Letting the leaky sink drip

My husband is determined to be the one to fix the leaking bathroom sink. Because we aren’t the family to automatically call a plumber. In most cases, we try to figure it out ourselves, at least at first. 

I upload two photos of the Kool-Aid blue goo I found caked to a fresh white bath towel under our drain pipe. The goo appears to be a dollop of gel toothpaste. But as Claude and ChatGPT assert, the blue goo could be water oxidizing with copper pipes or a rubber washer breaking down, and there are ways to repair it on our own. 

I share the findings with my husband who already has an idea of how he’d like to fix it. He’s the guy who forgoes instruction booklets. He retrieves a pipe wrench from the workshop. I am not surprised to see we own a pipe wrench. My father-in-law renovates homes and my husband has joyfully inherited a number of tools with highly specific use cases. 

My husband checks the pipe connections, tightens them, and on and off for several weeks the pipe continues to leak small drips of the blue goo into a clear plastic food container. He tries different things. I ask if I can refill the cabinet with towels. Not yet, he says. 

It’s been difficult for my husband to rock our baby to sleep. This round of parenting has been different than with our first. I’ve abandoned any form of sleep training that doesn’t feel instinctual and wholeheartedly natural, instead co-sleeping on a floor bed and nursing our baby back to sleep any time he rouses. This leaves little room for my husband to step in to assist. We know this. And like with so many other families with multiple children, he reroutes in taking the lead with our five-year-old while I calm the baby whom I’ve cared for most days of the week since he was born. 

One week night, like so many ordinary evenings, my husband is finishing a bedtime story with our older child while I sneak from nursery to kitchen to microwave leftovers like tonight’s mashed potatoes and a chunk of any available protein. 

My husband gently closes our older child’s bedroom door until it clicks shut and joins me in the kitchen. I grab a cloth napkin from a nearby drawer and settle atop a stool around our kitchen island. And just as I shovel a forkful of warm food to my mouth, the baby monitor gleams alive. We hear the connected-home crackle of our baby’s murmurs turn to soft cries, just an hour into our evening journey. 

Only weeks ago, we were enjoying luxuriously long stretches of independence from 7:30 PM to at least midnight. Six months into parenthood, round II, the exhaustion is catching up with me. I untense my shoulders with a few mini arm windmills in mental preparation for leaving a warm plate of food to cool as I return to the nursery. Tonight my husband tells me to sit, eat. He’ll try to put him back to sleep. 

I watch them on the video monitor from the kitchen as I resume my meal. He bounces our sleepsack-adorned baby atop his chest for a few minutes, then puts the baby on his back in the crib, the crib we don’t really use. He presses play on the musical mobile, the mobile that in my eyes is really just for show, decoration. I’d rather he just play white noise from our Hatch Rest sound machine. That’s what the baby is used to. Keep the sleep variables consistent, I think. 

I continue like this – finding all the ways my husband tries to calm our baby differently than I would and opine on them. I predict what won’t work and watch as some of those things do work slightly and then do not. This is no one’s fault. We staggered our parental leaves this go around, meaning I built the systems and schedule for our second baby and my husband will step in as full-time caregiver for a few months as I return to work. I tell myself this moment – this bedtime and others – is the time and space for him to learn, to try new things on his own. 

It is brutally difficult to not insert. I shake some garlic salt onto my potatoes and continue eating in quiet resistance. I want to press the talk button on the monitor and appear in the room, if only by voice, with advice, opinions. I resist. I think about how most mothers must do this – battle with the idea of equality in parenting when it can be excruciatingly counterintuitive to what our animal instincts suggest we do as mother body, which is to step in, to take the lead with the babies we grew inside ourselves. 

The monitor goes fairly quiet. My husband has laid the baby on the floor bed, and is now next to him in C shape, just like the safe sleep rules suggest for co-sleeping. Our baby continues to murmur, unsettled. My husband stays lying there so I can finish my plate clean. He stays there for the baby, but he also stays there for me. 

I end my meal with the final remnants of a container of Ithaca French Onion Hummus and some raw vegetables a few days away from the compost bin. I lay my plate in the kitchen sink and head for our bathroom to wash the fatigue from my face and apply a face balm the brand says will give me a radiant glow. 

I step over a plastic bucket holding the pipe wrench. There’s still a bowl under the drain pipe to catch the leak. It’s been a few weeks. I’m only mildly bothered by this, preferring the time and space to eat more than a stronger state of home repair. I straddle the bucket while brushing my teeth. I could move the bucket to a stray corner but opt for it to stay in place – a visual reminder to both of us to fix it when our volume of open time inches slightly toward plentiful again. 

I ask the LLMs if it’s fine to temporarily use a bowl to capture the dripping water, not really looking for a realistic answer and instead hoping for emotional permission. I tell it we have a baby and another young child. I say our lives have been very full. Its answer is pragmatic. It worries about water damage, moisture issues, especially given that we have young children in the house. 

A week later, I ask my husband if it’s time to call a plumber. Not yet, he says, now even more determined to fix the sink himself. And while I become tempted to call the following day when my husband isn’t around, I resist. I give him this. And I find momentary humor in this gift to him that is allowing him to work on the thing, to fix the thing, and to not pay someone else to accomplish the thing for us. He has the pipe wrench. And I can nurse our son to sleep. And while our time doesn’t feel plentiful at this moment in our family’s history, our tools — whether for home or the humans we’re raising — do seem to be so: plentiful. 

A few more days go by and the sink is still broken. We use a different sink to brush our teeth. Our baby is sleeping slightly better, then gets a cold. He’s fighting congestion and wants to nurse all night for comfort. I order a bendable book-reading light that I can wear around my neck to give myself something else to do as I sequester to a dark room at 7:30 PM and look the night of congested nursing straight in the face. Before I head in, I kiss our older son and my husband goodnight. And into the evening, the two of us parents head down our solitary paths until those paths meet up again in a place where there are always warm mashed potatoes and all the sinks are in working order. For now, we persist.