So, I haven’t been blogging up a storm of late because of the perpetual black cloud that is hovering – metaphorically and last weekend, physically – over my house and psyche.
Our family’s fallen victim to the times in that my husband is job hunting and as anyone, I’m sure, who has had a husband who’s job hunting can confirm, this does not make for lots of rip-roaring good times. It’s ups and downs of waiting for calls, slugging to interviews, waiting for callbacks, in a hiring atmosphere that is “crowded”, to say the least.
And job hunting for men is so different than for women. There’s so much ego built into it; I think there’s a measure of wanting to be able to provide (although luckily we planned ahead and we’re trying not to spend money we don’t have, unlike oh, I don’t know, the federal government – but this is not meant to be political!)
I’m trying so hard to not put a lot on his plate like extra child care, etc – and as a result there’s so much on mine between working and watching kids and keeping them happy. I’m not alone – I know – so many of you are in the same boat.
Then came the incessant floods of last weekend’s crazy rain. Luckily, for our convenience, our basement didn’t wait till the rains to flood – it gave a preemptory shot across our bow by flooding the weekend before, due to a broken valve or something on our battery back up (that never engaged but nonetheless is being blamed, by the plumbers, as the root of the problem – solely, I believe, because it is the one way they can get out of the blame). I went downstairs and found big wet spots under the carpet and was mystified until I opened the storage room to find 5 inches of water. So in came the water remediation people, out came the carpet and the padding and the toys and the computer and shockingly (and mysteriously) huge sections of the sheet-rock wall, which were perfectly dry. So now our great finished basement was a concrete hole of coldness. Not for nothing this is the spot where the children were exiled to play and where the beast was exiled to job hunt.
So then the odyssey of fixing it up began and we put in carpet as fast as we could to make it usable and then, last weekend’s rains came. I know I am so selfish. I thought of the poor people in Chile, and in Haiti, dealing with so much worse than I am. I thought of that as I prayed that we not lose power, so the sump pump would keep working and not flood the basement and the 1-day old carpeting, again. I thought of how selfish I felt as I saw the houses around me with water literally up to their first-floor windows; a kid in my twins’ pre-k even had to leave his home in a boat. Nevertheless, I also thought of how they say that God only gives you as much as you can handle, at any given time. So I thought to myself that God must be thinking “She simply cannot handle a flooded basement for the second time in a week”.
We made it through the floods, and I keep making it through these “dark days” one by one. And here’s two things making it easier. One, it’s finally sunny–it’s gorgeous, my kids are walking around in sandals, one claims to be moving outside…
And two, last night as I sat down with my list of to-do’s, in bed, I found sandwiched in between a couple a note from my 6 year old that said “Emma loves Mommy” with 5 exclamations. Sometimes it helps to know someone does.