Flushing It Out... The Early Years

I received my first swirly (noun: The process of sticking someones head in the toilet and flushing) at the ripe age of 10 months.  It didn't take much to entertain or amuse me as a child and that still stands true today.  I use to beat the heat of the brutal Eastern Pennsylvania summers by killing time in the only air conditioned room of our humble abode - the bathroom. Looking back, I suppose my father's placement of the only AC window unit was rather strategic on his part, considering he spent the majority of his spare time in that room.  Nonetheless, so did I because I had a wild fascination with watching the water in the toilet spiral away to what I could only assume was the world's best water park for all of my dead goldfish. Flush. Watch. Clap. Repeat. Flush. Watch. Clap. Repeat.  This was how my afternoons were spent because my mother couldn't close the door to the only room that circulated the stagnant air in our house.

I suppose I should have realized back then that if this was what I looked forward to each day - mediocrity was something I would excel at. Alas, flushing, watching, clapping and honey dipping from time to time, were the highlights of my day.  That was until I ended up face first in a flushing, courtesy of my helpful older sister. She was so adamant in helping me obtain a closer look that she just flipped me right over the rim into the bowl, face first.  My eldest sister, the mother hen that she always was, informed my mother that I was, yet again, playing in the commode.  My mother had heard that her youngest daughter was reportedly playing in the toilet more times on a daily basis than any good mother would like to admit.  Therefore, when my eldest sister performed her sisterly due diligence in reporting my every move to my mother, she didn't exactly jump up to stop me.  To this day, I don't think I made it into the accelerated program in grade school nor did I learn to swim until I was 11 years old due to this childhood traumatizing event. By the time my mother realized that I was not merely playing in the toilet but was submerged, head first, in the damn bowl with water whirling around my head, I'd like to say that my lips were blue and she had to do a few rounds of baby CPR; but all she really had to do was pull my water logged head from the bowl (I also attribute my larger than average head size to this incident). I guess it was after this event that I was no longer allowed in the bathroom unsupervised (later in life, this rule would still apply due to inheriting epilepsy). Which I also attribute to my inability to have a regular BM (which from here on out will be referred to as corn, corning, etc.).  I mean, who wants to corn with the door wide open or even worse, with someone watching?  I mean, I'm sure that there is some creep on a Craigslist personal add right now looking for that exact person - the one who is aroused by watching someone else corn, but that kind of freakishness is just not for me.

I'm pretty sure the reason I learned to talk and walk so early was not, much to my dismay, due to me being some kind of child prodigy, but rather a true testament to the law of Survival of the Fittest.  In order to still be standing here today, I had to learn to protect myself from the elements that surrounded me - helpful sisters, toilets, a father who forgot me at daycare (twice). Since that swirly, my survival instincts perked up and I quickly learned that in this life I was going to need all the skills that MacGyver had in his tool box and more.  Unfortunately, my tool box didn't include common sense.  I guarantee that I was the most gullible child you'd ever meet.  Couple that gullible characteristic with my open and unharnessed willingness to trust just about anyone and I was doomed from the start. By the time I was just about to start grade school, I had been hung up in the closet with the lights turned out and told that if I let go of the bar, I'd plummet to my death, coaxed into the back of the linen closet once all the linens were removed, the linens were then replaced and the door closed (again left for dead), led to believe that one of my favorite uncles had hijacked the Easter Bunny and may or may not have killed him so that none of my friends would be getting delicious candy and would all blame me (which resulted in the first ever child under 5 years of age panic attack) and that my real name was Delphine Courtney (courtesy of my eldest sisters childhood best friend and our next door neighbor). 

The only thing that my tool box did include was an awkward amount of height (I blame this, too, on ingesting too much toilet water because both of my sisters are of normal height), the ability to eat an inhuman amount of food and a really sharp set of incisors. By the time I was 5, I was already as tall as my older sister.  This would also make for many years of pain and suffrage, that will be discussed in detail later. Regardless, I was a giant kid that had developed a trust complex by the age of 5. Oh, did I also mention that my grandpa's nickname for me was "Chubby Chunker"? Well, it was. I think sometimes my family would just let him feed me ridiculous things just to laugh while I devoured them. What child sits on their grandpa's knee while enjoying a jar of pickled herring heads? This girl. I was like a human garbage disposal. Beyond that, I was a closet eater. One time, I snuck to the basement in the middle of the night and ate an entire 2 pounds of imitation crab legs... raw. In retrospect, I guess it was a good thing that I was tall as a child as opposed to the alternative of resembling a child sumo wrestler. As a child, my best defense was my teeth. Anyone that got too close for comfort or was questionable in my mind was bit. The neighbor that coined my childhood nickname, my sisters, my dad... anyone. At first, I guess my parents thought it was funny or cute.  However, after I sank my teeth into my dad's ankle like a starving vampire at a fresh feed, it wasn't cute anymore. In fact, it was so not cute that my father swept me up off the floor, marched downstairs with me in tote, laid me out on his work table, opened my tiny, blood covered mouth and put a pair of bottle nose plyers on my incisor and threatened to pull each one if I ever bit again.

(*Please note all of the following: My height in comparison to my sister that is 19 months (to the day) older than me, the girth of that dress and the food stain on that dress. That is all.)

Needless to say, that is just a glimpse of my early years. You really need the background to understand the forefront. My five year old self was just the beginning of everything that would essentially be flushed....