Last week, I clogged the upstairs toilet. I threw a bunch of dirty wipes in the can after cleaning Clara's bottom with them. My experience up until then had been that our plumbing system could handle the wipes. I guess maybe not twenty at a time, though.
I thought the problem resolved itself, but the next morning, as Clara and I were brushing our teeth, she casually reached over and hit the flusher. The toilet threatened to overflow but, mercifully, didn't.
"Let's finish brushing our teeth in the basement bathroom," I told Clara, shutting the toilet lid. The giant cat sticker Clara stuck to the toilet lid last Halloween has developed large cracks across the face and body, making it look even creepier than usual. I shuddered. I was not having one of my sterling days. I was feeling inexplicably exhausted--even more than pregnancy exhausted ( I later learned I was coming down with a killer cold and flu virus). The pregnancy queasies had also perched on my stomach, perhaps goaded by the sight of the backed-up toilet's contents.
Downstairs I mindlessly scrubbed my teeth, staring into the mirror over the sink. My jowls were coming back, I noted, though they seemed to hang a little lower than they did when I was pregnant with Clara. I'd slept on my hair wrong again and the back of it had taken on almost architectural dimensions. It looked like a hair version of the Sydney Opera House.
Clara was ominously silent beside me. I glanced down and around, and found her cheerfully stirring the downstairs toilet water with her Dora the Explorer toothbrush.
"Hey!" I yelled. "That is yucky! Yucky! Yucky! Yucky! We put our poop and pee in there!"
I snatched the toothbrush from her hand and tossed it in the waste-basket, wondering uneasily if it was the first time she'd done that. And if she'd only done it with her toothbrush.
"That's MY toothbrush!" she shouted, scowling deeply at me.
"No. We'll get you a new one. That one has germies all over it now."
"I want my toothbrush!" she yelled, and then she began flushing the downstairs toilet, over and over.
"Honey, please. Do not flush the toilet unless you've put your pee or poop in there, remember? It gives the toilet an ouchie when you do that. And we also use too much water."
After we'd brushed our teeth, I felt determined to fix the upstairs toilet. Clara and I marched up there, plunger in hand. I began vigorously plunging, visualizing Laura Ingalls Wilder churning butter. After a long time, it began to seem like I was gaining some traction. Big bubbles and belches were coming from deep within the bowels of the toilet's plumbing. Alas, Clara chose that moment to reach over and press the flusher. Immediately, what seemed like five days of my family's combined bodily effluence rose to the toilet's rim and streamed over, flooding the bathroom floor and threatening to flow into the hallway.
At that moment, a good parent would have chuckled ruefully and said, "O-kay. Time to call a plumber," and left the bathroom with the child for the park or an indoor carnival somewhere.
But I was suddenly galvanized by intense, pregnancy-grade fury. I picked Clara up and put her down with a loud thunk outside the bathroom door.
"DO NOT MOVE!" I said.
"MOMMY! I want to come in the bathroom!"
"NO!" I roared, plunging furiously. The filthy water sloshed all over my shoes and the bottoms of my pants. If Genghis Khan had been a plumber, he would have looked like me at that moment: wild-eyed, wild-haired, a prurient odor lurking as he purged toilets of their clogs all over the outer Mongolian rim.
Finally, panting, I gave up and stripped off my pants and shoes and socks, leaving them in the bathroom. Not wanting Clara to see me in full meltdown mode, I rushed past her and into my bedroom. Then my hormones really kicked into high gear. In order not to howl, I put my fist in my mouth while tears squirted out the sides of my eyes like geysers. I remembered seeing a mental patient in a movie biting her fist. I wondered what it might look like if I actually lost my mind. But instead of seeing myself in a straight-jacket or a mental ward, I for some reason pictured myself as a giant piece of three-layer chocolate cake with fudge frosting. Confusingly, my mouth began to water.
Clara, meanwhile, had followed me into the bedroom and was howling at my feet. Tears streamed down her firm pink cheeks.
"I want to go into the bathroom with Mama! I want to flush the toilet!"
Her cries were exquisitely-pitched, vibrating at the exact frequency of the throes of my last frayed nerve. My right eye began to twitch. I ran out of the room and down to the basement playroom, grabbing my phone on the way. Clara followed, whacking the wall with the flat of her hand every time she stepped down a stair and yelling at the top of her voice:
"WAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!"
"There. Is. S*#%. And. P*#$. All. Over. The. Bathroom. Floor," I said when Simon picked up his phone.
Simon, usually glacially calm and unflappable, cleared his throat nervously. I could hear the thunk of him running into his cubicle furniture and rustling papers as he frantically made his way to an empty conference room, where the cacophonous sounds of me hysterically crying and Clara screaming over the phone wouldn't alarm his work neighbors.
"I'm coming home," he said.
"No! Do. Not. Come. Home. I can handle it," I hiccoughed, and hung up on him.
Both the great and the horrible thing about pregnancy hormones is they change at the drop of a hat. A few minutes after I hung up with Simon, I began to feel remarkably better. I went ahead and let myself cry for a while, and Clara joined in, luxuriantly testing the range of her pitch and depth of her sobs. Then I wiped both our noses and gave her a kiss.
Then I called a plumber.
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