My husband and I own a cute white house that was built in the 1940s. It has a huge bay window in the kitchen that looks out into the front yard and a spacious master bedroom. There’s a good sized yard and we’re in a great neighborhood.
Last year alone, the following broke:
Washing machine
Dryer
Dish washer
Air conditioner
Heater
Refrigerator
Ovens
Microwave
...and we had a rather big deal electrical fire.
This being our first year of marriage, I certainly expected some difficulties. But I don’t think I expected...all this. But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t trade any of it. Each fresh problem has brought us a lot closer.
Washer and dryer? We got to do laundry at our parents’ houses and spend some quality time with them.
Dish washer? We hand washed for a few months and listened to podcasts while we did it.
A/C and heater? These were actually separate incidents: the A/C broke in the summer, and it was awful, plain and simple. But I will never take it for granted again, that much I can tell you. The heater? This went out the first cold weekend in November, but it just encouraged busting out all the blankets.
Fridge? Ovens? Microwave? We survived without them until we could afford new ones. (I have a new appreciation for the toaster oven.)
All of these issues were annoying, expensive, and time consuming...or in other words, they were “life.” I feel incredibly blessed- blessed to have enough to fix these problems; blessed to have family who take us in and help us when we need it; blessed to have a partner so I’m not doing this alone.
The coup de gras was an electrical fire we had in late October. We were winding down for bed and the power suddenly went out….but it didn’t. Several items were still on, but the lights in the majority of the house weren’t working. There was a weird noise coming from the kitchen. And then we smelled it...the unmistakable smell of electricity burning. We called the fire department and evacuated while they went through the house with a heat gun in full response gear. The dogs were leashed up and barking like crazy, I was in my pajamas...it was truly one of the scariest moments of my life.
It turned out that the breaker box wires had caught fire and melted the back of the box. We were very lucky that the walls did not catch fire. Because they didn’t, everything was contained and fixable. If we hadn’t been home, I am certain we would have lost the house, and more unthinkably, the dogs.
This experience put into stark reality what is really important to me. It was a real life version of “if you could only grab ONE thing from a burning house, what would it be?”. My first and only thoughts when the 9-1-1 operator told me to evacuate the house were “Where is Brent? Where are the dogs?”
Thankfully we were all fine. And the house was fine. And we got the problem fixed the very next day (thank God for favors called in in small towns). The house didn’t burn down. But I’ve thought about it a lot since it happened. I’ve thought about how the stuff didn’t matter to me. How the appliances and books and movies and clothes- none of that mattered to me. How none of the problems we’d had with the house even registered as problems in that moment.
That experience has made me a better person. It’s made me more grateful for what we have. It’s made me less attached to items, and more attached to the people (furry or otherwise) who matter. It’s made me rethink what luck is, and how good things are often packaged as something scary. I hope to remember these lessons for a long time and to repeat them to myself when the next item inevitably breaks.
As I was writing this story, I felt a little less...grown up. My mom reminded me of something very important: the year my parents bought their house and we moved in, the heater broke on Christmas Eve. It was (naturally), a preternaturally cold year in Florida, maybe...28 degrees outside? ...and the heater froze solid into a block of ice. Being late on Christmas Eve, there was no hope of getting this fixed for several days. It was so cold in the house that we burned the boxes and wrapping paper from the Christmas presents in the fireplace on Christmas morning to keep warm. The following summer, the air conditioning went out on my youngest brother’s birthday and it was so hot inside the house that the dogs would not come inside. I laughed at these memories- it’s easy to do now with some distance- and realized once again that we are all doing the best we can, one day at a time.
Having grown-up problems isn’t what makes you a grown up- it’s how we deal with challenges that does.
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