Our theme for the month of October is “childhood fears.”
I couldn’t have been more than five when I toddled into the bathroom next to the laundry room and shut the door. I remember a few things about that old house in Boston—the flat, glossy, fake tile in the kitchen that occasionally peeled and is still what I imagine linoleum looks like (despite learning recently that it was not linoleum at all); and my mini plastic training toilet, a cheery teal and white, with a bottom that snapped off for easy…well, my parents handled that part.
But on the day of this story I must’ve graduated from my training toilet, because I switched on the fan and sat down on the grown-up toilet to poop all by myself.
When the bugs first started dropping, I didn’t know what they were.
Where is that dirt coming from? I remember wondering. Then, Why is dirt falling from the ceiling? And then, That’s not dirt—it’s moving!!!
I don’t remember if I stuck it out to finish my poop. I vaguely remember my mother’s horror and alarm when I told her that bugs were falling down in the bathroom. I remember my dad up on a ladder outside our house, gingerly extracting a nest of baby birds—the source of the bugs—from the exhaust vent. My parents put the nest on an electric heating pad in a box and left it out on the stoop. “Don’t get too attached; a cat will probably get them tonight,” my dad warned me when I asked what we should name the birds. Sure enough, they were gone the next morning.
Perhaps I didn’t fare as badly as those poor baby birds (I still feel sad that we just left them outside on the ground). But from that day forward, I could not turn on the bathroom fan. Not a single one. My body had internalized the experience, and the exhaust fan’s foreboding hum was now inextricably linked with a shower of mites, raining down upon one in one’s half-nakedness. My refusal to vent my stenches persisted—at restaurants and friends’ houses, on family vacations; and no amount of complaining or retching from the next person in the bathroom could move me enough to change my ways. It was a brave day at Calvin when my self-consciousness around my freshman year suite got the better of me, and I decided that I needed to stop giving in to this irrational fear, if I didn’t want to become Public Enemy Number One.
Today, I am happy to share that I turn on the bathroom fan every day, when necessary, and it has rained bugs upon me zero times. But woe to you all should that number ever change. It wouldn’t take much to make me a poop pariah for life.
Eleanor Lee (‘23) graduated from Calvin with degrees in computer science and writing. She grew up in South Carolina but currently lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She loves coffee, laughing, and bringing emojis to the workplace.
