive you of.

I witnessed a really interesting dynamic that evening; one I had to sloppily write down in my phone so I could remember to puzzle over it later. While the woman mentioned above was off having (much needed, from what I heard) bathroom sex, two of her friends were extremely busy distracting her two children and (unsuccessfully) trying to keep them from freaking the fuck out over their missing mother. I heard the terrified wails of the children and watched the frantic back and forth “maybe she’s downstairs! let’s go check” action, and thought some deep track suit thoughts to myself about friendship. I had written down:

I want to be happy to distract your kids so you can get laid in the bathroom at a house party, not angry because you’re being selfish – work on that.

I was questioning my own ability to be a friend, and wondering if I was a terrible friend because my first instinct is to not be happy you’re having sex and to do whatever I can to help, but to be annoyed because your kids are FREAKING OUT and I have to deal with it. I wondered if this was a motherhood thing, and had to do with precious minutes of “you” time to blow off steam/some guy you met that night – if I was a mother, would I “get” that this was really, really needed and therefore be happy to run interference? Is it my selfish hipster lifestyle that keeps me from understanding the layer beneath “lol, bathroom porking” and displaying the compassion required? I didn’t get it then with cookies, and I don’t get it now without. I did run the scenario by others, all of whom immediately agreed with my own raised eyebrow and disdain at the situation – but they’re all childless as well, both by choice and because the babies aren’t here yet.

There are a whole lot of other factors that I don’t know, of course, but it’s still an interesting thing to think about. I don’t necessarily think I am a bad friend, but maybe there could be room for a little more compassion from my camp instead of scorn and ire.

Also, even if there is a 30-year age difference, NO MEANS NO. Date rape by small child left me with scratches all over my chest and renewed my fear in every small person who wasn’t made by Doug and Ali.

NO MEANS NO