Can You Hear This?

Another entry from the annals of the “Stupid Husband Stories”!

Mother’s day should be a special day for mother’s everywhere. I can’t say that my memories of Mother’s Day while married to Beau’s father give me any warm fuzzies (fortunately, there were only a couple), but, one particular Mother’s Day does stand out in my memory!!

After Beau was born, the ex and I talked about selling our house in order to move into one more suitable for small children. If you’ve read any of the other “stupid” stories, you’ve already learned the ex has a great deal of confidence in himself. Enough, often, to believe he can successfully manage most any task. Needless to say, when we began to talk about selling the house, he was convinced he could do a FSBO (For Sale by Owner).

For several weeks, he would require that we clean everything thoroughly in order to host the vast numbers of folks that were going to respond to his advertisement for an Open House on Sunday afternoon. After 3 weeks, I was a little tired of this weekend wash-up. I thought my statement, that I wanted to have a nice, enjoyable Mother’s Day with my son————–not the odd n’ end stranger strolling through my extremely clean house, would have an impact on his plans. Silly me!!

It was with little surprise, but EXTREME displeasure, I discovered, on the way home from church, that the ex ran an ad for an Open House on Mother’s Day. In addition, he expected me to help with the preparation. Along with my mood, the day was dark and overcast. By noon, it was raining cats and dogs.

It might be appropriate, at this point, to mention we had problems with the roof directly over Beau’s room. It leaked! When it rained very hard, the water would actually run down through the attic crawl space and fill up the ceiling light fixture with water. I should also note, that the erstwhile hubby, had also “fixed” the leak twice before this particular rain storm, thus accounting for the on-going leaky problem, but that’s another story………

With the rain pouring and the light fixture already full of water, I pointed out that putting something in the attic to catch the water, until I could get a repairman to the house the next day, might be a good idea. After all, “we” were expecting lots of potential homebuyers in about an hour. So the ex gets a pan and goes up in the attic.

Beau is taking a nap and I am busy emptying the light fixture when I hear the ex thrashing about overhead. Then I hear a loud shout, followed by a crash and look up to see he had bottomed out. Yep, his backside was “shining” through a newly created hole in the ceiling. We never agreed on decorating ideas, but this was over the top, even for him. It startled poor Beau from his nap. Since he was still fairly little and had never been “mooned” before, he began to cry.

So, there I am, folks, on Mother’s Day with a crying child, a torrential rainstorm, a fast approaching “Open House”, sheetrock and insulation all over the floor and hubby’s butt adorning the ceiling of a bedroom.

My next actions were simple and well-documented and, fortunately for hubby, didn’t include a police report for accidental death or homicide. I left the ex to extricate himself from the ceiling and clean up the mess. I made a sign for the front door which read, “Open House cancelled due to a family emergency. Sorry for the inconvience!” I called a contractor friend to come the next day to fix the roof and, by the end of the week, the house was listed with a local real estate agent!

Lessons Learned: never schedule an open house on Mother’s Day, call a repair professional the first time the roof leaks, when decorating or adorning your home, if you want moons “shining” down on you from the ceiling, purchase the glow in the dark stick-on ones!