I need someone to tell me exactly when things became so difficult to reach. I bought a new toilet brush to go with our new paint job (hey we’re living now, huh?) and I could tell right away it was going to be a battle getting to it. It was in one of those hermetically sealed plastic bubbles with no visible point of entry. I scrutinized it in Target wondering if my life really required a $20 craphole scrubber and I decided yes, this is my reward for living through this ordeal which can only mean I must have enough jewelry, I don’t know about that. The whole experience reminded me of buying action figures at the toy store with my son and gritting my teeth as far away from home as the parking lot as I predicted the blood I would shed trying to free Wolverine from his plastic prison. What I recall even more is that the look on Son’s face when the figure was finally in his hands was always worth my shredded skin lying at our feet. Must be love.
In preparation for liberating the toilet brush I left the utility scissors on the stairway for days before I got them up to the bathroom. This evening I went at it after the rest of the house was back in order and the only thing left is that I forgot to get our spare house key back from the painter but it’s no problem because he’s kind of related to us and just a stellar human being and probably didn’t think our stuff was so great anyway. He asked me how old one of our bookcases was and he guessed the seventies but it’s actually more like from The Beginning of Time but without any added value.
I got up to the bathroom and started stabbing at the plastic bubble with my giant scissors which made me wonder why manufacturers don’t spend more money making their products to die for instead of to die trying to use. I got the brush out okay but the pod-like cone it lives in was just a nuisance. I worked at it inch by inch with these big machete-like shears and it made me think of that playground rhyme about a 19th century murderess:
Lizzie Borden took an ax
And gave her mother forty whacks
And when she saw what she had done
She gave her father forty-one
I’m thinking Lizzie should have had some polystyrene resin products to work out her aggression on. It was exhausting.
Finally I just started whaling on the package without any plan at all until suddenly the pod-cone ejected itself from the plastic cavity and went sailing across the bathroom and landed in the tub. Strangely, when I was pregnant with my kids I considered the possibility that this might happen at the moment of birth. I mean it’s a long time to carry something around that dedicated to making an exit and who knows, maybe when the moment finally came it would be more projectile than previously imagined. It wasn’t, though, since I ended up having two Cesareans which was dramatic enough. Daughter came into the world wide-eyed and bopping, looking around like “Where’s the party?” Less than three years later Son emerged and fixed me with a steady gaze that said, “If you’re responsible for this you better make it good.” Now that they’re grown I have to say they both really created the party. Although to take whatever credit I can it does all start out with the packaging.