Broken faucet...

It is 9:30 a.m. and I am on my way out of the door to hit the gym for a couple of hours, when all of a sudden I hear my father calling for help from the bathroom on the basement floor.  I move at a glacial pace because he seems pretty calm, but when get to the doorway of the bathroom, I see an old man, trying to stop water from going everywhere.  My father, who is usually quite the handy man, had broken the hot water knob off of the faucet and called himself trying to to turn the water off when, poof, the protector flies off and water is flying in all directions.  As he attempts to stop the water with a wrench, he asks me to take over.  I'm just asking all kinds of questions, trying to avoid having to take over this job because I know that I will get soaked in the process.  He says he needs to go call somebody.  I yell and say, "We don't have time.  You have to cut the main water supply off for the entire house right now before the entire basement is flooded out."  Apparently the knob under the sink to turn off the water supply for this sink, specifically, was missing and he didn't know why.  So, he asks me to take over while he runs to go shut the water off outside of the house.  I try to do all that I can to stop the water from flowing onto the bathroom tile.  I take the wrench off and water completely soaks my hair and half of my t-shirt.  I then yell for my son to hand me the towel behind the door so that I can cover the broken knob to prevent the water from completely ruining the floor.  He does just as I ask him to and it temporarily works.  Meanwhile, I realize that my father is standing at the top of the stairs panicking and yelling for some keys.  I yell to him, "You have to turn the water off now, before this bathroom is ruined completely."  He calmly says, "I know."  He gets what he needs and is out the door.  The next twenty seconds feel like twenty minutes as I am scooping water from the edge of the bathroom counter into the sink to keep it from falling on the floor.  My son fetches me five more towels to start cleaning up the floor with and I am even turning the floor mats over at this point to get the carpet side to soak up some water as well.  I realize that my favorite beach towel, which I covered the broken faucet knob with is completely soaked and the sink is full of water and about to spill over onto the floor when the water is finally shut completely off.  I felt like I was in a wading pool because there was so much water on the floor and on the counter.  My shirt was completely wet and it was obvious that I was going to have to rebrush my hair.  It was truly the most excitement that I have had in all my years of house fixing problems.  Just as my father is thanking me for mentioning to him to turn off the main water supply for the entire house, I realized that I haven't even brushed my teeth yet, and began to wonder where I was going to get water from.

As my housing responsiblities become more and more evident to me, it is clear that I have a lot of learning to do.  For so long I had been broken myself that I didn't even have the desire to know or learn these things.  Now that I am a single mother of two in this house with my father, I am learning the responsibilities of taking care and upkeepnig a home.  It is truly fascinating to me.  The more that I am here helping him take care of this house, the more I see that there is so much more for me to learn in my adulthood.  I truly believe that you never stop learning, but I feel like there is so much that I missed somehow.  Where was I?  What was going on in my life that I had not experienced these type of things yet? 

The more that I realize that I am a broken person in the sense that there are so many things that I want to do and learn in this life and so many things that I haven't achieved yet that I often wonder what I can offer someone else.  The other question that I ask myself is if I was seeking a suitor, what would he need to bring to the table to offer me wholistically?  It started to trigger all kinds of thoughts in my mind.  In this day in time, do women even ask those questions?  I don't think I ever did when I was young and marrying the father of my children.  I think we both assumed that since we had already started a family together, it was the right thing to do...to get married and not worry about those things that we wanted and had dreams of doing.  Did we simply waste each other's time the past eight years of our lives?  It is evident now that we finished our childhood years together growing as adults and were growing in two completely different directions.  So I ask myself, if we wasted so much time together only to grow apart, what makes me think it won't happen again?  How will I know if I am doing the right thing when I think I finally find the right person?  Will that person really be the right person for me?  I mean, the truth is that I really didn't know my husband until we had been married for a couple of years.  It was only then that the lies and the cheating began to unfold and he wasn't very good at hiding the evidence of his sneaky ways.

The truth is, the faucet this morning begain to spray water everywhere only after it was tampered with.  The beauty behind the water going crazy in the bathroom was that the water hit places in the bathroom that, most of the time, only see a rag and some multipurpose cleaner.  But after it was all finished and the cleaning was done, the bathroom was sparkling clean.  It was whiter than it had ever been.  So, maybe I am not supposed to think through every little thing in life.  The best things come about due to an accident that nobody sees coming.  I believe my faucet is already broken.  It has been damaged and used inappropriately many times by its owner, but I am not sure that I want it to be fixed just yet.  It is clear that my faucet has some spray cleaning it needs to do and just maybe along the way, I will discover some new things that I never knew.  My lesson for the day is that sometimes it is alright to be a broken faucet...we all have to break sometimes...