My parents built their dream house in 1963, when I was just one year old. I will leave any speculation as to the amount of turbulence this may have created in my young life to another time. What I want to concentrate on is the septic system in this house.

My parents' house is a long ranch-style house with the master bedroom at one end and the childrens' bedrooms at the other. This house had two septic systems; one for each end of the house. Perhaps the design calculations did not account for the abuse that three children could heap on a septic system ("Let's see if we can flush THIS down the toilet!"), or perhaps the installation and landscaping of the area interefered with the septic system's proper operation (It's generally not common practice to pour a concrete pad directly over a cesspool...). In any event, within a few years after the house was built the septic system for the childrens' bathroom became a constant source of trouble. More specifically, the toilet would often back up and overflow.

This started happening when I was about five years old. For some reason, I was absolutely terrified of the overflowing toilet. I don't know why; perhaps I felt some sense of betrayal that the instrument that was supposed to take things away was instead giving them back along with an even bigger mess to clean up. Whatever the reason, my terror of the toilet's overflowing strongly influenced my bathroom habits for several years thereafter:

• I was extremely suspicious of toilets other than my own. All toilets were lurking monsters, but at least the ones in my house were the monsters I knew best. I would use only urinals in public restrooms, reasoning that I'd never seen one of them overflow whereas I was certain that the toilets would. I would only urinate in private bathrooms, reasoning that if I left no solids there would be nothing to stop up the works. I performed some amazing feats of choreography in my attempt to hold things in until I could get home. Surprisingly, I never had any accidents.
• I stopped using toilet paper. I was smart enough to realize that if you put too much down the toilet it will stop up, so I reasoned that the less I put down there the better. Needless to say this did little for my hygiene or my popularity, but at least the Porcelain God wasn't spitting at me!
• At home, I would perform standing urination with the seat down, not up. I had noticed in previous experiences that if the water level in the bowl was very low, the toilet was more likely to overflow the next time it was flushed. Having the seat down made the water level "appear" higher to my eyes, and therefore I felt safer. Totally illogical in one way, but totally reasonable in another.
• Finally, I gave up flushing entirely. If the monster was going to strike, I didn't want it to be on my watch. There was enough traffic in that bathroom that I figured someone else was going to flush sooner or later. Since, at the time, I was the youngest member of the household, I figured that my elders would be better capable than I of keeping the beast at bay.

None of this escaped notice, of course. My mother often confronted me about my toilet habits, but her efforts did little to change anything. I'd lie ("yes, I do wipe myself!"), plead insanity ("I don't know why the toilet's not flushed!"), or just sit there and squirm until the lecture was over. Part of me knew that the reason for my toilet habits was pretty silly, but another part of me knew that it was also of the utmost urgency. It's like the invisible monster under the bed; you may logically know it's not there, but you're scared to death of it anyway. My invisible monster lived in the plumbing.

Perhaps because of her own discomfort, my mother never pressed quite as hard on this issue as she did on others. Until one day, when she had had enough. Once again, I'd not flushed, and this time she stood me in front of the toilet and was DETERMINED to MAKE me flush it if it was the last thing I did. I could tell by the water level and by the mass at the bottom of the bowl that an eruption was imminent. I tried to tell her this, but I didn't have the words -- at least not words that she could comprehend. And she was INSISTENT. While I could sometimes wheedle with my parents, a direct order usually turned me into complete jelly, as it did this time. So I flushed. And sure enough, it overflowed. All over the bathroom floor.

Perhaps I should have felt vindicated, but instead I felt crushed. Mother had put me in an impossible situation, and now Something Bad had happened, and it was All My Fault. But I did flush more often after that.

A few years later, our town got sewers and my parents were the first on their block to tie in. Backups were a thing of the past, and I gradually acquired better toilet habits. Still, it wasn't until after I moved away from home to go to college that I finally became comfortable defecating in a public toilet.

I think one of the most important lessons to be drawn from the above tale, and one that we'll see again and again in these stories, is that things aren't always what they seem. Adults often express frustration, resentment, and anger at what seem to them to be the bizarre or wilful acts of their children. In fact, many of these acts are not wilful at all, and the child often has reasons for doing them. These reasons may not stand up to scrutiny in the adult world, but that renders them no less valid in the child's world. To do this, of course, we must make it safe for the child to talk about his or her view of the world.

In the case of the toilet story, I certainly didn't feel safe broaching the subject of my fear of malfunctioning plumbing. Nobody around me seemed particularly interested in my feelings about the matter either. In one way this is understandable; they had their own hands full dealing with the problem too. In another way, though, this should serve as a warning: if a situation is causing disruption to the lives of the adults in the household, it may also be causing some subtle changes in the development of the children.

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