My Meltdown

We've all seen it; the overtired toddler who seems to disintegrate before our eyes. They go and go until the tipping point when exhaustion overwhelms and they are no longer able to listen to reason. In 1983, when my daughter, Lucy, was about 15 months old she would fall apart so completely it reminded me of the reports of the nuclear reactor accident at Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

The descriptions of the accident explained a core meltdown, basically an implosion of the radioactive material unto itself. That's what my daughter was doing. She became toxic, radioactive. She was having a core meltdown and I began to use the phrase to describe it. I'd never heard anyone say it before, but other friends with kids began to pickup the term and passed it along. Friends from the East coast went back with the term and it proliferated further. Core meltdown morphed into meltdown as in She's having a meltdown or She's melting down. Wikidpedia currently defines it like this: Meltdown: (tantrum) a particular kind of fit or temper tantrum that occurs in babies and young children. Bingo

Meltdown caught on and spread. There seem to be no references to the term until a year after I began using it. In 1984 “Meltdown” was used as the name of a Christian rock group and later several albums and song titles, a music festival, record label, episodes of television programs and a video game were all called “Meltdown.”

My thought , my image. Years passed and many more headlines appeared using the term about sports teams and other subjects. I felt a little jab each time, like something had been taken from me, but I shrugged it off as the price you pay for being an original thinker. You have an idea and others run with it. It was manageable until the financial crisis of 2008. Suddenly, the term was everywhere. Mortgage meltdown, Wall Street meltdown, banking meltdown and with the presidential election, we had the McCain Meltdown. STOP People, think of something else to say. It's tired and overused and anyway, it's mine. It's my meltdown and you can't have it anymore.