What do bouncy houses and bladder control have in common?

Juliane Bergmann
6 min readJul 18, 2023

I wished for both on my 41st birthday

A Rainbow bouncy castle for my birthday

“Hey guys, we got a bouncy house in the backyard today. Feel free to use it anytime this afternoon.”

I’d walked across the street where my neighbor was hanging out in the front yard with her two little boys. She asked why we had a bouncy house. “I got it for my birthday,” I responded. The younger boy looked confused: “How old even ARE you???”

“41.”

Little dude looked at me like:

Fifteen minutes later I look out the window and see them bouncing off the walls inside the castle.

Nobody can resist the bouncy house.

You have to crawl into this thing through the tiny orange flaps, flashing everyone on the way in and out.

It was my first birthday in decades that I had a party. I didn’t before because I thought, well, nobody is going to come to a party on a Monday night. It’s dumb to have a party as an adult. I don’t really drink, so what else do grown-ups do at parties? I don’t have any real friends and nobody

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Juliane Bergmann
Juliane Bergmann

Written by Juliane Bergmann

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