The secondary trouble began when I resolved to clean out our chest freezer. My husband had invited his coworkers over to make dumplings for us, and I was having routine nightmares about one of them opening the freezer and running away screaming and gagging and, even worse, judging our priorities.
About this chest freezer: It's not that big, but it's heavy enough and awkward enough that it's an effort to move it by myself. We keep it in a mudroom that is right next to our kitchen.
About the contents of the chest freezer: A year (A YEAR) before the auspicious cleaning day, we made pork broth out of soup bones. In a stroke of domestic genius, we decided to store the remnants in Ziploc bags in a box in the freezer. During the first 2020 lockdown, I froze all kinds of leftovers. Because if the world ended but the electricity stayed on, we would want that lasagna from March, right? So the pork broth bags got shuffled out of their box to the bottom of the freezer.
At some point, all the bags burst. When I was digging around in there, sometime in the fall, discarding six-month-old leftovers, I saw the damage – a solid frozen mass of broth in the bottom of the freezer.
So I took the rest of the food out, rehoming it to the fridge freezer.
And I may have poured boiling water into the freezer in an attempt to loosen some of the bags. I am not going to admit to that in the affirmative.
And then I UNPLUGGED the freezer, thinking, This afternoon, the bags won't be stuck together anymore, and I can get some of it out that way.
When I returned in the afternoon, everything was still stuck together. So I did what any responsible person would do.
I LEFT IT FOR TWO WEEKS.
Until the fateful day of the dumplings, when I, motivated by the new fear of judgement from my husband's coworkers, opened the freezer.
It was full of thawed broth and emanated a smell that can only be described as “eau de shame.”
How, exactly, was I supposed to get it out?
Well… I TIPPED THE WHOLE FREEZER OVER into a bowl, pouring the broth out into the largest bowl from our kitchen. I was doing a lot of muttering and making other distressed noises. My children were watching me, and I kept yelling at them to stand back, and my four-year-old asked, “Is this an emergency??”
And then tipping it over wasn't working anymore, so I started scooping the stuff out with another bowl…
And then I noticed that there was a drain plug at the bottom of the freezer.
To make the rest of the story shorter, I pulled the drain plug. But I put the pan in the wrong place to catch the broth, so I still had to get the rest of it with paper towels and Swiffer rags, but the freezer was no longer full of the soup-that-must-not-be-named, and life could finally continue.
So here's my takeaway:
My problem – freezer full of frozen broth – wasn’t somehow unique to me. The design of the freezer allowed for that kind of ridiculousness, even anticipated it. I’m not the first woman (or man) to create that kind of disaster… which is why the freezer can be drained at all in the first place. The existence of the drain plug says, “You’re not the only one who’s done this.” In other words, “You’re not alone.”
The worst decisions of my life hinged on the assumption that I was alone.
“You are the only one who…”
“No one else would ever…”
“Nobody you know struggles with…”
“If you said that, she wouldn’t understand, and everyone would think…”
“The only one who has ever failed this miserably and on this many accounts is you.”
The litany of disturbing thoughts feels overwhelming, feels unending, feels undeniable. But the accusation – you are the anomaly – is false.
Because the Holy Spirit doesn’t use those kinds of phrases. Wherever the barrage of “you are alone” phrases are coming from, they are not coming from God.
They’re coming from somewhere else.
The Holy Spirit would never start a conversation with, “Yeah, you’re going to have to do this one by yourself.”
“Hail, full of grace… the Lord is with you.”
Which is why I’m writing these devotionals in the first place. I want to point to the drain plug.
Whatever it is you are dealing with, I promise you, you are not the only one.
That’s not to say it’s not excruciating.
But you are not alone.
Great tie-in, Meredith, of drain plug to 'you are not alone.' And humor shines through. There have been way too many similar domestic messy moments like that for me, and there will be more as well. God's grace covers all of us.
I’m sorry but the mental image of “is this an emergency?” is hilarious! Too funny! Glad you got the funk out of your freezer! I bet you feel a little bit lighter?!? Thanks for sharing!