Cheaper Than Therapy

# Level Ground

I finally drained the pool.

I should’ve done this last year. The truth is it was bad from the start — not looks-fine-from-the-deck bad, actually bad, off from the day we put it up. But it was already full, it was already summer, and I did the thing I always do. I told myself we’d just get through the season and deal with it in the fall.

We did not deal with it in the fall.

Here’s why it was bad in the first place. I bought this pool last summer on a whim. It was about nine thousand degrees out, I wanted it up that day, and “that day” leaves zero room for leveling the ground the right way. Impatience won. We threw it up fast in the heat and called it good enough, and good enough held just long enough for me to stop thinking about it.

Then I started watching it. A little more shift one week, a little more the next, the kind of slow you can almost talk yourself out of seeing. Every day a bit more off than the day before, and every day me deciding today still wasn’t the day. Until it was. Until I couldn’t look at it one more time and finally made the call — drain it, tear the base apart, do the whole thing over. Slow and right this time, because I couldn’t stand to do it slow and right the first time.

And since I clearly never learn, I should mention I also impulse-bought a hot tub three weeks ago.

Zero regrets. Best money I’ve spent all summer and I’m already obsessed. Which is the funny part, if you think about it. The same thing in me that has me out here re-leveling a pool I rushed is the same thing that got me a hot tub I want to spend every waking hour in. One blew up in my face. The other one’s the best part of my week. I’d do both again tomorrow and we all know it.

Now here’s the part that really tells you where my head’s at. I’ve packed my schedule so full of shifts — because I honestly don’t know what I’m doing with my life right now, and a shift is at least somewhere to be — that the only day I had free to deal with the pool happened to be a day of pouring rain. And I did it anyway. So there we all were, in the rain, for hours, digging. Me, Kyle, the kids, the neighbor kids, all of us soaked to the bone moving dirt and rocks because I refused to wait for a dry day I didn’t have.

The kids are home for the summer, so I had help, whether they liked it or not. I’d love to tell you they jumped right in. What actually happened is I spent a lot of that day wondering out loud where my children possibly got this lack of work ethic, seeing as Kyle and I have done nothing but work in front of them since the day they were born. A real head-scratcher. Meanwhile the neighbors’ kids showed up and out-worked mine in the mud, and I’m just going to leave that there.

So that’s the pool. Chaotic, a little ridiculous, very me.

But that’s not really what this is about, and I’d be lying if I stopped there.

Somewhere around hour three of moving dirt it hit me that I did this exact thing last year. Not the pool. The running. Last summer I had a ten-book audiobook series going, twelve, fourteen hours each, hundreds of hours of somebody else’s voice in my head so mine would shut up. Plus solitaire. Plus the slots. This year I’ve restarted the whole series — car, house, everywhere — and I’m back on the solitaire, because apparently I still can’t sit in a quiet room with myself for more than five minutes.

But this year I didn’t stop at my phone. This year I built a backyard project. Decided to redo half the yard. The pool, the hot tub, the leveling, the sand, the kids I dragged into it. The card games weren’t cutting it, so I went and broke ground on something. That’s where I’m at, honestly. Last year I avoided my feelings with a game on my phone. This year I’m moving the actual earth to do it.

I’ll be fair to this year, though, because it’s not a clean match. Last summer I was in a genuinely bad place. Some stuff with myself, and then it got harder in a way I didn’t see coming. I was grieving before I even had the thing to grieve. This year isn’t that, and I want to say so plainly.

But my father-in-law is gone, and that sits on me whether I look at it or not. I impulsively applied to a place I already know I’m not going back to. I’m picking every shift I can, and I told you it’s because it gives me somewhere to be, but really it’s one more way to stay too busy to feel anything. I’m still trying to figure out where my business fits in all of it. And instead of sitting with any of that, I drained a pool and leveled it in the rain.

I don’t do feelings. I know that’s a problem. I know it’s mine to deal with, and that no amount of nice level sand fixes whatever it’s standing in for. And yeah — I’m aware I do the same thing with my own life that I did with the pool, watch it shift a little more every day and keep deciding today isn’t the day. I see it. Anyway. I don’t have a plan and I’m not going to hand you a neat little lesson, because I don’t have one. I’m just saying it out loud, because that part I can do.

I write it down. Always have. It’s the only thing I distract myself with that actually makes me look at the thing instead of away from it.

So. The pool’s crooked. I’m fixing it. We’ll see about the rest.