“When I walked in and saw all that water my first thought was, this is going to suck in so many different ways.”

-David,  after a crap day at work, when he came home and (unbeknownst to me) saw that I had accidentally flooded our basement by leaving a hose running in the wash sink for 45 minutes. The water pressure from the hose had made it so the hose was shooting upwards spraying the walls and ceiling and pouring back down onto the floor while I played Go Fish with the boys upstairs.

I was just about to delcare four pair of goldfish when I heard David shout, “Water! Water! Water!” Hearing running water in your house in any room but the bath or kitchen is so defeating. You’re rushing into action while knowing that you’re literally sunk. Fire. Burglars. That’s just one scary message to GET OUT. Water is your mess and you have to get soaked and salvage. I ran down the basement to see our rug was was a raft, the kids drawings were floating and pools of green and blue ink, mixed with a brownish sludge from I don’t know where.

“You left the hose on,” was all he said. I was so embarrassed I blushed but my tone was not coy, “Get me towels and broom!” I screamed. The kids wanted to see the flood but David shooed them away. This was my mess and I had to clean it.  How did I do this? I had come downstairs to wash Dashiell’s winter coat and I rinsed out the laundry detergent cup and I must have left the hose on. The kids must have called me. I was becoming a mutli-tastking Mr. Magoo.

Or simply my own mother. My mom had recently flicked an ash into a waste paper basket and set my dad’s office on fire. She was on the phone and told her friend she had to go because the dogs were barking and she smelled smoke. Luckily the fire tried to climb a brick wall unsuccessfully and to her credit she grabbed the fire extinguisher but her arthritis prevented her from using it so she threw pillows at the flames and dialed 911. She and the dogs and the house survived, save for a $14,000 insurance claim.

My mom is 70, and she made a mistake. I’m 39, and I made a mistake. But the subtext here is clear: my family’s absent-minded streak is starting to gel in me—big time. Me, my mom and my dad (but not really my brother) have a history of going along with our business in a do-ta-do kind of way and then meeting calamity in a slam-bam-holy-shit-surprise climatic moment. My mother pulls out of the driveway and rams into the postman’s truck. Once when my dad was admiring the beach view with my baby cousin, he leaned back on a lose railing he had been meaning to fix and fell six feet down off the deck with the baby landing on his chest. I’ve learned the hard way that that when making pesto/smoothie/margaritas to put the lid on the blender BEFORE you press blend. I’ve also quite accidentally thrown my granola breakfast onto the back of unsuspecting freelancer at the Conde Nast cafeteria while engrossed in conversation with a glamorous freind.

These incidents and the basement make me laugh now. But at the time of the flood I was a lunatic. I screamed for a broom David could never find. (Brooms are the only way to swish and swash water effectively down a French Drain.) I slipped while holding the sopping rug and fell in a watery pile of mouse poop and spiders and started to cry and then started to laugh. Conrad felt so bad he made me a bookmark. And when he wanted to come downstairs and give it to me, I heard David say, “No don’t do it now, that’s just going to make her crazy.” A statement that revealed his true feelings: I had become the crazy mommy. It was three sane men on the stairwell and one wet, crazy mother in the basement. The unspoken dynamic/dysfunction had been uttered. I coudln’t believe my ears, it wasn’t until I was 16 that my dad copped to the fact that my mother might be crazy. David was laying it bare for Conrad and Dashiell before they’d even hit thier double digits.

Thankfully the boys decided to risk seeing me at my worst and carefully stepped over the obstacle course of watery soaked boxes on the basement stairs to give me the bookmark. My mother would have been smoking and told me to go upstairs to get the pillbox from her purse. But this was my moment to prove to David that yes I am becoming more absent-minded and can get crazy mad, but I’m cultivating own kind of crazy. Friendly crazy. Crazy with room to laugh if you let me scream first. Crazy without having to take a Paxil. When Conrad handed me the bookmark. I took off my soaking kitchen glove and carefully put it in a dry place and thanked him for being so thoughtful and for being so good for Daddy while I cleaned up the mess.

After my two hours of mopping and using Clorox Clean Up to wipe up the mouse poop and spiders, I was freshly showered and thought I’d call my mother-in-law because it had been a few days. When I told her what I did, all she asked was, “Did anything of David’s get ruined.” No, nothing of his got ruined, I told her. I could be annoyed, but I guess, in some ways its nice to know he’s got someone on his side.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 19th, 2009 at 2:17 pm and is filed under My weekly essay. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.