The Arrow: Gains and Losses, and a brand new Whiz Palace
<p class="">Last summer while we were <a href="http://www.erinketheridge.com/search?q=river%20camp">away at River Camp</a>, our elderly cat Zoe decided to pee on the bathmat a few times rather than hoist herself into the litter box and her stanky cat urin
I’m not sure how many people in my extended orbit are aware, but I’m slowly working toward becoming a nurse. That might seem like a hard left turn career-wise, and in one sense it is, but in another sense, it’s more of an extended merge. I’ll write about this sometime. But for now, the point is, last year I took a human development psychology class as one of my prerequisites (I’d only had general psychology as an undergrad) and among the many fascinating things I learned, the concept that there are gains and losses at every stage of life has become part of my mental scaffolding.
The gains and losses concept is useful in almost every part of life, and it’s particularly useful in the erratic, wildly unique context of a modern global pandemic. In case anyone forgot about that.
Everyone is experiencing gains and losses, but they’re all different and specific to our circumstances. Some losses are going to be profound. Losing a youth soccer season or a graduation ceremony is still grief-worthy, even though it’s not life-and-death grief worthy.
For myself, I’ve felt a sort of survivor’s guilt at my relatively low-profile losses, and in fact, I’ve felt even more conflicted about my gains. Like how we didn’t need to use our stimulus money to literally survive but were instead able to use it to actually, well, stimulate the economy. Which is theoretically what it’s supposed to be used for, right? Ugh, whatever. In this scenario, none of the calculus works.
The Second Arrow
Then the other day, Vox published an article on just this phenomenon: being actually kind of okay during all this, and feeling bad about it. The author referenced the Buddhist idea of The Arrow. Some painful event or piece of news or change happens (the first arrow) but then we follow it up with a story we’re telling ourselves about the pain (the second arrow).
It’s this secondary wound, the self-inflicted one, that increases suffering beyond the pain of the experience itself.
Everyone does it. I think it happens during one of the stages of grief, the bargaining or the anger or depression. The stages where you’re trying to assign blame or responsibility, either to yourself or others.
I wanted to document how we used the bulk of our stimulus money, but I shot myself with the second arrow, and I was struggling to share without a hundred caveats and mea culpas. I stabbed myself with my own good fortune, quickly forgetting about the time just a few months ago when we were struggling with large medical and car repair bills.
The bad luck wasn’t my fault back then, and the good luck isn’t earned now. It just is. It’s the ebb and flow of life.
So anyway. This is a post about our bathroom.
The Whiz Palace
Our “master bathroom” has been underperforming for years. We did a big refresh of it when Ethan was about a year old—11ish years ago—which included porcelain tile floors from the building salvage place, and a Craigslist porcelain pedestal sink to replace the bulky, builder-grade vanity. The mirror was from my childhood dresser. (Fun Fact! I have no idea what happened to the mirror that we initially put up. That was pretty decent. I have a vague feeling that it broke somehow? And then that’s when we put up the old dresser mirror?)
Through the years the lack of counter space has become an annoyance, the tiles have cracked (inexpertly installed without underlayment, back when we were still DIY newbies), and the jute storage drawers have begun to disintegrate, covering all the contents with a fine dusting of fibers. Yet we lived with it all, without any real plan to do anything about it.
Until!
The part with the elderly cat
Last summer while we were away at River Camp, our elderly cat Zoe decided to pee on the bathmat a few times rather than hoist herself into the litter box and her stanky cat urine seeped into the tile cracks and old grout.
I like to think she was urinating into the grout at this very moment, when Ethan was grimly clinging to the kayak because I kept accidentally smacking his especially wide cranium with the oar and I was suppressing a growing sense of dread that we would never get back to the dock even though we were only about ten feet away:
When we got home and smelled the travesty in the bathroom, Noah had to pull out about four of them, and we’ve been living with exposed subfloor in there for upwards of 9 months. I DIYed a solution by doubling up the bathmats. No problem!
And then That Whole Thing happened, and several weeks later, a stimulus check was deposited in our account.
We had already used a little of our tax refund to purchase “luxury vinyl tile” (ummmmmm….SmartCore is what it is, from Lowe’s) for both bathrooms (which together clock in at less than 140 sq. ft.), and we used some of the stimulus cash to buy a truly LUXURIOUS vanity from Costco, which fit our layout and plumbing situation perfectly AND was $300 LESS in store than the already bargain price on the Costco website. I ordered two 80%-off-sticker-price eco-smart toilets from Wayfair—the kind of toilets that are skirted and sleek all the way to the ground, so there’s nowhere for errant pee dribbles to pool and collect…ugh boys are SO GROSS! I love them so much! But they’re gross! I ordered a new mirror off Amazon—how is everyone feeling about Amazon? Ugh, let’s not go THERE either right now, one crisis at a time.
One thing led to another, and we (and by we I mean Noah) ended up scraping the popcorn ceilings out of each bathroom, patching and painting the ceilings, and they look sooooo much better!
And just like that, we have essentially a new bathroom.
I can’t tell you how truly luxurious it feels to have a pleasant floor feel underfoot, a beautiful and functional vanity, a throne befitting the name!
New Toilet vs. The Second Arrow
I can, however, tell you that I can’t get over that good fortune, that it feels terrible to know so many people are out of work or furloughed—including my sister-in-law, who is a nurse practitioner!—while I have two flush options to choose from (full disclosure: my sister-in-law already had two flush options, so that proves the point: my good fortune is irrelevant in this scenario).
One thing is not connected to the other, no matter how much it feels that way. My stepping out of the bath onto a plywood subfloor as some sort of penance wouldn’t give anyone back their livelihood.
I’m becoming more practiced in embracing the gains without letting the losses take over the narrative. Both happen, and both are necessary, even when they’re painful.