Foundations

On what needs to be fixed

This essay is an expanded (very expanded) version of a long BlueSky thread. If you prefer a serialized and much shorter form, the thread starts here.

The whole post will be available to non-paid subscribers on Wednesday.

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On Thanksgiving, I noticed a creeping water stain under the paneling of my breakfast bar. I was vacuuming—three pets mean I chase their hair tumbleweeds almost daily. The stain hadn’t been there before.

The plumber couldn’t come until the next day. I fretted. In slab-on-grade foundations like mine, water pipes are embedded in concrete. These slabs shift like rafts on Texas’ clay and limestone soil, . The concrete weakens with every subtle bend. The shifts between extreme heat and cold brought by climate change only worsen this instability. Foundation shifts often lead to pipe leaks, which can cost tens of thousands of dollars. These repairs are deemed “usual wear and tear” and aren’t covered by property insurance.

The foundation specialist I consult yearly says there are two types of foundations in Central Texas: “ones with cracks and ones that don’t have cracks yet.” Mine has cracks. The house flipper who sold it to me only mitigated further damage. “It’s like setting a broken bone in a sling,” the foundation guy explained, pointing his fingers at each other and moving them up and down in opposite directions. “Except these bones don’t knit together.”

Do I sound like I know about foundations? I know far more than I did in 2021, when I bought this house during my divorce. The tidy little home on Meadow Run seemed like a sanctuary then. But foundations shift.

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Within months of moving in, cracks appeared on my walls. “Normal,” the foundation guy assured me. “The repairs done mean it has to resettle. It’ll take time.”

“How long?” I asked, anxious.

“Oh, maybe three years?”

Three years later, I patched and painted every crack. They reappeared within months. Foundation guy shrugged. “It could take up to seven years. You’ve got new drywall over fifty-year-old construction. But these cracks are cosmetic. Don’t fix them yet.”

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I’ve navigated ups and downs in journalism and my mental health for most of my career. But homeownership brought new depths I hadn’t encountered before. I’ve been pulled down and climbed back out—over and over again.

A Friendsgiving interrupted my fretting. Just as well—I didn’t want to leave the house alone too long.

We ate turkey and laughed, louder than I had in ages, at bad DIY Christmas videos (“You know how much I love making things out of concrete!”). Afterward, we boxed up leftovers for me to drop at the local free fridge on my way home. A young woman and a man with a banjo case were picking through the offerings. “We were supposed to go to El Paso to see family,” she said, “but…” I encouraged them to take the whole bag of prepped meals. They only took two, then helped me load the rest into the fridge.

When I got home, the water stain had crept further. I went to bed, fretting. Tens of thousands of dollars, I thought. Tens of thousands of dollars.

I dreamt I relapsed. In the dream, I drank in secret. No one knew. How long could I keep it going?

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Jeff, the plumber, arrived Friday morning. “What’s going on?” he asked.

I burst into tears.

“It’s over here,” I sniffled.

“No, no,” Jeff said gently. “That’s not important. Are you okay? We need to make sure you’re okay first.”

He asked if I wanted a hug. I almost never want hugs, but for a moment, I did. I hugged this red-headed stranger. It was quick.

“I’m not okay,” I admitted. “But it’s because of the leak.”

“It’s all fixable,” he said. “If you’re okay, it’s all fixable.”

I had put my reactive dog in the backyard, and he barked for over an hour while Jeff hunted for the leak. He moved my stove into the center of the kitchen and found soaked drywall and drenched studs behind it.

Jeff measured the water pressure at the house and the city meter, then shut off the city water. “No leak that I can find,” he said. Still, water burbled on. Jeff noticed my pets’ communal water bowl on the other side of the counter. Could that be it?

My obnoxious but beautiful ex-barn cat, Molly Murderkitten, likes to splash water out of the bowl. Could the water have built up over time, creating a reservoir that suddenly burst through the wall? Maybe. But it could also be a foundation leak—groundwater seeping up through a substantial breach, perhaps.

In a snippy call with my insurance, I learned that even if it was Molly’s fault (damage in the thousands, rather than tens of thousands), property insurance doesn’t cover pet-caused accidents. So much for those All-State ads about covering “chaos.” Don’t we pay for unconditional love with tolerance for once-wild animals in our homes? (I could be convinced Molly’s love isn’t all that unconditional.)

But I wasn’t mad at Molly. I was mad at myself. Mad I’d held onto the house after my marriage fell apart. Mad I hadn’t saved more money. Mad I hadn’t seen through my husband’s lies before we bought this stupid, crumbling house.

My dog was hoarse from barking in the backyard.

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Jeff left me his personal cell and said that if it was an emergency to call the company, but he’d be back on duty Monday. He didn’t charge me for the visit. If it was Molly, the water should dry up eventually. If it wasn’t… well, we’ll see.

The only good news was that I didn’t have to shut off the water to the house.

So I got out a fan and bought one off Amazon and started soaking up the still-seeping water with rags. They lasted a couple of hours before becoming too thoroughly wet to soak up any more. Then the water came faster. I changed the rags every hour and washed the rags. The water didn’t stop.

It was not flowing so fast as to be a constant stream, not quite.

It moved slow enough to hypnotize me. I’d pick up a rag and see the water creep along the concrete, absorbing slightly into the foundation (“those things are like a sponge”) and even further into the framing before moving on. On the other side of the wall, it seeped underneath the breakfast bar. I took pictures every couple of hours and obsessed over finger shapes reaching slowly across into my living room.

All weekend: When I wasn’t changing the rags, I dialed friends who might have the bandwidth amidst Thanksgiving celebrations, and when I wasn’t on the phone or changing the rags, I was on Zoom AA meetings. I got more numbers to call from those. The dollar amount I could be on the hook for gained interest in my head. I Googled the costs of foundation repair at various levels of damage. I would have to sell the house at a loss. I would have to live out of my Subaru Crosstrek with two cats and a dog.

I couldn’t sleep. I barely ate. I got though another hour and another hour and another hour but they blurred together.

In that consuming downward spiral, I never stopped to think, “Is this an emergency?”

The water moved so slow.

I woke up Monday from a fitful nap thinking about how fast the garage might fill up with carbon monoxide if I started the car with the door closed. I grabbed my phone to my chest and felt my heart thump against it. 911. My dog warm and dozing next to me. The cats curled at the bottom of the bed.

I thought, “But who would change the rags?”

I turned on my computer and found an early-morning international women’s AA meeting. Just six women in the boxes on screen. I almost left for a meeting that would leave me less room to share. Something more anonymous, if you will.

And then I didn’t leave. The size of the meeting gave us all lots of time.

It’s hard to explain what happens when people share their problems with brutal honesty but free of comparison. I could tell you about the tragic stories I heard and about the ones that had a happy ending, but the point of the raw nerves isn’t to realize “it could be worse” or even “it could get better.” The point of exposing the broken bones is that all broken bones look the same. You could fall from a great height or trip. The pain is the same. We all have bones, we all break, we all hurt, we all heal, and then we might break again. And we set each other’s breaks. We ask after each other’s pain.

I decided the fucking rags could wait, especially if I wasn’t in a 72 hour hold. I called my therapist and she had something that morning. I called my aunt, a bossy busybody who I used to avoid at family functions. She listed three things I could do right away, including getting that foundation company out there — had I been scared of having fears confirmed? — and applying for city assistance if it was the foundation. "Cities don't want you to abandon the place and have it become unlivable!" Indeed, I found a form for low-income families to get loans to repair structural damage.

I called the addiction hotline I volunteer at and asked for an open slot. They needed someone that afternoon. I called Jeff. He was still mystified but slightly alarmed; he would come by as soon as he could. I dropped off my dog at daycare headed into answer phones. The hotline is usually pretty quiet but that day, a couple of people called who really wanted help. I got to tell them how to get it.

The details can stop here, because I suspect that things getting better is less interesting than a horror story. But things did get better: The leak was an above-ground pre-renovation supply line. It didn’t show up as a leak because the city shut-off valve was leaking. Insurance would cover it as well as the damage caused over the long weekend. The damage was contained to just around the breakfast bar and under where the stove had been.

The lasting bummers is long but it has an end: My kitchen would be unusable for a while. With workers tromping in and out of my living room, there might not be much of a point putting up a Christmas tree. I have had to live with two large dehumidifiers and four industrial fans going for days. The dog has to go to daycare during the repairs. All that is hard, but not as hard.

The spiral of obsessive thoughts still grabs at my ankles as I climb out of the hole. I’ve woken up in the middle of the night a few times; I’ve cried thinking about all the same mistakes I made to put me where I am and not in some mysterious other, better place that isn’t the one I’m in.

I think about the foundation leaks that still might happen and the equally unnerving drain on my bank account that comes with existing in America today.

Yesterday, I had just straightened up out of a spiral and was wiping my nose when a friend texted. Her niece had OD’d. Could I talk?

It would be unseemly to say I was glad to call her back. Still, can you understand that I have never wanted to be there for someone more?

She talked and cried and I listened. I just listened. When her anguish slowed into silence, I asked her if she had eaten. She had some food right there. I asked if she wanted to go for a walk. Maybe later, yes, in fact, later would be good.

I called later — a walk? No, she needed to rest. I told her that my dog and I would be walking by her house — maybe she could wave? We would be sending her good vibes.

I could summon good vibes for her. Easy.

My problem with asking for help isn’t that I don’t ask for help; my problem is that I wait too long to do it. By the time I’m asking, I’m asking for a lot, right now. I’m asking a lot from a few people. When their aid slows, I convince myself that I’ve gone too far. I convince myself that I should never ask for help again… until once again, I’ve waited too long and need all the help in the world, immediately.

Looking back at this past week, I’m astonished to find that I asked for help a lot, I asked for help from everyone, I asked for help over and over again. I asked for help immediately.

All of which means I was the strongest I’ve ever been. What a triumph it is to lean into a community as hard as you can and let yourself be caught.

It takes so much more courage to ask for help at the instant you need it than it does to wait. Asking for help becomes a set of stairs you climb up instead of down.

Make as long a list as you can of who you can go to and keep calling until someone answers and has time. Some people have to tap out. Others tap in. When someone doesn’t have anything to give at that moment— it’s ok, it’s not about you. They might be asking for help from someone else. Just keep going down that list, asking for help, and when you get tired of asking for help, keep asking.

Suffering out loud is brave; pain kept quiet multiplies. There is no nobility in turning inward. I know this because I asked for help — and I know this because people have asked for help from me. I used to think the goal in life was to be so very together that other people would turn to you for assistance. I used to think that needing help means you don't have anything to offer.

I used to think that I needed my foundation to be perfect if I was going to offer support to anyone else. But everyone's foundation is cracked. We wouldn't be human if we weren't somehow fixed to this fractured earth.

What if no one ever needed anyone? We might be independent, but we’d be alone.

Your support allows me to keep writing long essays that won’t find a home elsewhere. Thank you.