Flash Memoir: A Roof Before the Rain
How babies are like the weather
Welcome to another installment of Loss + Finding Home, a real-time flash memoir of the complete gut and remodel of our 1950s California ranch-style home. Answering the questions: What does it mean to be home? Who makes up a home? How do you build a home when someone is always missing from the dinner table?
Previously on Loss + Finding Home, I talked about framing and wondered, “How does anyone build anything?” Today, I’m talking about the roof, rain, naptime, and control. Walk with me…
It’s been a minute… Turns out, building a house is very time-consuming, and while I spend most of my day thinking about writing, I rarely have the time, let alone the mental energy, to put pen to paper.
I was catching up with some of my favorite Substackers, and they seemed to all be in the same boat because many of them started their posts with some version of, “Sorry I’ve been MIA, but…life.” This week, knock on wood, all of us are healthy, and I’m mostly focused, so here goes…
A few weeks back, we were in a race with the rain to finish the roof. The framing was done, but since water and wood don’t play well together,1 we had to put a literal lid on the house to protect all the work we’d done. I found myself wishing we could push back the storm a day or two…
And that got me thinking about how babies are like the weather. You can’t control them, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. 2
January and February have been a little “floody” in Santa Barbara in the last few years.3 So much so that I think it’s time we give Atmospheric River Season a spot on the calendar.
The roofers worked Monday and Tuesday but were no-shows on Wednesday and we worried they wouldn’t get done in time, but they finished up on Saturday afternoon, just in time for the rain to start Saturday night.
This creek runs along the backside of the property we’re renting. During the storm, it was raging, but now that it’s settled down, it’s quite nice to listen to. If you watch the video, you’ll see Peyton make a cameo. She’s in a “Don’t take my picture” phase.
When we bought the house twelve years ago, one of the first things we did was replace the roof. It still had the old cedar shake shingles, and in fire country, that’s not good.
Nick’s cousin was a roofer, so we flew him and a friend out from Nebraska to help. They immediately got to work. Suddenly, chunks of wood flew off the roof, and outside resembled a junkyard. It sounded like a hail storm as they scraped layers upon layers of rotting wood onto the ground.
“You have to be quiet during nap time,” I said. They all looked at me sideways.
Owen was six or seven months old then, and I felt like I was finally getting the hang of this whole mom thing. Part of what gave me confidence was how predictable Owen's naps were. I was so militant about his sleep, fearing any deviation from our very elaborate but effective routine would ruin everything.
A few years later, when Owen was two and a half, and all of my friend’s kids were still napping two to three hours a day, I sat on the couch obsessively watching a monitor while Owen sang “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” complete with hand gestures.
I told friends how I thought nap time might be coming to an end, “Oh, I make my kid nap,” they’d say, and I’d walk away thinking I must be doing something wrong.
“You’re ruining our weekends,” Nick told me when he finally had enough of me trying to force sleep on a child who wasn’t tired. Resigned, I let go of the illusion/delusion of control.
Looking back, I think my friends responded out of fear. They looked at nap time like I did, as precious hours to themselves in a job that doesn’t give bathroom breaks, let alone a lunch hour.
With Tatum, I break all my “rules.”
Never wake a sleeping baby - Kind of hard when you have to get an older kid to softball practice.
Fall asleep drowsy, but awake… Why? When nursing her to sleep is so much faster and I have an excuse to scroll Substack. (I’m really enjoying this from
Sarah Levy, This from
, and this from They all touch on the very intense and specific time of new motherhood.)Sleep train after one… But sometimes miss her and maybe we both needed a little snuggle.
The roof made it on before the rain and all babies fall asleep eventually with or without my conrol.
This is where I am today. Thank you for listening.
Emily
Coming up… windows and guts
A quick note on water: I’ve never thought much about the amount of engineering that goes into controlling water and keeping the inside of a house dry, Flashing on a roof, Tyvek wrap around the house, and the slope of a concrete patio. We’ve made some pretty impressive advancements around trying to control something as powerful as water. Spend five minutes watching anything on HGTV, and you’ll see the consequences of getting it wrong. Side note on a footnote: The old house had a flower box attached to the front of the house. I think they look really pretty in a nostalgic/Americana kind of way. But Nick cringed at the thought of putting soil and water onto the house.
When I first wrote this, the idea sounded familiar, so I Googled it. Apparently, it’s a quote from a personal responsibility/ pull yourself up by your bootstraps kind of self-help guru that you might hear on the If Books Could Kill podcast.
We are all still coping with PTSD after the Thomas Fire of 2017 and the Debris flow of 2018, so when the weather calls for a lot of rain in a little bit of time, roads close, schools close, and we all kind of freak out.
And still I will try to control things that were never mine to control. Thank you for this 🤍
I wish someone had told me how much parenting would be about learning how much you can’t/don’t/will never control…
And I’m not allowed a flower box either 😆