I had a leak.

What are you willing to unravel, how honest can you get?

The wet squish of a floor underneath my feet where solid ground should be was the first alarm that something was drastically wrong.

The crack and give of the floor where my daughter ran into the bathroom was the next.

Over the last three months my family and I have been trying to navigate the world of insurance and contractors trying to get a rotted bathroom subfloor fixed. Dark and comical twists and blocks continued to pop up in us trying to fix this water leak.

“What do you think it means?” I ask my best friend. We often speak in ways to decode the mysteries of the universe. The signs.

I do the quick google searches asking for spiritual meaning. This time in our lives has not been frictionless. Of course I am at this point outsourcing and desperate for relief, for answers, for solutions to this karmic cycle of rotten luck.

I set my phone down, feeling the sting of embarrassment and the prick of tears behind my eyes. My pride wavering, as I relent to the thought that; the bathroom is of course just a bathroom, the leak of course is just a leak. We see absurd things unfold around us everyday and I know by now at times things are just as they seem at face value.

But it’s not just a bathroom and I am also a writer and often succumb to magical thinking and I wouldn’t have much to say if I actually believed the above sentiment.

So down to the crawl space we go. My husband descends with a flashlight to confirm the holes and the mold beginning to fester. I go deeper. To the cobwebbed and spider filled room of my mind where this bathroom is not actually just a bathroom.

If this were a stand alone incident, I might have been able to avoid poking around deeper. But its the bathroom, in conjunction with every theme from three years ago begging me to make room for them.

Three years ago I was going through my second pregnancy loss in the midst of us doing the bathroom renovation. In the midst of my partner leaving his job in pursuit of birthing his own company. We all deal with grief differently. Some begin to tear apart the walls of their homes, desperate to change the look of something. Others completely restructure the foundations of their lives, changing the process of their day to day. It looks different on the outside, but it’s the same. Two people desperately trying to prove they have a say in the way their destinies go.

Or maybe it is destiny itself that pushes the broken hearted to burn and dismantle so we can regenerate. Bigger questions that I may never have the answer to.

I won’t write in depth here about how that bathroom actually is more like a tomb and a temple. But those who have experienced loss in this way will know. I will write about how eerie it feels to be at the place in time in the present. Where what we bound ourselves to, what we built is breaking at the fault lines.

I am now watching fractures expand where I once thought was solid ground. How long was it all festering? Were the seeds always planted in a soil too malnourished to flourish?

The way a house holds energetics is not lost on me. I believe in the imprints of joy and sorrow and belly laughs and sobs etched into the particles that settle in this home. That drape over bodies and hearts like the throw blankets on your couch. I think tending to the things that hold us in our day to day, is sacred work. We ripped out the tiles of our day to day three years ago and forgot to tend and instead, we kept building.

I recall Carl Jung suggesting that bathrooms in the subconscious mind often represent an aspect of the shadow self. The place we go for privacy, but also a place of confrontation for aspects of ourself that are unwanted. A place for purification.

It all looked pretty, but the foundation was never solid and we built over repressed desires and pauses.

Of course hindsight is 20/20. It is easy to look at the agreements and contracts we bound ourselves to with more insight. We have grown, a new life did in fact bloom. There were always the pauses. The compromises we would make, the self betrayal in order to get the desired outcome.

We had a leak. The bathroom got fixed, we are reworking foundational issues. I however cannot stop myself from walking on floors and having the phantom feeling that they are giving. The dreams where the shower falls through to the ground. I cannot unsee the infection or the fuzz of mold hiding in places I never even thought to look.

I also cannot ignore the hope that blooms in my chest. It feels fragile and almost momentary like a peony, sensitive like the skin of a new scar. This is healing. This is accountability. This is relief.

What do you want to build on? What are you unraveling? What are you willing to see, what crawlspace are you willing to sit in to be able to move forward on a ground that can actually hold you?

And maybe its still just a bathroom.

But I would be a fool not to take the opportunity to see.

Until next time,

Taylor