The Tide Pod Challenge

It's funny what will trigger you, really:

The Tide Pod challenge has set me thinking of my childhood. One of my mother's pet punishments was to wash our mouths out with soap. A common, but in retrospect, cruel and potentially dangerous punishment.

We didn't get just a swab, we had the whole bar, twisted around in our mouths until we could taste nothing for hours. At one point, we had even made a joke of rating the soaps by flavor. Lava soap, I believe, was the worst.

Well, this being the norm of our existence, as living in the projects at the time exposed us to many colorful words. So, soap was on the menu probably more often than ramen noodles.

One day, though, soaps started showing up with bite marks in them. Not just nibbles; whole hunks of the soap torn away by teeth. After a little bit of sleuthing, we traced it to Kevin, the youngest of our nuclear group (mother had one more, father had three more, but he was the youngest with a shared mother and father).

At the time we thought it was because he had genuinely come to enjoy soap. As I have gotten older, though, I'm pretty much determined it was an act of defiance, a statement to our mother and stepfather at the time that they would never break him.

And it was punk as all get out. And he would have only been about 8 at the time.

That wasn't the last bitten bar of soap we would find, though. Though it didn't end the punishment, it did give us kids a source of levity about the whole thing.