Plumber's Daughter

When you’re the daughter of a master plumber and expert handyman—a doer, a person who takes things apart fearlessly and fixes them—you develop a complex. You feel inadequate at home, around him, when you don’t want to attempt fixing something because you fear you might do it wrong, or make a stupid move. He might judge you harshly for not figuring it out or being able to just follow the instructions. You had also learned to ask him to fix whatever was broken when you were younger, and he did, because he knew you were pretty young to figure it out, and he liked to do it, anyway. But now that you’re older, he expects you to have observed and learned, and to try it yourself. You feel the pressure around him to not be stupid or illogical, so you either don’t say anything to him about whatever you could use his help with, or else you just try it on your own, when he isn’t watching.

But away from home, you are actually on a different plane. Your friends’ dads may not have been plumber-handymen. You find they call repairmen to come in and fix things for lofty fees. You think, “wow, why don’t they just look at it to see if they can find the problem and solve it?” You remember how your dad banged on the furnace and took the wrenches down into the basement and came back up with the fires roaring (although they couldn’t roar for long, because that’d cost too much money… nevertheless, the furnace now worked). You remember the clogged sinks and how you had to cover that little hole with a damp towel while you plunge, in order to create the pressure and suction. You see your boyfriend’s drain filled with water that is slow to go down. He leaves it, but you stick your hand in and pull out the drain, finding a wad of hair and gunk on the end of it. You clean it off, put it back into the sink, and watch the water go down the tubes.  It was a very simple fix, but sometimes it seems people don’t even look, for whatever reasons, perhaps because they assume they wouldn’t know what to do. Would he have left it or put drain cleaning chemicals down there, not even thinking that he could pull the parts out and investigate? Would he know how to use a plunger on a sink, let alone using it in a standard way on a toilet?

               

You think of your dad in the bathroom, lifting the ceramic back of the toilet off and jiggling the ball and flusher when the water level is oddly low in the bowl, or the water is continuing to run long after a flush. Running water costs money, so you can’t just leave it going. You’d watch him and think “wow, I don’t want to touch that; or wow, I don’t understand, good thing he’s doing it.” But when you’re away from home, you have that leg up in many cases. You have come to realize that you just have to wash your hands after sticking them into the toilet or reaching into the water area behind it, scum and mold or not. You realize that you can wiggle parts and often something shifts and it works again. You realize you can take note of what you did, and try the same thing next time, and find there’s in fact a logic to that wiggling. You don’t have to do anything but investigate and be confident that you’re actually helping the cause. Without your dad watching you, you don’t feel in your mind that you’re judged for  not thinking logically enough as a  handygirl; instead you are commended for trying to fix whatever’s broken at all, and you are bold in what you try, because you know your boyfriend or other friends don’t necessarily know any more than you do.

To be a master plumber’s daughter outside of his house is wonderful at times. You rise up and fix something yourself, finding you’ve learned more from him than you know when you’re under his self-shingled and repaired roof.