DIRTY DRIPS

There is a feller in our home.

I don’t know what it is with us and ceilings and leaks, but we woke up this morning to water dripping through the kitchen ceiling, all due to a busted tap in the bathroom.

Now we have a man here, and while he’s here we’re getting him to do a bunch of other jobs that we’ve put off for far too long. Horribly expensive, can’t really afford it, but it needs doing. Life stuff, eh?

So, that has been our day so far.

This probably doesn’t seem like the biggest deal, but Sanja and I have a weird anxiety when it comes to calling in tradespeople.

With me, part of it is guilt-driven, because I have this hard-wired condition of worth that I should be able to do DIY and fix everything myself. I can’t do DIY – I’ve tried, and inevitably make everything worse. Flooding the back room and putting an axe through the ceiling are but two of the consequences of my repair efforts.

None of the things I’m good at are in any way practical (I can’t write a new ceiling) and so are seen – by some anyway – as less valuable. So I feel less valuable, an sort of like a failure.

I know this is some latent gender bias thing, because my dad – who was every bit as bad at DIY as me – was nagged into doing it by my mum, rather than call someone in. He once put a drill through his leg, and couldn’t use a hammer without smashing his thumb open. Or swearing.

You can add to that condition of worth being cemented by the fact my brother-in-law is brilliant at all that stuff, AND because my ex also fancied herself a handyperson, which was sometimes held up in the family as an example of how useless a human being I am. Or a useless excuse for a man anyway. I always felt like that cliché of the guy who came from a long line of miners, and wanted to run off to London to become a poet instead of work down the mine.

“A poet?!? A bleedin’ la-di-dah poet?! Get thee down t’pit, son!”

Rather than call someone in right away, I just get paralysed. It’s a real fear. Real fundamental stuff burrowed down in my soul. In the fight/flight/freeze response – when it comes to that, I freeze.

That said, I take a small degree of comfort in the fact that since I bought out my ex’s share of the house, we’ve learned that a lot of the issues we’ve had are to do with the fixes she did around the place… We’ve had a lot of “Who the hell did this?!?”-type reactions when the tradespeople show up.

So. She wasn’t that good at it. Ha ha.