collapsing grout - I try to pretend I'm Lee Krasner circa 1945 or some shit

It feels almost incidental that the sewer pipe beneath my house, which does not have a basement, collapsed and thus I cannot do laundry or use anything in my kitchen and have been eating takeout off paper plates for some time now and that it'll cost thousands of dollars and god knows how much time around the schedules of diva master plumbers (who FINALLY showed up yesterday while I was trapped at the nursing home working, then left again with more $ out the door and still no real plan/clue - sigh) and then to rip up concrete and fix it and I'm just praying that won't include a jackhammer through my kitchen floor, and that tomorrow we will manage the holiday by washing dishes in the decrepit bathtub....that all is certainly a big deal from a certain point of view but I honestly give it very little mental attention. I should be researching pipes but instead I research international adoptions from Peru (which are nearly utterly impossible for an infant under 2 years old through that country's understandable yet draconian and depressing restrictions) and spent a sleepless night worried not about money or the fate of the world either but about Aaron's new job start today and his wellness in general that seems precarious to me but that might be due to my own precariousness entirely. He might be, as he says, quite well finally. And such things as our relayed weeping-urge yesterday over a baby-mirage dangled in our path are just to be expected for two people who have been through so much reproductive hell and intimate catastrophe. All I know for sure are: that the children we already have here are playing X box live while talking in a constant Frankie Valli voice since we saw Jersey Boys (tj) and laid up with what appears to be strep throat coming on (ears) and I can hear their patter right now in the comfortable quiet of the house; that Aaron is gone to new stomping grounds and can't text me and won't tell me any of his new coworkers' names except for David; that he is coming home tonight and is gung ho to smoke a turkey; that before I lived with him, I never took showers with another human but that now it feels odd not to and for the 53 days and 18 hours he was gone, I took baths almost entirely so I wouldn't think about it; that we both want to remodel the bathroom despite the kitchen plumbing fiasco and will probably take a home equity loan to do so in order to get a new tub that seats two and that thus if we break up again I will probably be quite vexed to wash myself anywhere; that I am fine this way except for my own insecurities, in want of nothing more than this life as it is, but just without the constant anxiety that it get snatched away suddenly; that any life can and eventually will be snatched away - I knew that already of course but I didn't KNOWknow (never underestimate the power of denial, my mother often says). And these are the things I mull over, leaving plumbing to plumbers and the weight of the world to people with stronger backs than mine, relinquishing ambitions beyond the one: for this family to be intact and safe for the people in it. A safe place to cry, when necessary, which sometimes it is necessary. And still hold fast. So, able to control almost nothing really when it comes down to it, I DOTE. Nervously. Just like all those neurotic women mothers wives about whom I've always wondered, What's your fucking problem? At least I try to be creative about it. I order Piss Artist (lewd Pictionary) for under the tree for the kids whose memories of me will include a relentlessly inappropriate sense of humor to offset the Betty Crocker mojo. And I make homemade sex scenario lists for Aaron as stocking suffers - can you rattle off 50+ unique ways to give a blowjob? I can, no sweat. A list which sits open on my desktop in case number #53 occurs to me, next to open browser tabs for The Hague and a green bean casserole recipe on the French's onions website.