Fighting with Plumbing...

When I envisioned remodeling our bathroom, my mind did not immediately go to my unborn children. Truth be told, my first thought was of pictures of our finished bathroom on the cover of Sunset's remodeling issue. On the list of grand fantasies regarding a basic bathroom remodel, my future children were admittedly pretty far down the list. How I might permanently scar them didn't even make the first draft of said list. Now, I don't have any children yet, but as a man in his late twenties, recently married, I spend increasingly more time planning, day-dreaming, and worrying about the kind of father I will be and by proxy, what kind of kids I will raise. So, as I took crow bar and enthusiasm to tile and dry rot, I felt confident not of my handyman aptitude, which is admittedly lacking, but surely confident my children’s psychological well-being was not hidden in the sub-floor, fragile and impressionable. Yet, in the midst of debris and second hand tools, during an extended battle with a stubborn pipe, my father and the father I would become entered the room and scared me to death. I slammed a wrench down, screamed awfully at the inanimate object, and stood, ready to physically fight a ¢46 pressure fitting that would not come off. My cats sprinted for cover while my wife avoided eye contact and turn to leave. Later, after my heart rate dipped and fury receded, she said simply “I just don’t want our kids to be afraid of you”. And there it was. She was not worried about the broken wrench, not worried about the bathroom, or me …she worried that I would be the monster hiding in the closets of our children. Maybe I would be better served to lose sleep over that rather than my choice of tile colors. So, my new remodeling “project” might be me, using more patience than rage and less of my father’s plumbing. You never know, I might just be able to break the cycle of loss when it comes to emotions vs inanimate objects.