During extremely stressful situations, like my MIL being in hospice care these past weeks, I’m always surprised how life insists on going on. So it was extremely interruptive when my youngest woke me up in the middle of the night to tell me the refrigerator was leaking. I knew the hose to the ice maker must have broke, because it happened in 2012 (that’s what a life blogger gets – a timeline of when things break).
I didn’t initially wake my husband because there’s a little shutoff valve between the fridge and where the hose drops into the floor. I was just hoping it broke on the side the fridge was on and not the side that fed the water. No such luck. Dad was paged out of his slumber, though I think he really woke when something crashed off the top of the fridge upon moving it.
My poor husband gets up at 3:40 in the morning for work, the last thing he needed was to mess with a broken ice maker hose. And why do those kinds of things happen in the middle of the night anyway? Why can’t something break while I’m making dinner and I’m standing right there? Anyway, he had to rush outside in his bathrobe and turn off the water main to the house. We Googled 24-hour hardware stores, then I made an executive decision and sent dad back to bed. We could live without running water for a few hours.
I told him to leave the valve out and I’d go buy a new one in the morning and fix it myself. It seemed simple enough. As we climbed back into bed, my husband fired instructions: don’t snip the end of the hose, it will crack it; try and get the connector with a shut off, but if you can’t a coupling will do; make sure to check for leaks after you turn the water main back on.
What he was really saying was he didn’t trust I wouldn’t mess it up. His concern was not without merit. I am the type to storm the coast without making sure my boat is still anchored. But I was determined I could do it, so the next morning, I was eating breakfast determining my next move, when I saw he sent his text: “I’m leaving work at 9.”
That was fine with me. I didn’t have to prove anything. Besides, he decided to replumb it into the kitchen sink instead of the piping under the house. For that, he had to go into the crawl space and patch the old location and then attach the new plumbing. I don’t crawl under houses. Heck, he doesn’t like to crawl under houses.
I tried to make it better for him by telling him at least the duct sealing crew was under there recently and maybe the bigger spider webs would have been removed. It didn’t make him feel better. The next best thing I could do was lend him my gardening hoodie so he felt completely covered from the creepy crawly things he might encounter.
It took him a day and a half and only three trips to the hardware store, but he did it. We always hope when we’re dealing with something as stressful as a parent dying, we don’t have to also deal with mundane household issues. However, when things break and have to be resolved immediately, it serves to take our minds off the more pressing issue at least for a moment. I’m not saying having the ice maker hose break was a blessing, but sometimes we need a respite, even a bad one has its place.
Gretchen Leigh is a stay-at-home mom who lives in Covington. You can read more of her writing and her blog on her website livingwithgleigh.com or on Facebook at “Living with Gleigh by Gretchen Leigh,” or twitter @livewithgleigh. Her column is available every week at maplevalleyreporter.com under the Life section.
