Leave It To Professionals

Some things are best left to the professionals, I’ve been told growing up.

Like brain surgeries.

Or haircuts.

I tried to negotiate cooking and cleaning into this equation, but those turned out to be non-negotiables. That is, non-negotiables if I wanted to get married.

You must know how to cook, and clean and make a good cup of strong Turkish coffee before you get married. My mom would pause after each invariable as if to enunciate its singular importance. All the aunts and uncles would nod in agreement.

Yea, yea… they muttered.  The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.

I thought I was doomed.

It turns out, even doomed people get married. To top it off, my husband doesn’t even drink coffee! And last week he made himself a sandwich with ‘duck food’ bread. He said he couldn’t tell the difference.

Life is full of wasted effort.

Nobody mentioned anything about painting. It was clear as day that painting was right up there with haircuts and brain surgeries. I accepted this truth as self-evident.

When my husband and I bought our house, it was just the two of us. The house was large and we spread out like crabgrass – each claiming our own space. This was all good and dandy until kids came along. Our growing family forced redistribution of the square footage.  Our son claimed the old guest room and the old study became a nursery for the Thing 2. Our living room remained the only underutilized dead space that admittedly carried considerable potential. 

But, there was a problem. The room needed to be painted.  Badly. And I didn’t know any professionals who could do it. I was stuck with the decorating preferences of the previous owner – pinks and blues and pretty flowers – with its peeling accents, like it was the law of Moses.  

I resigned myself to the color-wheel status quo until one afternoon my next-door neighbor, Karrie, probably tired of listening to my complaining about our house dropped a bombshell:

Oh, you can paint that room in no time.

But that’s impossible- I can’t paint!!  I exclaimed, It’s a job for professionals!