Part 13 - From Maggots to Mold

Imagine this:

You’re quite pregnant, your head is throbbing. You’re in your fifth week of work overseas trying to get things tidied up and handed off so that you can take off for five months of leave to start your family. You’re in a home that’s not yours. You walk into a bathroom. It stinks. You almost vomit. Then you curl up on the bed and start bawling.

That’s how we started our fifth week here. Week four ended fleeing the maggots. Week five started with nauseating fumes (the current hypothesis is that the stink is coming from mold growing in stagnant water down the pipe).

There was definitely a moment of panic for me. What are we doing here? There was an edge of desperate blaming anger. It’s not my fault. We’re only here because of you. There was self-pity. Maybe I should have found us a better apartment, but I didn’t know how.

And then there was a tidal wave of gratitude and sympathy. Maybe that’s one of the many things that love can be.

I looked over at Addie who had cried herself right into a nap. I looked at Bump B and remembered that the whole reason for being here is to figure it out, day by day. There’s nobody coming to save us. There’s no easy escape hatch to just not deal with it. There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. If we don’t deploy effort to improve our circumstance, we pay the price.

I want to raise a child, given the chance, who will deploy effort to improve their own circumstance when they’re uncomfortable. I want my kid to be the kid that other kids look to when they’re struggling to believe that everything will work out fine. Not because expectations soften to the point that discomfort is acceptable, but because we’re problem solving beings who can identify, evaluate, decide, measure, and ultimately iterate to make tomorrow better than today.

I’ll take a beat here to thank my parents for providing me with skills and attitudes to problem solve abroad. For guiding me to grow the abilities I’d need to pursue something like moving across an ocean with my first child on the way.

Thank you, Mom and Dad. I hope to carry on your legacy of raising capable people. On the way, we’ll keep solving one problem after the next. This week, it’s getting the stink out of our downstairs bathroom.

That’s the game. Keep calm and carry on. And have some fun along the way.