The other F-words.....

Flooding

Here's hoping you never experience it. Since flooding is one of those life events that if you experience even once...changes your perspective on quite a number of things.

Firstly, we have too much shit. No seriously, if you have ever been through a flood and you need to rapidly remove all of your belongings that are floating in a 1000 square feet of space, you will realize in a real hurry that you have belongings that make no sense at all. Moving gives you the same feeling but not necessarily with the same intensity if you have time to pack gradually. Both events end in tossing things into the dumpster just to prevent any more heavy lifting when you no longer have the energy to deal.

Why do we keep so much organized paper garbage in bookcases? I still have binders of  notes from culinary school from 10 years ago, and not one, but two filing cabinets. One drawer in the filing cabinet is just dedicated to warranties for household appliances. This makes me very lame.

We have an entire furnace room filled with children's toys in labelled rubber maid bins. Toys that the kids have barely sneezed on in the last 5 years but somehow whenever I threaten to garage sale them, I get a protest that rivals most Occupy Wall Street movements.

Bunk beds are the worst piece of furniture known to man to have to take apart and move quickly, unless you are in a barracks and have an entire military unit to disassemble them. Hate them and subsequently sold them after the second flood, especially since my husband is too short to help me remove the top bunk from the bottom one and I'm too big to get into the top bunk to change the sheets.

I remember a time when the only belongings I had were in a backpack and I could disappear on a dime. Somewhere in between our lives now and my life then is some form of reasonable.

Freakouts

Secondly, don't expect your kids to behave and think the way, say an adult or someone of sound mind might behave in a state of emergency. Kids live in a land of wonder and find beauty in the most tragic of circumstances. We always appreciate this about our children in hindsight and wish we could be more child-like overall but in the midst of a household disaster you might just lose your damn mind as a parent.

I'll give you an example of what this looks like in my world in case you don't have children yet. Upon coming home to discover our home was flooded the first time around, it was just me and the kids. Disaster, as a rule, strikes when my husband is away. It's like a cat and mouse game with me and my higher power. (I envision someone above thinking, "Hey, she's looking a little bored down there, too much going through the motions, too much putting her feet up with a glass of wine and some Corrie on the tele. Let's throw some crazy ass shit at her to deal with so she can feel empowered.").

Once I got past the sucker punch of realization, I quickly instructed the kids to grab whatever the hell they could carry and get it to higher ground upstairs or in the garage as fast as they possibly could. My two youngest are the muscle in the family, both gemini's, they are like power rangers in the face of danger. They went to work grabbing and flinging as instructed.

Like a maniac, I began the hauling and heaving of all of the heavy items upstairs, things that the kids couldn't carry like chairs, dressers, night stands, mattresses and beds. As a woman on a mission, I neglected to see my oldest daughter, my fairy child, until the 20th or so trip up the stairs. She was twirling in a circle, no bigger than a foot, a tiny section of carpet that was completely dry, arms outstretched with a happy look of contentment upon her beautiful face.

"What the HELL are you doing?!", shouted my completely freaked out, psycho mother self to my daughter.

"I'm in the circle of peace", responded my daughter with a wide eyed innocence having been abruptly disturbed from her happy imaginary cloud land inside her head.

"There no circle of peace here!!! Only a circle of Hell!! Now, get back to work!!", was my Mother of the Year response.

Frustration

Insurance after natural disasters such as flooding is a complicated, difficult and often a frustrating issue. One important point to remember is that the insurance company will try to settle a claim for as little money as possible, and their adjusters work towards that goal.

Some adjusters and companies that offer assistance for flood relief have sold their soul to the devil.  These people make money off of other people's disasters for a living and sympathy is hard to find. They also have personalities that dirt would envy. Our first flood resulted in a $1200 bill for three basement dryers for a period of three days. The second time we begged and borrowed equipment from friends. It cost us a few bottles of wine and some gift cards.

There is no flooding insurance in Canada. The only monies you can claim is under Property Coverage: extension of coverage to water damage (ground water). Our amount of coverage in our policy is $10,000. I really hope yours is much, much more. If we wanted our insurance to cover our damaged belongings, tear out of flooded property, equipment to dry out our home, repairs and furniture storage, we would need about $25,000. Frankly, our furniture in the basement is shit, so if you have nice furniture, make it $30,000.

If you don't have $30K of coverage in your policy, then this means your regular family life will be exchanged for a self imposed chain gang lifestyle for several months, on average 2-3, until you manage to get the work done yourself. Now, $10K will cover that and if your are lucky, you can swing for a couple of bottles of booze to numb the pain.

Fuckups

When it came time to sort out the flooding source, the cause of our pain and financial fisting, we couldn't have made worse decisions. This should be your first priority. Having a contractor friend sort out installing a new sump pump and having your husband otherwise known as Anti-handy Andy pick out an appropriate new sump pump is a REALLY stupid way of ensuring that your home has a pretty good chance of flooding, not once but twice. Using anyone other than a qualified plumber to do these things is like choosing a lobotomist to do your rectal exam.

There were other factors the second time around too, but in our haste to get our lives back to normal, we should have spent more time focused on flood prevention instead of looking at cheap carpet samples. We now have a much deeper hole that's been dug by our super plumber and have two sump pumps installed, including one that is attached to a marine battery and will give us 1-2 hours of pumping in case the power goes out. Time enough to beg a generator off of a friend until we get one of our own.

Digging outside our foundation to install a pipe to allow water to drain towards the back of the property is on our list of fun times ahead for the spring with the idea that if we keep water from coming in, it will also keep water from coming up. Rocket science....

Why didn't we do this the first time around? I'll blame it on the fact that we spent time learning calculus and things about the industrial revolution in high school instead of learning how to build a deck or fix a leaking toilet that's cracked or how important creosote removal is in fire prevention or how to properly care for your furnace so that you don't kill your entire family with carbon monoxide. Those are stupid subjects not worthy of learning...apparently. Almost everyone in their lifetime will live in a house of some sort, but only a handful of our entire civilization will ever need to know how to calculate the slope of a curve. Fuck me, if I can figure out how they determine school curriculums.

Did I forget to mention that installing carpet twice is a dumb ass idea for a basement that floods. Duh! This is painfully stupid when you are hauling it to the dump and it still looks the way it arrived only now its sopping wet and unrecoverable. LVT, is the way to go, a vinyl flooring product that can get wet, requires no sub floor and monkeys can put it together. Actually that is an insult to monkeys. Sorry monkeys.

Friends & Family

If you have any of these miraculous people in your life and they care about what happens to you and your family and they are not psycho's, allow yourself the honour and privilege of accepting help. So, so hard for me to do since accepting help undermines my feelings of independence, opens me up to vulnerability (psycho's cause trust issues so avoid them) and challenges my need to feel that I have the strength to cope with difficulty all on my own.

There are so many gifts in the act of generosity for the giver well beyond free wine and gift cards or so I am told. Giving increases happiness, fulfillment and purpose of life in ways that having a large bank account never will or so says, "Psychology Today". I'm trying to focus on the generosity of being humble in accepting help from others. I hear that it will make me a better person, so for now, let's just go with that.

“In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” 
― Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman's Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia

Freedom

We can easily become prisoners of our own frustration and despair, whether it be problems at home, work or otherwise. As a Chef, I often get asked if regular kitchens resemble the Gordon Ramsay world of "Hell's Kitchen". Then answer is not everyday. If it did, there would be a hell of a lot more bloodshed on that show. People being stabbed in the eye and punched in the throat. Good realty TV fodder, not sure why they don't...more Chefs would watch it, if they did.

What I do tell people is that unlike other workplaces, the insane stress that is often put upon kitchen staff brings out the absolute best and the absolute worst of everyone that you work with. Most workplaces hide the ugly bits behind insincere smiles, politically correct behaviour and HR paperwork. There is no place to hide in the kitchen. It will make you fall in love with the people you work with and hate their guts all at once. As a result, most kitchen teams are a tight unit because of the freedom that comes from being vulnerable to the good, the bad and the ugly behaviour of everyone on the team.

The only price tag that comes with finding a way to deal with what life throws at you, is acceptance. This requires letting go of self-will, circumstances beyond our control, self-pity, rage, unrealistic expectations, and blame. Surrender does not mean weakness or giving in. It means asking for help when we need it. Acceptance allows us the freedom to work on the things we can control versus the things we can't.

We have the power to set ourselves free from our personal shortcomings that chain us to our problems. They do not need to define our quality of life, emotional well-being or level of joy and happiness. I do not have to accept misery and allow it to distort my everyday thinking.

Being a bit of a perfectionist (I know this will come as a gigantic surprise to most of you...shocking!), I can often cling stubbornly to the ideas of what I think life ought to be. It puts massive demands upon myself and others, makes big problems out of little ones, increases despair when things don't go as planned and makes me struggle to accept things as they are.

Learning to not be touched too deeply by the happenings around me that are essentially unimportant is my life lesson. My daughter is teaching me how to do that with her "circle of peace".

We are your average Canadian family, and we use the F-word.