In our strenuous efforts to exert control, we mostly find that we don’t have any.
”It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet told himself that never in all his life, and he was goodness knows how old – three, was it, four? – never had he seen so much rain”
So begins chapter nine of AA Milne’s “Winnie the Pooh”.
It was this story I read each night for several months to my then-young son.
There was nothing I could do about it. If I tried to begin a different chapter, or selected another book, he would complain and refuse to close his eyes.
If I was especially exhausted and tried to skip a page or two believing him to be unconscious he would stand up and point to the pages of the book that I’d missed.
If I entertained any illusion of control it soon became clear that I had very little.
So this week, as the torrential rain smashed against the side of the house making the garden so treacherous I took my phone out there with me and the dogs in the event that I should slip, break a limb, and need to call for assistance, I found myself helpless again when a vast damp patch appeared on the ceiling and wall in the back bedroom.
It seems that a lot of people were having similar problems this week if my difficulty in finding a roofer was anything to go by.
So I stood peering up at the gable end trying to work out if that really was crumbling concrete I could see between the tiles and the wall but I had no real idea and no control.
Elsewhere in the house, my influence was no greater.
The dogs still needed walking but I was running out of clean towels with which to dry them off before they ran thankfully into the warm dry house and shook the grubby, watery residue from their coats against the wall and trampled muddy paws across the carpets.
By day three I was beginning to lose a grip I’d not had in the first place.
My sister texted,
“Have you found anyone to look at the roof yet?”
“No, but I hope someone comes before I’m found lying under a pile of collapsed ceiling.”
She didn’t react to my penchant for over-dramatisation having grown familiar with it over the years.
Looking elsewhere for control I try and carve time from my working day to tidy and do some cleaning, but where I was happily idle for a brief period in the middle of last week when the house wasn’t on the point of collapse and the rains less biblical, this week I can’t draw breath before some other piece of work arrives needing my attention.
A question to answer from someone at risk of redundancy.
“My head’s all over the place and I can’t concentrate worrying about it.”
I tell him a story about a therapist friend of mine who worked with someone once who just came every week and cried, not knowing how to cope when his wife left him, unable to contain his feelings of helplessness.
“One day he arrived much brighter and said that he’d come to realise that whatever happens, he’d be OK. Once he stopped trying to control what he couldn’t control and focused instead on his ability to survive all but the most unlikely outcomes he found he didn’t need to have control after all.”
Finally, a gap emerged in which I could have a proper clean and tidy.
I made myself some dinner from a large bowl of leftover rice.
“I’ll get on with the housework after I’ve eaten,” I thought.
Eating all of the rice turned out to be a mistake because I felt so full and exhausted that I had to rest for a while and found myself on the internet checking the chapter number of the Winnie the Pooh story.
While doing so I found a lovely print of the illustration at the beginning of “Piglet Is Entirely Surrounded By Water,” which reminded me of those bedtime stories with my now adult son, so I bought it and had a nap.
When I woke up it was getting late so I decided to leave the housework, dirty towels, and grubby carpets and just wait for more rain.
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