Wake up
She trots down the stairs feeling the newness of the carpet beneath bare feet. Bare feet in winter time. Life had slipped into an easy flow since the remodeling chaos.
Coffee. How she loved that wake up, the feel of a warm cup in her hands as she awakes gazing out new windows, double paned, and professionally caulked.
She flips on the kitchen light. It fizzes and fades. It won’t stay on. Blown bulb? The electricity isn’t off because the clock just directed her to get out of bed. She flips the dining room light switch and it glows. Then she steps onto a cold, wet kitchen floor. Water. A half inch pond covers brand new linoleum. A saggy, wet ceiling leaks gallons from one teeny tiny drip hole.
She stares, stunned. Is her house betraying her again? Only the one frozen pipe this winter in the sink upstairs. Hadn’t all the other structural issues been addressed?
Run, she thought. Run back upstairs into the warm bed. Maybe this is a nightmare, the ongoing nightmare of her first home purchase as a newly divorced, single mom. Her little corner of the world is a nine hundred square feet, two story, brick, two bedrooms right in the middle of a downtown block. Her castle of dreams turning, again, into Cinderella after the stroke of midnight. The first winter she blocked off the arctic upstairs with a blanket nailed across the stairwell. She and her girls slept on mattresses in sleeping bags on the living room floor. They’d run upstairs to shower where an electric heater struggled to warm them, get clothing and hurry back down to huddle around an ancient, rusty floor furnace. She did a lot of baking that winter just to have the oven on. They survived frozen plumbing six different times. As a result of the plumbing saga that first winter, she learned to fill the tub with water for flushing and fill pitchers with water for drinking and teeth brushing and coffee. Did you know a melted tray of ice cubes is enough to brush three sets of teeth?
Her Knight arrived via a low income HUD loan. The two month project took nearly five months to complete but the house was fixed. Updated. Upgraded. Insulated. Insulation was blown into the walls, a new furnace, set inside a new, little storage closet, new dry wall in the dining room because the plaster had cracked like varicose veins floor to ceiling. Flooring in the kitchen and half bath. ‘Vinyl is Final’ siding. Her family was fortressed. She was set. Remodeled. Renewed! This winter they live in the whole house and are beginning to decorate, doing the fun stuff and creating a home space. Her sales job finally producing enough commissions that the utilities were staying on regularly! She even had some play money. She inherited some nice pieces of furniture from her Grandmother. And the dream for a comfortable, warm home was coming to fruition. The foundation seemed solid. Well, getting past this winter’s minor issue of the collapse of the metal roof protecting the back door due to snow weight. That’s a fairly easy fix – tear it off and install two new posts.
Now, the drip, drip, drip of yet another calamity - a wet dream. Upstairs, in the bathroom just above the kitchen a waterfall cascades down the vanity and across the floor. The frozen sink pipe unthawed into a sink with the drain plugged. Why hadn’t she heard any flooding? She turns off the water faucet, pulls the stopper out, put towels onto the floor and begins to bale water into the tub. Why didn’t she have to get up and pee in the night? How long had this been flooding? How can disaster creep in so quickly, so quietly?
Back down stairs across new carpet, she stands in the kitchen doorway and stares. Tricked and overwhelmed. Water runs across the floor dripping into the laundry room, out the back door and across the back step under the collapsed awning and into melting snow.
She grabs the broom and begins to sweep. She has no mop. She usually does the floors on hands and knees or swipes with a rag under her foot because – well, it’s a small area and a mop costs that little bit of money she can spend somewhere else and she has bigger concerns calling for her money. And mops are so, well, dirty and wet and smelly and heavy and there are few places for storage. Who wants a nasty, soggy mop in the new storage closet where the sweeper barely fits?
She has been through the wringer with this house and at last has a competent structure capable of housing them comfortably. And now a stopped up sink has flooded her comfort.
Standing in cold water she questions starting the coffee pot for fear of electrocution. Should she try the light again while standing in a puddle? Just as she starts to meltdown, four little girl feet come bounding down the stairs and abruptly stop at the kitchen door. “Mommy?”
“We’ve got a flood.”
“Are you crying?”
“Yes, I am. I don’t know what else to do. Oh? Oh, oh, dear, it’s time for school, isn’t it?”
Function, she admonishes herself. She has to get these girls to school and herself to work. “Girls, get dressed. Be quick about it. We’ll have to go out somewhere for breakfast. I’ve gotten caught up sweeping flood water and lost all track of time. I can’t possibly get to work. Please, be quick.”
The ceiling will mold. The floor will come unglued and rot. The floor will curl. The new ceiling tiles will stained. Will the ceiling fan ever work again? She sees dollars flying out like a flock of migrating geese. The vacation she dreams of is disappearing into a stream of cash flowing to Ace Hardware. Why had she opted for carpet and not all new plumbing? Vanity? They said the insulation would take care of the plumbing problems. Is this 1920’s black cloud really repairable?
Upstairs, she puts on jeans and a sweatshirt, combs the girls’ hair. “Get your book satchels.” Back downstairs with every intention of phoning the office, she decides to poke another little hole in the ceiling and let all the water finish dripping out while doing the school run. When she pokes, a huge chunk of ceiling tile falls out. Splash. Water cascades onto her head, dripping to her bare feet. Breathless, she stands soaked with cold water.
She goes back upstairs where the girls are dutifully brushing their teeth. She take off the second set of wet clothes, wrap up in her blanket, sits on bed and screams into she pillow.
“Mommy? What’s the matter, mommy?” they question, looking for parental support, guidance and direction. “It’s a school day. We have to go to school. Get dressed. Don’t cry? I’m hungry.” Confused children stand at the foot of the bed preparing to dive into the hysteria they are witnessing.
“Oh. I know. I know. I don’t know. I just really just don’t know. Just get your gloves and hats. Shoes? Do you have shoes and socks? And I’ll get dry clothes on. Wait downstairs for me. Don’t go in the kitchen. It’s wet. We have to get food somewhere. Oh yeah, be sure you have your homework. No, put your boots on, it’s supposed to get warmer but rain all day on top of this stupid, dirty, melting snow. It will be nasty.”
“Mommy, you said stupid.”
“Yes, I did. All this is stupid. Ugly and stupid and wet. And STUPID!”
She hugs her pillow and takes some deep breaths trying to calm herself all the while knowing she sits above a ruined kitchen. The kitchen with the new ceiling, and floor and stove. The kitchen she just painted. Her new kitchen with cute little pass through to the dining room with her grandmother’s little rail road lamps hung inside. The new light fixture and fan she gifted herself in a rare splurge.
One final look. Is this real? Wet and real. Turning on the fan would dry things faster? Better not.
They get into the car that starts easily and has gasoline. A plus. Maybe she can get a grip. The sun is shining. The snow sparkles. She doesn’t have to drive around the block to go back into the house for her purse! She takes the girls to breakfast where the waitress is particularly kind. Perhaps it’s because she asks for coffee STAT the waitress senses a morning gone haywire. The three talk rationally and sensibly. No one complains about any part of breakfast. In fact, the children probably would have eaten kale or spinach without complaint for fear of their mother having another meltdown.
Yet, all the while, her mind is a hamster on a wheel, spiraling downward into worst case scenarios’ so much so that she has the house completely gutted when she gets home. And she and the girls get into the car with a full tank of gas and drive in to the sunrise onto an easier plane of existence. Or at least move back into rental property and let someone else who knows something about home ownership and basic repair take care of all of this. But then she knows being smart enough to turn off a sink is necessary in all the above scenarios. So she’ll just go on home. That’s where her stuff is. The waitress brings a large coffee to go.
Bonus, she has enough cash for school lunch. She leaves the trusting children with a smile and reassurance so their last snapshot is not of a manic mother. “It’s going to be okay. I’ll get this fixed. I will figure this out. I guess… I will. Somehow. I don’t know how or where to start but I suppose it will happen, somehow.”
With no money left for a mop and no stores open at this time of the morning anyhow, she goes to Bobbi’s, her single-mother friend who always seems to have things one needs! Once, at an overnight outing, Bobbi produced extra toothbrushes and a pair of shoes from the trunk of her car for anyone who forgot theirs. She quickly explains the situation, takes a mop and takes Bobbi’s daughter to school. Is she procrastinating the return home to a flood plane?
What if she left the light on and a spark flies and burns the half of the house that isn’t wet and I have a fire on top of the flood? A disaster of Biblical proportion. What if locusts descend?
The silence of the house penetrates her like a wave. Exhausted, paralyzed and unsure of what to do, where to begin, the dream of a sweet, warm, Ringo Street seems impossible. The vinyl encases a tomb of failure. A pretty façade covering internal corrosion and rust and systems run amuck.
She throws the mop into the water, pulls up a chair and wonders if this puddle is the result of all the tears she has cried in this house. The worry of single parenting, of the financial struggle, of making uneducated decisions and being inefficient and incapable. Of being divorced. Of being alone. She had cried this lake of tears now settling onto the foundation of the reason for the monthly mortgage payment.
Has life played a dirty trick on her? Look, Susan, here’s a home of your very own for you and the girls. No more need to live in the apartment complex with the other single mothers and young children. Lots of chaos. Too many people and too much noise. Oh, and by the way, the house you can afford is a handyman’s dream. But you have no handy woman skills? Then here’s some low interest money to fix it up some and make it livable. And now that you are nice and settled in, here’s a way to tear it all down again in one little, stupid twist of a knob. HeHeHe. You left the stopper in the sink.
She gets back into bed, pulls the covers over her head. “WHY?” she cries and pleads for sleep. A little nap. A respite. A break.
“Susan Rea, get up and clean up this mess.” She sits straight up. She stands awake at the sound of her deceased Mother’s voice.
“I’m too tired. I’m beat.” No answer.
Only the quiet of the house echoing the one simple sentence. “Susan Rea, get up and clean up this mess.”
And, so, what’s a single mother to do? She gets up and cleans up the mess.
The voice? She doesn’t question it was her mother’s directive to put her back on her own parental, homeowner, motherhood track. So she cleans up the mess as best as possible.
Then she makes coffee and tries to pretend the day is just beginning and she goes to work at noon. She needs the money to get the fallen awning fixed.
The linoleum doesn’t curl. The rest of the ceiling doesn’t fall. The light and fan work fine from there on out.
The ceiling tiles remained stained until she sells the house, like a reminder not get too comfortable, that just around the corner another disaster might befall. Be wary sister.
The difference being that now she knows she has the where withal to handle a tough situation, maybe not the carpentry skills but the tenacity. And that still serves her well.