Before I married Mr. Fix-It we broke up. But since I had already paid him to put up shelves in my kitchen, he did the job. As I removed the turkey from the oven on Thanksgiving, there was the sound of things separating from the wall of shelves now filled with breakable objects and then a massive crash. He is an iron worker who could find a stud in his sleep. This was sabotage. I, on the other hand, can’t hold a tape measure straight. While I spent two years pretending to understand the process of installing telephones, drilling into concrete, climbing telephone poles, I didn’t actually comprehend any part of my foreperson’s job except for schmoozing customers and telling my gang to wear eye protection. I was a fraud.

Growing up with an architect mother who actually made our building blocks, chunks of wood cut into geometric shapes, sanded and polyurethaned, I was my father’s daughter, incapable of the simplest construction-related chore. We knew winter was coming when the sound of storm windows breaking, accompanied by my father’s swearing filled the house. We were masterful readers, writers, storytellers, and coffee makers, but weak on things that required measuring or hammering or taking things apart.

Mr. Fix-It loves taking things apart. I cringe watching him disassemble, repair, and then reassemble the dishwasher and other appliances. I silence the instinct to mention anything wonky because chances are that thing will soon display its guts to me. Also, he loves, like my mother, plans: floor plans, architectural renderings, any future project that he believes I should approve. Notwithstanding my inability to actually understand what I’m looking at, is that upside down? I don’t want to be kept informed. I wallow in not knowing how or why this or that wall needs to be destroyed.

An oft told family story was that when my father went to his first teaching class at Amherst College, my mother, with my two older sister’s present, took a sledge hammer to a wall she felt blocked the flow of the apartment. In the middle of the rubble and the two crying babies, a faculty wife knocked on the front door bearing a cake, hoping to have a coffee date with my mom. Instead, she was confronted by a wild haired woman wearing few clothes, covered in plaster dust, holding a sledge hammer. She quickly learned that this graduate from Harvard Design School had no interest in classic faculty wife behavior, that my mother was busy renovating things and would not be on any social committees.

Mr. Fix-It recently had a custom-built shed installed on our property to house his welding equipment and our sauna. The Mennonite family that came to drop the building off included a woman who clearly understood how to do things I find awful. Maybe she would have made a better wife. I don’t like dirt, gravel, gardening, or asphalt. Lumber yards give me PTSD from waiting for my mother to decide which length of whatever she needed to complete some home renovation project that was driving my father crazy. Recently, Mr. Fix-It has taken to wearing a tape measure attached to his belt. I can’t look.

The other day he fiddled with my cake pan and when I went to place that cake in the oven, the bottom dropped out, like the shelves, and batter went everywhere. I blamed my own lack of understanding of how to close the mechanism that held the bottom tightly until he murmured something about not trying to fix my cake pan again. Again. This is my cross to bear. I married my mother.

—Molly Moynahan

The Teachers Way

Mr. Fix-It

“Living through a home improvement is like living in the wild. You do whatever it takes to survive.” – Anonymous

The teachers Way