askyermom

Totally misleading title and I cannot care right now. It was an emergency. It was old and nobody knows what exactly has happened. Each person tiptoed in for a part of the emergency and then left without telling the next shift what’s what. [This is from November 2023, so if there’s tension in my tenses, that is why.]

Let me back up. First off, I had a terrible evening when this happened. It seemed like it might be fine, I mean I left work just a smidge early and beat the traffic. As I arrived at Mom’s assisted living house, I remembered that she bugged me to bring cokes. It was weird that she would have run out, but she had been very lucid and could still count. I detoured to get the cokes and found the traffic. It was like everyone in town had decided to buy sodas for their demented mother at the very same time.

When I arrived at her house, I followed protocol and said a prayer, reminded myself of my boundaries and kissed my scarf. Once inside, I could hear Mom using her command voice at the back of the house and I went back to discover the emergency that had her hollering from her bed. She was confused and believed that she had been moved and just wanted to be in her bed. After some calm conversation, I told her she was like Dorothy in Oz and all she had to do was close her eyes and wish to be in her bed and she would be. She wanted me to take away some of the furniture and pile all her belongings on her bed. It had become a favorite delusion; that her bed was some sort of flying carpet. Once she was calm and medicated I left. She already had six cokes before I brought her six more. So much for counting.

It was a weird game. She tried to cook up urgency from nothing and even knowing that rule, I still fell for it regularly. She was very convincing, especially when she was totally loopy. She announced that she would die in two weeks. Her birthday was 15 days away, so maybe that was her cue. I planned on taking her some cake early, just in case.

When I arrived at my house, I parked in the back and hurried to get in because the light is poor and my headlights will shut off before I get in if I’m slow. Everything in this old house is wheezing toward failure. I had a repair tech coming for two appliances to trace a water leak. Then, when the new furnace didn’t seem to be very effective, I felt like it caught whatever all the other appliances were having. My showers had become tragically brief, because the hot water was not hot enough, too. I felt this wave of helplessness. Why do I have to understand so many machines that are supposed to be smart. When the power blinks on after an outage all the machines in the house play a tune to signal their readiness and to show off how smart they are. They don’t play the same tune, of course, but it’s a cheerful cacophony of service. It makes me feel outnumbered.

So, anyway, I barged into the house and noticed that someone had opened the door to the furnace area. Huh. Weird. Then I noticed that no additional water had leaked into the bucket that is my new basement accessory. Good. The closet where the mops and brooms are kept was open. Weird. Yersis must have seen a mouse. It’s about time for that again. Upstairs, I hung up my things and saw there was a new lock on my front door. Weird. My smart lock was in pieces nearby. Very weird. What kind of mischief had Yersis been up to? I called her to ask, “Hello, what the fuck?”

She didn’t do anything and didn’t know anything. My first instinct of blame had been so pure and certain I was befuddled it was a dead end. The flashing lights caught my eye and I saw there were a quantity of large men in trenches in front of the house. There was a tag on my front door on the outside and my wreath was set on the ground. The tag was red and hard to read but I saw that someone had checked some boxes to let me know that my house was entered for emergency purposes. I barged across the street to confront the one man who was not in a hole or doing anything important. He seemed to loom with authority.

He apologized and calmly explained that while my house was broken into, it was an emergency and the police and a locksmith were involved. The call came from my next door neighbor that their gas was not working and my house was shut off because my gas line tees off from theirs. Only the two homes were affected. They were almost done repairing the 100-year old line. My neighbor and I both chimed in that the line can’t be that old, but his maps claimed 1920s and our puny neighborhood history could not persuade him.

Teed off? Yes, I was. I quizzed him on the procedure that meant they had time to call multiple people and organize these trenches, but hadn’t bothered to call me. He pointed out that it wasn’t his department which gave me a polite way to excuse myself and exit the conversation because it was true.

The customer service rep I called was equally calm and methodical. In a gas emergency, they don’t phone, even though my phone number is connected to my address so that calling them pulls up my information on some computer. It then dawned on me that if they had called me or a more erratic customer like my mother, there could be interference with their emergency duty. They had to enter the home. I could have told them to wait and then had time for some advance freak out instead of the aftermath freak out. The element of surprise doesn’t seem like it’s in anyone’s interest, but what do I know.

I told the representative that it was the most polite break-in I could imagine. The dog and cat were both calm and nothing much was disturbed. My lock was maybe not too broken to reinstall, although they left me no key for the replacement. Brass might be an improvement, but a key would be, well, key.

Trench boss had told me that someone else would stop by to get the gas line active in the houses and turn on all the appliances to check the service. They refilled the holes and the crews left. Tofu and I huddled under a blanket with a book and an electric heater running. I was beginning to feel relief from all of my appliance angst, even though the project wasn’t over.

It was now coming clear that I had been trying to set up camp in a weird kind of denial. All the underperforming appliances weren’t some new normal of the first cold snap of winter, the gas was only lighting feebly. I remembered how browning the sausage for stuffing seemed to take forever. Each clue had only made me feel personally sad and broken, as if somehow I didn’t deserve adequate hot water. Wow.

I looked at the pieces of my lock and realized that the whole miasma of mysterious emotion I had been having was simply insecurity. I had not stopped to think about it or look for an outside reason for all the household decrepitude, instead I just soaked it up as signs of my own decrepitude, old me in my old house.

Expecting failure is a crappy habit.

This was actually a huge relief. Sure, I still had a water issue that required a drip bucket, but that’s only one or two failing appliances, which is so much better than eight.

A couple of hours passed before there was a knock on the door. I answered it happily to find a large man with a large beard. “Are you here to turn me on?”

He blinked. “What have you been told?”

It turned out that he was not a turn-on technician, of any specialty, but had come around in response to a report of the smell of gas. Everyone smelled gas tonight, I told him. They had the lines open in the street. He checked my house anyway and ended up next door to finish clearing the connections between us. Why don’t these people talk to each other? Relying on me to explain anything is a terrible idea. I thought my gas failure was a personal failure.

A couple of hours after the not-turn-on man stopped making noise next door another knock woke me and Tofu. The turn-on tech was a feisty little firefighter of a gal who got everything going in record time. She knew what she was doing and didn’t need my interpretations.

The furnace sprang to life and with the luxury of climate control restored, I had never felt more safe despite having had a break in.

I know how to tackle insecurity, after all. It’s always just a bad story we tell ourselves, an illusion.

We are good enough. We can do what needs to be done. We are worthy. Sometimes our neighbors know what we refuse to acknowledge. Men might show up to turn us on, but don’t count on it.

Love,
yermom

This is the place where I link to book info (4.3 stars! better than good!) and book status info which needs an update of its own. Don’t Eat Your Children will be available in 2024, and Harlot’s Last Laugh will be developing. I’m sorry about that. It’s a full time job having my full time job these days.

Please contribute if you enjoy this junk because YOU are the one who keeps the fridge running to keep those words fresh. Thank you!!