No Use Crying Over Spilled Water

Today, for the first time in this whole process, I almost broke down. I say almost, because in the end I just had to laugh, but it was touch and go for a while.

We are now an incredible six weeks into the plumbing ordeal. What should have been a relatively straightforward job has turned into one disaster after another and last night we didn't even have a toilet in the house. We had to traipse next door to use Tom's spare bathroom. One of the benefits of living next to your contractor I suppose. This morning I took the girls out to breakfast so that we could use the bathroom. Of course they thought it was a great adventure and such a treat to have pancakes made by Denny's, but all I cared about was the fact that I could flush.

Still, that wasn't the breaking point for me. Nor was it when I got home and saw all my sheets, pillows and blankets on the sofa because for some unknown reason the plumbers had to put a hole in the laundry closet to get to the shower (which has not been part of the problem in any way). It wasn't even when I had to rinse the chicken I was cooking for dinner in a bowl rather than in the sink and attempt to wash my hands without spilling anything down the drain.

No, what finally did it for me was hearing that the plumbers were going to have to go through the stucco on the outside of the house to get to a pipe that is between the exterior wall and the kitchen cabinets, thus putting a bloody great hole in the front of our house. At that point, I really thought I was going to cry. All I could think of was the fact that they have been working on this for six weeks now and it seems to be getting worse and worse. Pretty soon we'll have a beautiful new addition to our home but no original home left. Good thing we put in all those outlets I suppose.

Anyway, at the very moment when I had had enough, I started to think about a young girl I know whose family left Syria a couple of months ago because they were fleeing a war. I thought about a friend who is battling her fourth bout with cancer. I remembered hearing about families who barely subsist on one meal a day. And I realized that my problem is just that, a problem and nothing more. It's fixable. Life goes on, and toilets will flush again.

Besides, I can't do any laundry this weekend. So life's not all bad.