Trials

Brian lived in our new apartment for about two months before we got married. It wasn't until he'd lived in the apartment for several weeks that he told me one day, quite casually, "I hate to say it, but the shower in the new apartment never really gets very hot."

I'd already been feeling some cold feet, not about marriage but about moving. I loved my little single-person basement apartment. I loved the neighborhood and the big windows and the proximity to work and renting from a friend and having a big backyard for Jin to run around in. I knew the new apartment had its own advantages - it had more space, taller ceilings, its own washer and dryer (not shared), newer carpets, an open kitchen. Brian and I together could not fit in my old apartment, and there were going to be tradeoffs no matter what. But hearing about the water worried me. 

The first six weeks or so of our marriage were, for me, an exercise in functional showering. The first time I took a shower in the new apartment I didn't think it was so bad. True, the water didn't get terribly hot, and I had to turn it all the way up to get it to its hottest not-terribly-hotness, but it was hot enough. Unfortunately, things went downhill from there. Most of the time the shower was just barely not hot enough, which was almost worse than a cold shower, because we clearly weren't running out of hot water - it was just like we were always catching the shower at a bad time.


I know this is such a first world problem, but I felt really powerless. The water heater is located in the main part of the house, and so we have no access to it. I was beginning to feel like I was doomed to a year, more likely two, of cold showers, and that thought made me want to cry. I started showering as quickly as I could, and I learned that I could streamline my showering. Some mornings, if I didn't need to shave or wash my hair, I could be in and out of the shower feeling clean in less than 60 seconds, and the up side to all of this was that it became a lot easier to get out the door to teach my 8:00 a.m. class.

But last week after I ran for two hours and then jumped into a cold shower, I broke down. I got out of the shower crying, and I felt ridiculous and started laughing when Brian took me in his arms to console me, but I felt like I just couldn't take it anymore. The next day at church, Brian spotted our landlord and casually mentioned that our water never quite seemed to heat up. That afternoon, our landlord checked our water heater, found that it was turned down to a super low temperature, turned it up, and all of a sudden we found ourselves in hot water heaven.

I don't know why we didn't ask the landlord sooner. Now that the problem is fixed, it seems silly that we assumed it wasn't fixable, especially since we'd brought so many other problems to our landlord's attention when we first moved in. I know there's a lesson in here about not getting what you don't ask for. But I'm enjoying hot showers more than I've ever enjoyed them in my entire life, and it's distracting me from thinking too deeply about all of it.

Amy and Brian during the Cold Shower Era. We managed to put on a brave face.

Amy and Brian during the Hot Shower Era.

 ***

In other showering news, Jin has discovered the bathtub. Twice now we've come home to find my netty-spongey-shower-thing unraveled in the bathtub because Jin climbed in while we were gone and played with it. Jin is not much of a chewer, nor has he ever shown any proclivity for hanging out in the bathtub, so this was surprising. Yesterday, we looked up after our dinner prayer to see Jin actually standing in the bathtub lapping up water. Brian tried to grab the camera, but he climbed out before we could get a good picture. Strange animal. We love him, though.