Of Straws and Husbands

It really is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. It’s not the Bedouin. Or the Bedouin’s tent. Or his wife. Or her pet dog. It’s a straw. The little things get us.

For me, it wasn’t the dead refrigerator, or the roof, or the dead tree that caught fire while we watched helplessly. It wasn’t even my camera.

Oh, did I not mention the camera? Sometime between dead tree and roof, a kid at the pool splashed my camera, filling it with saline. It was a total accident, nobody’s fault. But now the digital display is inconsistent, and there are sometimes pictures that cannot be deleted. Because they won’t go away. But if I try to delete one, the whole memory card is erased. Fun times, but I am making due until I have saved for a big girl camera.

My breaking point was the shower head. I knew it was too good for me the moment we bought the house. And clearly, it knew it, too. The house’s previous owners remodeled and added some pretty awesome features. They wanted the bathroom to be like a hotel, complete with soap/shampoo/conditioner/lotion dispenser (I kid you not. And I have yet to find refill kits for it.) and the shower head. The shower head is was a marvel of engineering. It has a two-foot long slide bar that allowed us to adjust it to the proper height for the current occupant, from the six-foot man of the house to the two-and-a-half foot Squish. More importantly than that, however, the slide bar actually held up the shower head. And now it doesn’t.

It started its slow death a few months ago. There was a little wiggle when we changed the height. Then it kind of slid to one side. But we could work with it. Until two nights ago when it gave up the ghost completely and I found pieces of its carcass in the bottom of the tub, shower head laying as unsupported as a volleyball player without a sports bra. You knew there would be at least one Olympic reference, right?

And I lost it. I didn’t go all Hulk-smash or anything, but I’m still not proud of myself. I muttered, cried a little, maybe I beat my head against a wall. Because I’m good at that. I lamented every single thing in my life that has turned to crap because I touched it, all the way back to the Wal-Mart stock I pretend invested in in economics class in the eighth grade .Seriously. Stock was booming until the moment I filled out my assignment form, at which point it tanked. For years. Yes, if you lost your cheap, foreign-made shirt investing in Wal-mart in the late 80’s, all I can say is “You’re welcome.”

Anyway, back to my current tragedy. I attempted to take a shower, broken equipment and all, and it was unpleasant. Any idea how hard it is to condition one’s hair with one hand while the other holds the water at just the right angle so as not to wash it all off before the stuff has done its moisturizing duty? And forget shaving the legs. I don’t ask much out of life, but I do have a need to be clean.

My tantrum subsided after a bit, and I was able to discuss calmly with my husband the importance of repairing the device soon.  My sweet guy gathered the broken parts, and then he left, cancelling his evening plans of lame Olympic coverage and an episode of Sherlock so he could fix the problem sooner rather than later. I love him.

Maybe it was my tears of despair. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve let a lot of other crap roll of my back lately. I even handled the malfunction of my beloved camera philosophically, though it is practically a second limb. Or maybe it was the inability to shave my legs. Few enjoy sharing sleeping quarters with a porcupine, after all. I choose not to examine too closely and just say that he loves me. A lot. And he fixed it.

It’s a temporary fix, to be sure. But it will hold until we find the distributor who made the hotel shower head holder. And save up the money to replace it. I can work with that. A $5 solution by a husband that loves me, and I am ready to take on the world again. Sometimes its the little things that break us. And sometimes its  small stuff that gets us right back up on the camel. It’s a good view from up here. I like it.

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Don’t forget to visit here to enter my giveaway. I’ll have pictures of the goodies tomorrow, I hope.