Earlier this year I made a commitment to eat healthier. Part of that commitment: vegetables with every meal. That sounds simple enough, but let’s be honest—sometimes you can’t figure out how to pair broccoli with pancakes and other times you’re too tired (or lazy) to cook more than macaroni and cheese with hot dogs.

I haven’t figure out how to make broccoli and pancakes work yet, but I’ve mastered the mac and cheese and dogs conundrum—peas. Grab yourself a bag of frozen peas, pour them in, and viola! Veggies with dinner. Last month I made such a dinner; one digestive cycle later, however, and I had a predicament.

After the necessary rigamarole of eating, digesting, and eliminating dinner, I went about my business. Because I work from home, I tend to drink a lot of coffee, then drink a lot of water to counteract the acidity of the coffee. You see where this is going? Back to the bathroom. No big deal. I’m used to it. What I’m not used to, however, are peas floating in my toilet.

That’s right. I don’t know if I consumed too many peas, failed to properly digest them, or my plumbing failed, but a stubborn cluster of peas floated through the toilet. It didn’t concern me though. Surely they’d drown in my excess of coffee and water.

But they didn’t.

Huddled together, clinging to the surface, those peas tormented me through my coffee break, lunch, afternoon snack, and the next dinner! I had no choice but to warn my husband and ask for his assistance. Oddly elated to be asked to help in such a situation, my truck driver husband swelled with pride at the knowledge that nothing could survive an encounter with his digestive output.

BUT. THEY. DID!

Those stupid tiny veggies-I-had-to-have-at-dinner mocked me as they swam laps around my commode. But what if they weren’t mocking me? What if the peas were suffering (what I can only imagine must have been a torturous existence) because of our bad plumbing? We know our house has some issues that we’ve been saving up to fix, but it never occurred to me that our decision to be fiscally responsible would lead to the unnecessary anguish of innocent pisum sativum.

There was no time to test the theory, though. After dozens of flushes, the peas remained, and the cleaning lady was coming! I had a choice to make: my pride or my strainer? Being the frugal woman that I am, my strainer won, so when the cleaning lady arrived I had to explain the Pea vs. Plumbing debacle. I don’t know what she did or how she did it, but that afternoon I enjoyed a pea-less toilet.

The moral to this story? Sometimes we have issues in our lives that we can’t figure out. It doesn’t matter who’s to blame—the mutant peas or the failing plumbing. What matters is how you respond to the situation. Are you willing to risk your pride to ask for help? I’m glad I did (though I’m hesitant to eat peas anytime soon).