A New Toilet

There’s a new toilet in the back seat of my car. Why it’s there is kind of a long story that’s connected to elimination but not the kind we usually associate with toilets.

Until recently my life was quite off kilter. What looked happy wasn’t. What looked whole was full of holes. What felt right was wrong.The elimination I’m referring to is a marriage, to be more specific my marriage of twenty seven years.

A few months ago I moved into a new house and have been busily turning it into my new home. As I’m renovating parts of this house I am very aware that I am also reinventing parts of me.

This new toilet is one small component of my attempt to put an imprint of myself (or at least of my bottom) in my new home. Just as moving requires sorting, discarding, and keeping what’s worth keeping, so does this life transition. I needed to decide which parts of me to leave behind and which parts I never want to lose. My new home needs to nurture the best parts of me and provide room for new possibilities that I can’t even anticipate.

My home and my life really are mirror images of each other right now. Both are alternately exciting and overwhelming, fun and boring, freeing and lonely, satisfying and scary. Both reflect my choices, my tastes, my comfort, my wants. The new toilet is an integral part of not only my new bathroom but my newly remodeled life.

With the exception of an aging dog and two feisty cats, I live alone. No one else to cook for or talk with over breakfast. No one else’s dirty clothes, phone messages or mail. The only men in my life show up in raggedy T-shirts with wrenches or paintbrushes tucked into their well worn overalls.

But with their help my new house is slowly being transformed into a place that feels right for me.

And soon my new toilet will be installed into my lovely new bathroom, a small part of my precious, messy, uncertain new life.