Problem Solving

Sometimes, family that don’t spend time together, having to work on a problem together helps form bonds.

Once upon a time, the first time I moved house after my disability and after my removalist cancelled five hours after he was to have started the job, by which time when he rang me to tell me he’d had to go to hospital and I would have preferred to have heard from his next of kin to tell me he had DIED.

My Mum, then early sixties and me one-handed, arrived at my new home to find my bed had not been put together by my removalists. To their credit, it wasn’t actually their job to put things together and I had been warned because when I was contacted for payment, they told me they had eventually given up and left because they didn’t want to waste my money. In both of our defence mum and I were both exhausted. Mum with upper back problems, me with recent lower back disc bulge surgery, we walked in the door and mum had already decided I would sleep on my mattress on the floor.

Not far from the front door I went to my bedroom door, took about two seconds to assess and problem solve what the men had not managed to work out. “The base is the wrong way around!” Mum literally dismissed this and told me I could sleep on the floor. I, however, was not going to make this bed twice, nor make her. I should probably mention, my bed was made by my dad, a builder, or a carpenter (a Chippy!) back when I was twenty-four-ish. It’s a timber Sleigh Bed. Although wisely at the time he convinced me to not shave the foot of the bed as tall as the bed head. Half the bedrooms that bed has been in, I’ve not been able to move around even three sides of the bed. Even the bedroom I have now, getting down the end of the bed to my ensuite, I hover to go sideways and my bedroom door does NOT close. So, the base of my bed is a slat base, I’ve recently described it as glued and screwed and built into a sturdy box, so it doesn’t move. Even twenty-five plus years later.

I encouraged mum to push boxes with heavy art books in them across the floor to put under the timber mattress. I helped and using only four or five, it took the weight of the base. I wriggled the foot of the bed and leaned it against the wall. We both pulled just a fraction on the base to detach it from the bed head, leaning that also against the other wall. We then carefully replaced the base, reattached the bed head then perfectly slotting the foot back onto the base. All the bolt holes matched. I recall we were both spent but I was determined. I think mum left me to sort the bolts. Fair, wriggling on the carpet to each corner then two bolts into the middle of the centre of the base into the bed head. With the shifter to tighten and it was done.