Love in its most mundane form
Just yesterday, I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the restroom. Our house has an automatic water pump that pushes water to the water tank upstairs every time it gets empty, and it decided to work right at 1 am.
Except it didn’t turn off automatically like it was supposed to. It made weird sounds, and I assumed there was no water going up, just an overheating turbine and hot air.
We already replaced our water pump the first year we lived in this house because of the exact same issue, so I was getting paranoid. The water pump is housed outside the house, and I needed to check it.
Our front yard is small, but still, the thought of going outside at 1 am scared me. We live in a small suburb on the outskirts of the city, and sometimes there are wild dogs roaming the area.1
So, of course, I woke my husband up. He examined and repaired it while I waited on our front porch wearing my nightgown. Thirty minutes and one pail of water later, it was done.
I thanked him, and we went back to sleep. Every day, we need to wake up at 4:30 am and go to work at 6:30 am, so time is tight.
Except it’s kind of hard to sleep after spending time dealing with a malfunctioning water pump. I fell asleep first, and my husband didn’t sleep again until 3 am—that’s what he said when I tried to wake him up for Subuh.
So I let him sleep. He thanked me and drifted off right after the Subuh prayer. I went to work earlier using public transport. We’ll meet at his office as usual after work.
Oftentimes, love is not flowers, candlelight dinners, or poems. It manifests as waking up in the middle of the night to repair a water pump or letting your spouse catch some sleep after a disrupted sleep schedule.
Oftentimes, love means a thank you and a lot of prayer for a stable, mundane, and boring life together—so our worst night was just a malfunctioning water pump.
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we caught five dogs roamed our front porch once at 2am. they were friendly but it was still kinda scary.↩