Never go to Costco with a Scrooge

By Juli

Em is a bit (cough, cough) younger than I. We grew up during vastly different parental development periods. I had to break our mother and father in, suffering the strange mix of behavior that came from clinging to 1950s standards, enjoying too much '60s, while confronting 1970s parenting and poverty. Conflicted parenting. Paradoxical upbringing. You get it.

I always thought I had it much worse off than Em, but I’m learning that while our parents emotions and behaviors mellowed like a fine boxed wine over the years, other things stepped in on cue to fuck her up just as bad.

Take the house plumbing for instance. Heck. Let’s start with the whole house. I have no doubt in my mind the place is the epicenter of lead, asbestos, and God knows what else. I just hope I spent enough nights sneaking out to parties to tip the scales in my favor, avoid mesothelioma or some such other horror.

What I never had to contend with (thank you, small favors) was the deep seeding plumbing issues that have permanently scarred her. Dinner prep and clean up time you’ll find her circling around my kitchen, cawing warnings of what may and may not go in the garbage disposal.

(I’ve recently read that garbage disposals are incredibly un-green. That I will go to enviro-hell if I continue to use mine. To that I say, it is on my LIST to start composting, and that I mitigate my sin by running the water only as much as is absolutely necessary. So don’t you dare preach to me.)

Anyway. She’s flapping and making bird noises. THREATENING to call my father and tell him I’m putting spaghetti down the drain. LECTURING me about the plumbing bills she sees as she peers into the crystal ball of my home repair future. No rinds, no pineapple parts (I caught my husband trying to put the top of a pineapple down once, BTW. Em would have had a heart attack.). . .no coffee grounds, no this, no that. What in the world was it made to dispose of then? Please tell me. I’ve searched the manual, save my understanding that one shouldn’t pour grease down the drain, I think this is the stuff of urban legend. Next she’ll be hanging garlic on my windows and sprinkling holy water on my sheets.

Hellloooo, appliances have evolved. Em, disposals have advanced since mom and dad’s prototype model from the ‘20s. And, while I’m at it, I’d like to tell my husband that we in 2009 no longer have to scrub our dishes clean before we put them in the dishwasher. And, I don’t care what his mother used to do, why does he think it’s helpful to open the oven after we done using it? To air it out? To let the heat out? Huh? With two young kids, that’s called a trip to the burn center, not good maintenance for the oven.

I think I might be ranting. And digressing.

The problem is, Em has brought me into the web of her twisted plumbing upbringing. . . .long term. A couple of trips for paper products ago, she bitched and complained enough that wiping her butt at my house made her feel like she was using a down comforter, so I switched to the store brand. It was fine. A little rustic, but it did feel somewhat less creepy than that super soft stuff. I felt a little guilty flushing that. Like maybe I should be making bedspreads with it instead.

But the LAST time we went, she pulled out the big guns. THIS stuff over here is what we buy in Michigan (like Michigan residents set the gold standard for toilet paper selection. . .actually, now that I think about it, they just might. . .). Seeeeee, it’s totally septic system safe. Breaks down RIGHT away. Blah, blah, blah. I gave in. I was weak from chasing down the kids chanting “Don’t touch that. Don’t run. Don’t hit. Don’t yell” for an hour.

WEEKS (maybe months?) later, it seems we’ve made hardly a dent in this bulk buy of toilet paper from hell. Single ply. SHEER. And, apparently, with regenerative properties, like a lizard or something. You cut off one roll from the herd, it grows another while you’re sleeping, or trying to scrub the crap off your three-year-old's hands. You have to use about fifty times more of the stuff than anyone who has ever loved a tree could feel right about, but the stuff actually seems to have water repellent properties too. There’s no way around wrapping your whole arm in it before you go back for the deed.

I’ve been up at night trying to figure out other uses for it, but I’ve come up with nothing. Anything, anything to get it GONE and move back to that luxurious Kirkland stuff (yes, the kind you can see the little splinters in). So I can start tending to the callous on my ass, stop running to double check the kids “work” in the potty. God, save us!

Em’s going to find me half crazed, wound up in institutional TP, stuffing whole rolls of the stuff down the commode. See Em, you can take things too far. It’s called the law of diminishing returns. And you have so broken it.