Our bathroom

Our bathroom was unchanged since we bought it. The previous owners had decorated it with a nautical scene -- wallpapered ships sailing on the ocean, like we had seen on our honeymoon in Nantucket. My wife bought something that looked like a glass flotation device to hang from a wrought-iron hook above the large mirror.

We live, by the way, in the middle of Nebraska, which made the nautical theme all the more ridiculous. So I don't blame her -- my wife -- for walking into the bathroom. She was a few months pregnant when she walked into that half bathroom and started ripping the wallpaper away in shreds. 

But, you know, it was ours. We bought that room, this house, together. We sought to make it our own. And she, alone, walked in and started ripping it apart. 

But it wasn't easy. It wasn't clean. The wallpaper stuck. Stubborn. It wouldn't let go of all those years it clung to that dusty drywall. Hell, it shouldn't have been there at all. I'm sure it knew that. I'm sure it sensed that. Ships in Nebraska? Come on. But it held steady anyway.

So she chipped at it. She grabbed a metal blade and chipped at it. Tried to make it let go, shrivel in on itself and give in. But, dammit, it didn't. That paper clung there. Stubborn bastard wallpaper.

Next, she tried a wallpaper steamer. Tried to use heat and water and technology to make that paper release. It didn't. Of course. Some of it came off. Enough to make things look even more uneven and unclean. Then, she tried a sander. She tried to apply dry, blunt force to that paper to make it relent, make it ... go away. But, of course, it stayed. Shit.

Then she turned to me. It was my time to make things better. My turn to make it all go away. I tried to protest. I didn't start this, I said. I didn't grab the slightly flawed but mostly OK paper and try to rip it away to reveal something better. She wasn't having it. This house was half mine. I should try to own it and make it better.

So I sanded. I plowed that machine into the walls. Thick dust coated me. I breathed it in. I coughed. I choked. But I kept going. Some of that paper came off. But not much. It remained -- uneven, unsightly, imperfect.

At that point, we'd had too much. We bought some primer. (I hate primer.) And coated over the ragged, rough shards of wallpaper. We waited for it to dry before dousing it in putrid yellow paint. We hated the looks of it, of course. So we painted over it again. A weathered blue this time.

The paint eventually dried.

So when you walk into that bathroom, it looks OK at first glance. But if you stay longer to -- you know -- you begin to see the ripples of those buried shards. You can see where we painted over the imperfections, tried to hide them instead of dealing with them.

You can see, in short, that something's not right. You can see those ships that should have long ago sunk.