MEMOIR. TOTALLY TRUE.

The Plug Dilemma and Other Childhood Misunderstandings

My broken memoir continues . . .

Not me. I never wore dresses, and my hair was shorter than this. Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik

The previous episode ended with this line:

There was definitely something wrong with me.

At first, I blamed words. My earliest memory is a word mistake. Well, that and leaving a tap dripping all night.

I was four years old when I woke early to find the basin in my bedroom brimming with water and on the verge of overflowing. Panic set in. We weren’t allowed to enter our parents’ bedroom before 7 a.m., so I tiptoed down the corridor to my sister’s room to ask her for help.

“Pull the plug out,” she mumbled, burying herself under the covers. “And don’t bother me again.”

“Pull the plug out, pull the plug out, pull the plug out,” I repeated in my head. Closely followed by the thought: “What on earth is a plug?”

Pull. I knew that word.

I’d seen it written on doors. You either push them or pull them.

So I trotted back to the errant basin to find something I could pull. I could only just reach the taps to tug at them. Nothing happened. I couldn’t find anything else to pull, so I tried pushing the taps in case I’d got the words muddled up…