Evil Bathroom Strikes Again

Last night I came home from my English class with Educatodos and was putting my backpack in my room when I noticed that I was sloshing through water on the floor. I opened the bathroom door, and someone had taken a massive sh*** and the toilet was overflowing! The water had started to make its way down the corridor towards the family room. I even had poo-water invading my bedroom! Who just leaves a massive bowel movement to flood a house?!

In my “Holy Crap!” moment I forget the word for “flood” and just walked over to my host mom watching t.v. and said, “Bathroom! Water! Everywhere!” And everyone ran over and my host mom does the Honduran, “EEEEEEE,” where you suck in and kind of makes this high-pitched sound that seems as though it should be coming from an animal. My host sister, acting suspiciously guilty (I might add), just kind of walks away, shaking her heard. My host sister-in-law pokes her head out of her room and blames it on her husband and goes back to bed! Then my host mom, angry that someone has degraded her home, just sits down and continues watching t.v. WTF? I’m standing there, in the middle of poo-water, amazed at the fact that the entire family seems content to leave the water where it is!

So, seeing as how everyone else seems to not care that there is poo-water invading the house, I grab a broom and start sweeping. SO FOUL! I mean, it looked clear, but I knew there were poo particles all up in that water.

I think my host mom thinks I was guilty, because I immediately started cleaning up, but really I just had a flashback to the mother vs. child scenarios.

You know that moment as a child, when something really big happens (like poo-water flooding an entire house) and it’s too big to ignore because your mom will ruin your life for “not helping more.” You can’t go and hide in your bedroom, hoping to wade out the storm there, because she’ll find you and you will have hell to pay. You know that, whether you did it or not, if you don’t participate in cleaning up/fixing the situation, your mom is going to go on a RAMPAGE for a very long, undetermined amount of time. So, instead of protecting yourself somewhere, you just quietly start helping, hoping that you get points for helping, but you don’t do anything wrong to draw attention to yourself. As long as she’s still concentrated on the mess, you might be able to get out alive!

So, I recognize the warning signs: seething, stewing mother; nobody taking the blame; children weighing whether or not this is one of those “mayday” moments. Well, the last thing I want to do is encounter one of these all-out-war episodes in a foreign language, in a foreign family. My instincts return to me and I immediately spring into action, grab a broom, and with my head down I start sweeping. If you’re heads down and you’re doing something, maybe she won’t notice you.

Well, my host siblings obviously know Angelica better than I do. There was no real, earth-shaking, mom’s angry episode. Merlin went to her grandmother’s house to sleep and Lorbing ended-up coming home, and like a true Honduran man, left the clean-up to the women and went to bed. I was steaming mad by the end of the ordeal, because I was sweeping up someone else’s poo-toilet-water when I should have been in bed!

Also, when sweeping poo-water, don’t wear your sneakers that you bought because they are mesh so they dry faster. When you wear said sneakers when sweeping, the likelihood of poo-water coming contact with your foot is like … 100%. Every time I felt water splash up on my foot I couldn’t help but dry heave. The great thing about Wat/San, is that in training you get to learn about all the lovely things that happen after coming in contact with human fecal matter. I must have learned a lot, because all those nasty diseases kept flashing through my head. It was like the tunnel in Willy Wonka, where my mind was just racing with the most random, foul pictures related to bowel movements. I’m surprised I didn’t have any nightmares.

After having scrubbed my feet and sanitized my floor, I crawled into bed and started thinking about how I kind of missed mom-wrath. Mind you, my Mom NEVER threw fits like that … I just know from … stories I used to hear from my friends. Right, that…

But seriously, that stupid book excerpt I posted, where you miss the things you least expected, who would’ve thought that I would miss my Mom yelling at me. I mean, not so much yelling, but that awkward dance you do when you’re a kid (or an adult) just trying to avoid bringing down the wrath of your mother. And if you have siblings, sharing that knowing look, and with a rare show of camaraderie you all just work together and don’t point fingers; that “If we don’t work together none of us are going to get out alive!” Or, knowing that even helping will piss her off still, because now she doesn’t have any reason to yell at you and that pisses her off more. And then? She still yells at you.

I guess that really just boils down to family dynamics. I mean, obviously this is a bit dramatized, but we’ve all been there. It was just kind of funny to experience that in someone else’s house, and remember those first, terribly awkward moments where you really just want to hide, but know that you should help. You can feel the tensions mounting and I couldn’t help but laugh with the memories of your own similar experiences. I hope last night got me points and I didn’t place the blame on myself instead.