The Bare Necessities
I was sweeping in the kitchen when I suddenly found myself singing words to a song that I sang when I was a small girl. My three-year-old son was sitting in the living room watching an old, Disney classic—The Jungle Book. I was practically raised on Disney movies and I've made it a parenting goal to make sure my children enjoy (or at least watch) all the Disney classics I loved so much. The Jungle Book is one of those movies. In case you haven't seen the movie (shame on you), I'll briefly explain to you the scene that had me singing while sweeping.
A bear named Baloo is telling a boy, Mowgli, about the relaxed life of living in the jungle. To drive his point home, Baloo breaks out in a song (you know how Disney movies do) and informs Mowgli about the bare (or maybe bear?) necessities of life.
This is when I found myself singing along. Then I paused and listened to the lyrics and realized Baloo had some good points. But allow me to take a walk down memory lane before I highlight Baloo's profound words.
When we moved abroad, we thinned down our possessions a great deal. We didn't pack anything in a crate because we had heard from good sources that it would probably get held up in customs for up to a year in the country we would be living. It seemed a waste to try and bring any furniture, since I wasn't willing to wait a year to get a couch. Plus, I wasn't all that attached to our hand-me-down couch anyway. So, we decided to bid farewell to whatever didn't fit into our eight suitcases.
Six months after arriving in our country, we found a house to rent and started adding to our possessions once again. A highchair, a couch, a kitchen table, a mattress, etc. etc. Even with those new purchases, our house still looked like the definition of "bare necessities.” I didn't mind it so much though. Very rarely do people get the opportunity to start with a clean slate when it comes to their possessions. I didn't think our life could get anymore basic and bare at that point.
Famous last thoughts.
Not too long after we moved in, we had a heavy rain and found out how terrible the gutter system was for our house. You see, we live in a neighborhood where the houses are all very close. So close, in fact, we share walls with each of our neighbors and the ones behind us. As it turns out, somebody's gutter drained right on top of our kitchen ceiling. The ceiling couldn't take much more of the constant water draining onto it. It collapsed and all the water came pouring right into our kitchen and into the rest of the house. Did things get damaged and/or destroyed? Yes. Live and learn.
Then we had another flood in our house caused by a different issue while we were at the mall. It was a sudden downpour that caused a lot of flooding all around the city. We had no idea because we were in a huge mall and barely heard the rain. When we returned home, I opened the door to find myself standing in water. I stuck our son in his inflatable duck bathtub and let him watch Toy Story until about midnight because that's how long it took to clear out all the water. Praise the Lord for tile floors.
Once again, things got damaged. Some stuff didn't make it. We came to the conclusion that water must have come up from the flooded drains (yuck). We stopped setting too many things on the floor from that point on—lest another flood come.
We were so busy focusing on our plan for floods that we didn't notice we had a MAJOR termite problem. We figured it out when our breaker kept flipping. We narrowed in on the potential source of the problem: the outlet where our washing machine was plugged up. We removed the outlet cover and found it crawling with termites (shiver). We knew what this meant—those nasty things had eaten through some wires. My husband had to crawl up into the "attic" space and clip the chewed up wires, rendering them useless.
Ever since then, our washing machine has an extension cord that runs through a window into our bedroom so that it can be plugged up. It looks as ridiculous as it sounds but I don't even notice it anymore. Also, both of our bathrooms no longer have working lights. We have to use a rechargeable emergency light for the kids' bathroom and we use the natural sunlight for our bathroom. The other night, the emergency light went out while my son was taking a bath so I had to light some candles. I should mention that his bathtub is literally a tub. A plastic tub. I felt like it was scene straight from Little House on the Prairie. But I digress...
Just when I thought there was nothing else left to be damaged, we had another big flood while we were out of the country for the birth of our daughter. No one knew our house had flooded until a few days after the fact. And since the climate is very warm where we live and we hadn't been there running our ACs, it will come as no shock to you mold moved in.
That particular flood costs us about $700 worth of damage. I handled the news surprisingly well—better than I could have ever imagined myself handling such news. One reason might be because we had already been down this road a time or two. Another reason might be that I've tried to stop clinging so tightly to my possessions. You know the saying: "the more stuff you own, the more stuff owns you."
But I think the main reason I didn't let the news ruin me is because of this reason: letting go of things, figuring out how to live without those things, and finding ways to work with what you've got is just the expat life. It's what we signed up for. The sooner we embrace those realities, the sooner we can move on with our life and stop thinking about all that we don't have or all that we once had. There are far better things ahead than what we leave behind (thank you, C.S. Lewis, for those wise words).
And now for the wise words of Baloo that caused me to stop sweeping and take note:
Don’t spend your time
lookin’ around
for something you want
that can’t be found.
When you find out you can
live without it
and go along not thinking’ about it,
I’ll tell you something true—
the bare necessities of life
will come to you.
Photo/artwork of Baloo by Brittney Ann Art.