I am spending New Year’s Day at my parents’ home.  They still live in the same house I grew up in, so around every corner there is a childhood memory lying in wait.  This morning I got up and stumbled into the bathroom.  I found myself sitting on a bathroom toilet with a story to tell.  When I was four years old, my younger sister, Georgina, was being potty trained.  Georgina had a mind of her own about potty training.  She didn’t ever want to sit on the potty chair.  No.  She wanted to sit on the big potty with no safety net.  I guess she thought she was as big as the rest of us.

One day, she climbed up on the big potty, lost her balance, and fell in (sort of).  She yelled for help.  Being a concerned older sibling, I of course responded immediately.  When I walked in the bathroom door, I saw her with her bottom dropped deep in the toilet, her elbows wedged against the rim of the toilet seat, and her knees gripping the front of the toilet seat.  She was hanging on for dear life.  I do want you to know that I loved my little sister, but at that moment, an overwhelming curiousity overcame me.

I would like to think that other four-year-olds would have responded similarly.  I just wanted to know if Georgina would flush down the toilet like other unmentionable things flushed down the toilet, so I responded to the crisis situation.  I quickly ran over to the toilet and began flushing it as quickly as I could.  The roaring noise of the flushing toilet filled the bathroom.  Georgina’s eyes got big with fear, and I waited expectantly . . . for the results of an early scientific experiment.

Just in case you are wondering, Georgina did not flush down the toilet to my everlasting disappointment.

The story of trying to flush Georgina down the toilet has been told repeatedly in my family.  Often my actions are incorrectly interpreted as aggression against a sibling rather than intellectual curiousity about scientific knowledge.  Much to my dismay.  I learned last night that Georgina’s youngest daughter lives in fear of me flushing her down the toilet.  I have never repented for trying to flush Georgina down the toilet because I have always held to the believe that the scientific knowledge gained from my informal experiment was worth whatever “minor” trauma Georgina experienced.

However, in light of the fact that I am apparently traumatizing another generation in my family because of my misinterpreted actions, I am going to take action.  Although I don’t necessarily make New Year’s Resolutions every year (because I know I won’t keep them),  I am committed to changing my ways.  So here in this public forum, I am going to make a firm commitment to my New Year’s Resolution.

I, being of relatively sound mind, do hereby make this resolution for 2009.

I will not try to flush another family member down the toilet this year.  (However, I reserve the right to re-examine this commitment every year.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.