Exploding Toilets

Warning: This blog was written with two underaged fact-checkers reading over my shoulder the whole time. So much for artistic license. 

“Mom! The toilet’s exploding!”

Sam was running across our bedroom, sopping wet, with only a towel wrapped around his torso.

“Just jiggle the handle, it’ll be fine.”

I was sitting on the steps, playing DJ on the bluetooth speaker and very loosely supervising the bedtime routine that was taking place all around me on the second floor. So help me God if I have to stand up from my perch.

“No, really! The toilet is EXPLODING!” Sam insisted.

I trudged into the bathroom, still clutching my phone open to YouTube Music in case I needed to change our soundtrack to match the current mood.

“See! Look!” Sam said, lifting the lid off the back of the toilet.

Immediately, water began spraying out the top and hitting the wall behind the toilet. 

“Oh my goodness! That’s a lot of water!”

Tess, freshly pajama’d, had rushed in behind me, and I sent her to go fetch Tighe. Plumbing is his specialty, not mine.

Meanwhile I reached into the top shelf of the toilet and pulled out a narrow piece of black plastic.

“What the heck is this? I don’t even know… what this is… where this goes!”

“See? I told you the toilet was exploding,” Sam said from a safe spot a few feet away.

I could hear Tess pleading with Tighe to hurry. Apparently he had the same initial lack of concern that I had.

Until he took the mysterious black plastic thingamabob from my hand and, in a state of confusion, said, “What the heck is this??”

“Exactly,” I mumbled.

He reached into the top shelf and began fiddling with something or other until the water stopped spraying out the top and instead started gushing out the bottom of the toilet. 

“Oh that’s even more water!” One thing I’ve learned about crisis situations is that my idle observations are less than helpful.

The water was rapidly flooding the hardwood floors all around the toilet and next to the shower as Tighe frantically turned the knob to turn off the water. And still the water continued to gush and pool even after the knob was moved to the off position. 

We’re talking two inches of water on the floor!

“Whoa…,” Sam and Tess were frozen in uniform amazement. It really was so much water.

“Oh my god, this is bad! Get towels!” 

Some of the trim around the baseboards in there is already worn and I can’t imagine anything is adequately sealed around that toilet or under those floorboards. And right below that particular bathroom is… Tighe’s office. Complete with a 55-inch flat screen TV, several computers, monitors, and other office equipment, and for reasons that are still painstakingly frustrating, a Yamaha baby grand player piano.

“SAM! TESS! GET TOWELS!”

But they were still in awe of the flood, frozen in place.

“NOW!”

Sensing my panic that was now teetering on the verge of unhinged, they startled and scampered away, returning a few moments later with two hand towels. 

“This isn’t going to be enough! We need buckets! A drainage system!”

Even Tighe was in full panic mode now. Which says a lot. Typically no matter how dire the circumstances, Tighe is cool as a cucumber and sleeps like a baby. Which I don’t resent in the slightest.  

“This is going to leak through and collapse the ceiling beneath us!” Tighe shouted, trying to make the best of the two saturated hand towels but just sloshing the water back and forth.

“Fuck!” whispered Lou, who never likes to miss a household disaster. Actually, he’s frequently the one to cause most household disasters. 

“Should I go downstairs and check it out?” he inquired, totally overestimating his own importance, as usual.

“Yes, sure,” I directed him, already hurrying off to grab as many beach towels as I could carry. I tossed them at Tess and Sam, and as they threw them on the floor, the quantity of water had already started to lessen.

“Oh, it’s dripping down here!” Lou called up the steps.

“It’s running directly into an outlet,” Nate, another prime example of self-importance, assured us as we hustled down the stairs. “Don’t worry, I unplugged everything nearby.”

The two bookend children were standing in Tighe’s office, which is located directly under the bathroom, staring up at the ceiling. There was indeed a steady drip of water from the ceiling to the floor, and another one trickling down the wall. A distinct water mark had appeared along one of the tape seams in the drywall and started to bubble and bulge.

“This will surely collapse overnight,” Tighe muttered, throwing down a few more towels.

“Will Rocket die?” Lou asked.

We glanced at the dog bed on the floor behind us.

“No, I’m sure he’ll be fine,” I replied, but totally lacking confidence as we listened to the unmistakable sound of water dripping in the ceiling above us.

Whether it was the absorption into the oversized beach towels or leaking into the ceiling beneath us or both, we finally managed to get the floorboards mostly dry. And as the catastrophic nature of the evening began to dissipate and our heart rates returned to normal, we began to ask questions. 

“Who did this?”

“How did this happen?”

“Did this happen while you were in the shower? Or on the toilet?”

“Do you require supervision to poop?”

And those answers remain unclear. Perhaps I was too angry to hear the full story or perhaps Sam and Tess told different, conflicting versions of the event, but I still don’t understand what happened. 

They were flushing excessive amounts of toilet paper. 

They were flushing cardboard. 

One or both of them had been constipated for days and consequently spent an extraordinarily long time on the toilet. 

And how, exactly, were they both involved? 

By the end of the night, Tess, knowing she was in trouble for whatever transpired in the bathroom earlier, was weepy, her eyes red, tears staining her face. I started to feel guilty for my anger.

“Tess, it’s okay. It’s going to be okay,” I consoled her as I kissed her good night. “Just stop wiping your ass with cardboard when you poop.”

That made her giggle as she rolled over to turn off her light.

Update: At the time of posting this blog, the ceiling has not collapsed. Rocket has not died. And no one is supervising anyone else as they poop and/or flush toilets.

Important life lesson learned: do not flush cardboard down the toilet.