Have you ever caught someone at the wrong place and the wrong time? Well, I live with her.
I’ve been staying back at the house for the past couple weeks since getting out of class. Meaning, I’ve been staying with my mom for the past couple weeks. Meaning, eventually, I’m going to catch her at the wrong place and time.
Now, we’re both good, God-fearing Christians and all, but we were both raised to despise the Christmas season with a passion. Mom doesn’t enjoy having to buy presents for every Tom, Dick, and Harry in her extended network of friends, family, co-workers, and the guy who occasionally mows our lawn (he’s built up an immunity to the poison ivy in our yard). And I’m just not wild about Santa Claus and decorating in general (having built up an immunity to the Christmas spirit the moment I met Santa Claus—if that is his real name). Neither of us enjoys the icy roads, or the cold weather, or the shuttling between ten different Christmas parties in these icy roads or that cold weather.
I’m assuming this is about the busy holidays we’ve had. Either that, or the fact that both of our cars have basically broken down. Or it’s just her time of the month—she had been complaining about cramps. I don’t really know what this is about, I can only guess at why she snapped. One thing my ex-girlfriend probably learned in a hurry is that I skipped those classes in Empathy and Charisma, so as you can imagine, it’s easy for me to miss these nuances in the heat of the moment.
It started when I went to the bathroom. I had gone to Country Kitchen my last meal, as we always do whenever we ring in the new year, or Christmas, or any non-denominational holiday, or whenever we’re really happy, or really sad, or really hungry, or really thirsty, or whenever it’s a nice day, and occasionally when it’s a dark and stormy night, because apparently my extended family makes a hobby out of eating bacon/omelette/chicken/onion/fried/breaded/charbroiled/microwaved sandwiches with people thirty to forty years older than us. So naturally, I made use of toilet paper and baby wipes.
Now, there are three things to understand. First, our toilet isn’t the best. Second, baby wipes aren’t bio-degradable, which I would appreciate our public schools teaching us. Our teachers instruct and test us on material concerning the Inquisition, or Mark Twain, or geometry, or the chemical number for calcium, or calculus, or the principles of socio-economics, but they can’t teach us things we might need to know in our day-to-day lives. (And then we wonder why so many kids drop out.)
Mom says that not flushing certain things down the toilet is “common sense.” But if toilet paper can go down the toilet, then why not hydrated material of similar density? We know to draw the line at things like logs, or bricks, or asparagus, or blocks of cheese. Or toys. (Although a grade school buddy of mine once flushed his sister’s doll down the toilet, not realizing Bikini Barbie might clog it up.) But who thinks of something as miniscule as wipes not being able to flush?
The third thing to consider is that while we have a trash can in the bathroom, stuff like that will stink up the trash can—and ultimately the bathroom—until our friendly neighborhood garbage man comes. So, I weighed my options, seesawing between leaving it in the trash can, or flushing it down the all-consuming black hole and being done with it. Now, I have clogged the toilet before, which is why we make more liberal use of the trash can (or just flush a couple of times in between wipes), but I thought to myself, “What harm could baby wipes possibly do?”
Well, Mom found out when she went in, and then before I know it, I hear, “What the hell did you put in there!!??”
It turns out the all-consuming black hole doesn’t consume all; something as simple as baby wipes can resist its gravitational pull.
Now, I put forth a reasonable argument about the similarities between toilet paper and baby wipes, and how such a misconception concerning the degradability of the latter is inevitable in such circumstances. But when she asked me why “you didn’t use any fucking common sense,” something about her condescension brought out of me a reply along the lines of “I DIDN’T KNOW!!!”
As you can see above, the number of exclamation points are the degrees from my indoor voice. Normally I use my indoor voice, and I especially use it around Mom, which probably caught her off guard. Somehow, though, Mom managed to one-up me, screaming back, “Don’t you yell at me! Don’t you DARE YELL AT ME!!!!!”
Now, neither of us have really yelled at each other, and I always figured our first actual argument would be over something a bit more important than freaking baby wipes. However, her above ultimatum triggered in me a need to make my point to an exhausted, car-less, emotionally-disturbed opposite. Which came out as, “Well, you’re ACTING LIKE IT’S THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD!!!!!!111”
Mom finally decided to make an appeal to logic. Either that, or she was just really, really pissed that “We DON’T HAVE A FUCKING TOILET BECAUSE YOU CLOGGED IT!!!!!!!!!1111111111111111”
And then I remembered, “Oh, right, because we can’t afford a plumber. Because we’re broke. Because our cars both need fixed. And we can’t leave this God forsaken house.”
Needless to say, the whole experience has left a bitter taste in my mouth. She apologized, and I apologized, because we both realized how stupid it was and how we let our tempers get the better of us.
She also made some chicken noodle soup for supper. Naturally, I’m not all that hungry.
*Edit: It does, in fact, say on the box that you're not supposed to flush baby wipes. It says this in very small letters. In the middle of a wall of instructions on the back of the box. So, yeah, easy to miss that.
And yes, apparently, baby wipes have instructions.
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