At 12:45 this morning I was woken up by the whispering voice of my seven year old daughter telling my husband on the other side of the bed, that "there is water on the bathroom floor Daddy." My husband, Bill, who hasn't had more than six hours of sleep in one night for the past three days, sleepily replies, "I'll clean it up in the morning honey, go back to bed." I hear her shuffle off down the hall. I was barely awake myself and completely satisfied with the morning cleanup plan as I too have been sleep deprived for the last few days. I went right back to sleep only to hear her return a few seconds later, but this time her voice is bordering on a cry, "No Daddy, I think we have to clean it up now, it is all over the floor!" Both of us are on our feet and down the hall to find water flowing out of the bathroom into the hallway. The toilet is over flowing and water is pouring over the sides of the tank! Bill shuts the water off and we start throwing towels everywhere. He informs me that the toilet was not working last night and that he took the back lid off and sat it over the toilet so no one would use it. I quickly see the "crime" play out in my head. My daughter must have woken up to use the bathroom and seeing the porcelain top on the toilet seat did not communicate to her "broken toilet, use the downstairs bathroom" to her seven year old brain. No, she just saw the obstacle and moved it, simple, problem solved. Then flushed the toilet after using it just like her parent's taught her put the porcelain lid back where she found it, turned off the light, and went back to bed. Probably she was in bed for a minute or more until the sound of the toilet went from the normal filling of the tank to it overflowing. I can see her little quizzical face in bed knowing that that sound is not normal nor good and that she is probably responsible. I remember that feeling so well as a kid, knowing that you have to tell your parents what is happening but also knowing that you could be in big trouble. In a child's world this is as stressful as it gets.
Back in the present, I look around to find our daughter to ask her what had happened but she had left the scene. I find her in her bed with her covers pulled over her head crying. I sat down next to her and asked her what had happened. "I didn't do it, she replied." I said "It's okay, we're not mad at you." Then the tears come and the story is told just as imagined. The two of us go down stairs to get a glass of water while Bill finishes mopping up the mess in the bathroom. Now the upstairs bathroom sits directly over the kitchen and downstairs bathroom, and what we find in the kitchen as we round the corner, is about what you would expect. The water is coming down through a vent over the stove, into two cupboards where I keep my cookbooks, down the wall and onto the stove and then over the side onto the floor. I can also hear it dripping inside the wall of the second bathroom and the clicking noise of wires shorting out. My daughter starts to cry again and just sits down on the dining room floor. I start trying to rescue my cookbooks and give her the job of wiping them off with a hand towel as I move them one by one. Now this is the kind of scene that would normally push me to the point of freaking out. I am usually fine with a catastrophe as long as none of "my things" get ruined. Somehow though I am able to keep the freak out inside my head this time and not let my daughter hear me yelling, "Not the Dean and Deluca cookbook, we got that as a wedding present" or "that was my Great-Grandmother's Practical Recipes For the Housewife that her mother had given her as a wedding present. Oh f*#k." I'm really trying to work on not getting angry so often.
It took about 45 minutes to get everything dried off and one load of towels started before we got our glass of water and made it back upstairs. Our daughter clung to me as she confided how scared she was to come and tell us and that it was "really hard to tell the truth." To which I said, "I know, it can be really hard to tell the truth but I'm glad you did and I'm proud of you and I love you." As I said this to her, I realized what I was saying was what all of us need to hear and feel when we are scared and feel ashamed, just to feel loved and forgiven and as quickly as possible. Even with the honest mistakes we make we punish ourselves so much and it . I always struggle in parenting with whether or not I have properly addressed my children's bad behavior or explained their mistakes ad nauseum, hoping that this will somehow insure that they will not be repeated. Often times this is delivered not in a loving way but with an angry voice because my children can be infuriating and ruin my things, and I like "my things." I get mad and forget and put "my things" ahead of their feelings and I don't like when I do this. In the end, Dean and Deluca and my Great-Grandmother's Practical Recipes for Housewives will live to see another day and for today, I have managed to clean up the mess and keep my child's feeling intact.
