Care and Feeding: The Great Hamper Mystery

[cereta]

Dear Care and Feeding,

We popped in to visit our son, a college junior, last Sunday, and discovered his plastic clothes hamper sitting in the bathroom filled with a mixture of bleach and water. When we asked about it, he went red and his roommates started laughing. No one would tell me what happened, and I started getting flustered, and we wound up leaving slightly earlier than planned. It had not been a planned visit, we were just driving by his college town, so now I am both inordinately obsessed with what happened to his hamper and also embarrassed to be That Mother, barging in and demanding answers.

—Hamper Stumper

Dear HS,

Oh, you sweet summer child. Your son either got very drunk and mistook his hamper for a toilet, or he got slightly less drunk and just threw up in it. Frankly, I am impressed that these fine young men didn’t just hose it off outside, and actually went out to acquire bleach! The children truly are the future.

These, of course, are not actually children. They are adults (college juniors!), as is your son, and you needn’t concern yourself with his excellent hamper cleanup efforts. He was not dissolving a body (although if he was, he was right to do it in plastic and not a bathtub, as in Breaking Bad).*

You have not done anything particularly wrong (merely awkward and prying). You gave his friends a chance to razz him a little, so if you see no other signs that he has a serious drinking problem, I suggest allowing this to fade gently into the mists of the past until he has his own kids and comes clean, as it were, about the Time He Deposited Bodily Fluids in the Hamper, which has happened to … many people.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2019/10/keeping-tabs-children-college-care-and-feeding.html

Comments

[cereta]

Honestly, I posted this just because it made me giggle ;).

[zulu]

For a minute I was worried all his clothes were still in the bleach-filled hamper! But barring the laundry disaster, I think it's just clear it was some other mess mishap.

[minoanmiss]

*giggles helplessly and cannot stop*

[cereta]

I KNOW, RIGHT?

[staranise]

That asterisk doesn't seem to have an accompanying footnote, which makes me sad. I've never seen Breaking Bad, but I'd love to hear some facts about why dissolving a body should not be done in a bathtub.

[euphrosyna]

The footnote was something about them correcting the reference cos they got it wrong first time around.

[minoanmiss]

In Breaking Bad dissolving a body in a bathtub led to damaging the structures around the bathtub such that the tub fell through the bathroom floor.

[sporky_rat]

This was definitely a giggle I needed, thank you!

[cereta]

I figured we could use something light-hearted.