Monday evening, around 7:30, I sent Jake upstairs to get himself in the bath tub while I cleaned the kitchen. Suddenly there was a loud pop and Jake came running out of the bathroom bukkid nekkid. He had turned and turned the hot water handle until the the whole thing came out of the wall and water was shooting in a straight line out of the hole in the wall where the handle used to be. I called my dad, who was off at a Knights of Columbus meeting, and therefore unreachable. I then called Justin, who said he was coming over.
In the time those events transpired, my bathtub communicated to me that the drain was not equipped to drink as much water as the bathtub was capable of holding, and we were coming perilously close to flooding the bathroom. How to turn off the water from the hot water heater did not immediately present itself to me upon visual inspection of the apparatus. We have a closet upstairs that we keeped locked, because the floor is unfinished and parts of the air conditioner, some circuit breakers and some pipes are in it. I had some initial trouble locating the key to that closet in the junk drawer, which is already unmanageable after two months in this house. Once I got the door open, I had no idea what I was looking for so that was pointless.
I am nothing if not calmly responsive in an emergency, so I did the only thing I could think of:
1. I yelled at the boys to get the dog and get out of the bathroom.
2. I climbed into their almost-overflowing bathtub in full pajamas
3. I pulled the shower curtain
4. I shoved the hot water handle back into the hole in the wall to stop the water and let the tub drain.
When you shove something into a hole spewing water, the water will vacate the hole with much force at all different angles before letting the something you are shoving stop the flow.
After a few minutes, Justin called to say that he and his brother were on their way over, but I definitely needed to call RotoRooter. The bathtub was only about half full of water, so I released my grip on the handle and allowed the water to come forth again. I called RotoRooter and waited for someone to call me back. The urge to cry was creeping up. Jake had not dressed himself and was roaming the house wrapped in a towel, so I got him dressed again. In this short amount of time, the need for me to get back in the bathtub had returned, so I sent the boys downstairs to wait for Justin while I repeated the plugging procedure. While I was in the tub, the RotoRooter guy called to let me know that he was thirty minutes away and it would be $175 per hour, two hour minimum, not including travel time. I told him to wait.
F*ck my life.
Justin and his brother arrived and came upstairs. When they came into the bathroom, I warned Justin that I was, like my water, about to open up full throttle. The guys scrambled around the various closets upstairs and the water stopped coming out of the wall. When I stepped out of the bathroom, Landen brought his mother's pocket watch upstairs to me, broken. Jake had given it to him to play with, and they broke the door off at the little hinge. As I sat down on Landen's bed to ineffectively communicate the wrongness of playing with something they know is not a toy and the seriousness of its brokenness, my eyes were watering and my voice was shaking. Justin poked his head out of the bathroom to tell me that he had fixed it and the boys could bathe, and asked me if I needed him to stay. I assured him I was very grateful and was fine to bathe the boys and get them into bed. He offered to stay, even if just for five minutes, so I could go off and have a minute to myself. He barely finished the sentence before I was scrambling down the steps and throwing myself face first onto my bedroom floor to sob and wail. My Ugly Cry.
It ain't that cute.
The impeccably-timed phone call from my dad came about 90 seconds into that outburst. He told me welcome to homeownership and shared with me that the bathroom ceiling collapsed on my mother a couple weeks ago. I reminded him that Mother wasn't home alone with a collapsed ceiling and two young children because her husband was 7,000 miles away. Corey doesn't know anything about plumbing, but at least he could've stayed in the bathtub while I made the phone calls or Googled "how to turn off water."
Tuesday was a total pisser. You can't cry that hard and have a good day the next day. Plus I sent Landen to school all dressed for Santa pictures but forgot to send the form and the money to take Santa pictures, so all he got was a lousy pencil. I was dubbed The Worst all day on Tuesday. We as a collective unit had made a full-recovery and I was The Best on Thursday, for Taco Bell for dinner and Harry Potter before bed.
One thing I know for sure about this year - everything would be better if only my husband were here. That probably wasn't true in 2009 and will be disputed in 2011, but in 2010, that's what I know for sure.
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