I have the perfect test for pre marital counseling. If the couple can change a toilet bowl wax seal together and live to tell about it, they should make it! If they can come out on the other side and still have warm fuzzy feelings for one another then they will have a glorious marriage!
After twenty-three years of marriage and forty-four years of living I felt that I had experienced most of the frustrating things this life has to offer. I was wrong. I have never till today tried to change a toilet bowl wax ring myself. We have only lived in this one house, and I distinctly remember having a plumber put in a new toilet once. I don’t know what we paid the man, but likely it wasn’t enough.
My husband and I have put curtains up together (another good test), put toys together, a foosball table, bicycles, swing sets, and gone through other various trying ordeals together. All those times were challenging, and we struggled through them and laughed through them and yelled through them taking out our frustrations on one another. In the end we still felt triumphant and had camaraderie built through our success. Then …today and the toilet.
It wasn’t till I lay on the floor beside my husband as our older two sons stood above us holding our toilet trying to gently lay it down while lining up the bolts with the slots—four large people in a very small bathroom—that I realized that there can be hell on earth. Oh my goodness! This was pure torture. No wonder plumbers make so much money! The bolts moved; our flanged apparently rusted away after thirty-plus years. The toilet almost slammed down on my head. But it didn’t. It slammed down on my finger. There was screaming and moaning and groaning; and, I have to say, pure terror! You think I exaggerate? I do not!
We can send people to the moon. We are building a space station. We communicate all around the world with small hand held devices. The World Wide Web exists and THIS is how we secure a toilet to the floor. C’mon! There has to be a better way! There has to be!
I had to walk down the hall and step outside. On the way to the door my oldest who had been part of this fiasco inquired if we had managed to fix it after he had left. I told him now that they would all have to go out and poop in the woods. That was fine with me because I was never going back in there to try to fix it again! I stepped out on the porch and cried. Yes, I cried. Over a toilet, you ask incredulously! YES! It was the most horrendous, disgusting, aggravating, hopeless endeavor I have endured! I agree with my second son who declared the whole system faulty at best!
I took several deep breaths. I offered the whole situation up to the Lord. Hubby came out. He took one look at me. I looked at him. He started grinning and told me that our oldest had told him that he had to poop in the woods. Then he started cracking up and so did I! My gosh! How did we get to be forty-four years old and we can’t do a simple thing like change a wax ring on the toilet! It is pathetic. It is ludicrous. But we weren’t defeated. Yet. He had one more idea on how to secure this thing to the floor since our flange was all rusted and not capable of holding the bolt.
We ran out to the store and returned with his solution. We said a prayer aloud in the van asking, in Jesus’ name, for blessing upon this last attempt to secure our toilet. I mean, God cares about even the little things, right? If two of you agree to anything in My name … right? Wrong. It didn’t work. He looked up at me from his position, once again on the floor, and I looked at him. He looked me straight in the eye and very seriously said, “We’re done.” I replied, “We most certainly are.”
