My ten-year-old daughter always rushed to the bathroom as soon as she came home from school. As I asked, “Why do you always take a bath right away?” she smiled and said, “I just like to be clean.” Yet, one day while cleaning the drain, I found something. The moment I saw it, my whole body started trembling, and I immediately…
My daughter Sophie is ten, and for months she followed the same pattern every single day: the moment she walked in from school, she dropped her backpack by the door and hurried straight to the bathroom.
At first, I brushed it off as a phase. Kids get sweaty. Maybe she didn’t like feeling grimy after recess. But it happened so often that it started to feel… rehearsed. No snack. No TV. Sometimes not even a greeting—just “Bathroom!” followed by the sound of the lock turning.
One night, I finally asked her softly, “Why do you always take a bath right away?”
Sophie flashed a smile that was just a little too practiced and said, “I just like to be clean.”
That answer should have eased my mind. Instead, it left a tight knot in my stomach. Sophie was usually messy, blunt, forgetful. “I just like to be clean” sounded like something she’d been coached to say.
