Nearly The One… But Not Quite

Finding a house to buy is exhausting and emotionally-draining work but, really, it ought to be dead easy for us. Coming from the UK, we should be bowled over by the sheer size of the houses and gardens here, delighted by the amenities (closets! garbage disposals! air-conditioning!), and ecstatic at the prices. It should be easy as pie.

But we’ve discovered that it’s really quite difficult, more difficult than I suspect it is for the natives, precisely because our mindset — and more the the point, our expectations — are so very British. Our eyes are not acclimatised to American house styles. After a lifetime (for M) and years ( for me) of living in a place where almost all the buildings are constructed of stone or brick, the little clapboard houses that look so sweet and appealing to Americans appear alarmingly flimsy to us. Seeing something akin to fabric on the roof, instead of slate or tile, seems very odd. M is repeatedly surprised by closely-built neighbourhoods with no fences, so the gardens run into each other. He deeply distrusts septic tanks and well-water. We both instinctively look for Main Streets, not strip malls. And I just don’t like bungalows (ranch-styles) which, unfortunately, appears to rule out 75% of the houses on offer. After seeing nearly 20 houses with no real winners, we are slowly driving the poor estate agent (realtor) round the twist.

And we switch back and forth between wanting to be out in the country and wanting to be in the city. In truth, we are trying to find what we had in the UK — a small town, complete with functioning Main Street, which is located out in the countryside — but that does not exist here as far as we can tell. Though neither of us want to be in the city, certain areas of the inner suburbs do offer real functioning Main Streets, complete with independent shops, coffee houses, post offices, and green grocers — and that really appeals to both of us — but, at the same time, it comes with that claustrophobic, houses-backing-onto-houses layout that we both recoil from. And yet, every time we venture out in the countryside — suddenly relieved to see open spaces and feeling so much more at home — we find no towns to speak of, only collections of houses and the occasional gas station, and the reality that we would need to use the car for everything. We find the surroundings we like out in the country, but the amenities we want much closer into the city and, unable to decide which is more important to us, we each flip back and forth between the two daily.

I thought we’d found it on Thursday. The realtor and I viewed a house that was so far out in the sticks, he was muttering at the GPS — he is actually based in the city, catering to a city-clientèle, and is perplexed by our attraction to houses in the back of beyond. I liked the house. I really liked the house. I liked the shape of it, I like the layout, I like the potential for expansion, I liked the floors. The kitchen needed work, but it was do-able — almost exciting — not overwhelming. And the location was absolutely perfect — out in the countryside, on a huge lot that ran down to a forest on one side, and on a quiet dead-end road with views across sweeping green countryside, and yet within walking distance of a… well, not a Main Street as such, but small gathering of buildings encompassing a pizza parlour, diner, bar, post office, corner shop, hair dressers, and antique shop, all strung out along a state-route and yet all walkable from the house. I felt waves of relief roll over me as I realised that it was possible for me to find a house I liked here in this foreign land (I had begun to wonder), and I rang M and asked him to come straight over as soon as he finished work. “I think we’ve found it! I think we’ve found THE house!” I stood in the living room and waited, mentally arranging the furniture and starting to feel quite giddy. I wanted to live here. I wanted this house.

When he arrived, he was tired after a particularly hard day, dirty in his work clothes and hot in the pre-storm humidity. He was instantly hesitant about the siding (”Mmmm… I’d rather it were brick…”), though he was quite taken with the garage and, upon inspection, liked the layout of the house itself well enough. But he was not happy with its having well-water and a septic tank, and even less impressed when he found the water had left the sinks and loos with a heavy iron-brown stain. He went outside to inspect the septic tank. “But listen,” I said, marching along behind him, “Listen to the stillness… look at the view! There are cows… We’d have deer!” He looked at the surveyor’s report instead, and found that basement needed dampproofing, and its walls needed stabalising, and the radon count was off the scale. The estimates were $20,000 just for that essential work alone, even before I’d started treating myself to a new kitchen and building the extension I’d been conjuring in my mind. The asking price was not low enough to compensate for that, and the owners, apparently, are in no rush to sell. Even the realtor agreed it was not the house for us. I began to feel like a balloon deflating slowly.

So, it is back to the hunt: put our criteria into the computer and see what possibilities it spits out, schedule a day with the realtor, and go and have a look. It should be fine. It should be easy. There are so many houses for sale…

But it’s been four days now, the computer has produced nothing else that piques my fancy, and I cannot stop thinking about that house.

So Unfortunate!

We’ve been househunting all day and I am so brain-numbed and tired I can’t even think how to write anything.

However, as the estate agent (realtor) and I were trawling through all the houses on their books, we came across this one, and I ended up laughing so hard that I nearly stopped breathing.

A gold star to the first person who can spot why this house has been on the market for ages and will not sell…

Finding My Inner Fibre-Fiend

I had a little reminder this weekend of who I am — who I really am, grown-up me, when I’m not ever-fraught mummy, best-supporting spouse, finance-and-household officer, lost-and-confused nomad. When I am just me, the way I was –oh! — so many years ago. This weekend, we took my sister’s car back to her and combined it with a side-trip to the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

That I spent more money than I had budgeted for, or even that I had to spend, was no matter. That my mother and sister and dear children were bored, hot, and exhausted made no difference to me at all. That there was next to nothing that I could eat and so I went all day so little food that it would have normally had me shaking with hunger was no problem. I was in my element, I was beside myself with excitement, I felt like myself again — it was marvelous! My sister looked at my face at one point and laughed out loud. “You look crazed!” she said. “You’re so excited. You’re like a kid!”

And, looking back, it taught me a few things as well. I realised just how much I need to make a bit of time each day to do something for me, something that makes me feel productive, creative, and which I love (…besides raising my daughters — which I do love with all my soul, but you know what I mean). I don’t get that time these days — hardly ever — and I didn’t realise how much I missed it until I was immersed in so many things I’d love to spend that time doing, if only I had it again.

I realised I am in serious need of some local fibre-friends who really get what this means to me. And, so I don’t have to subject my poor family to any more long, hot, dirty days at the county fairgrounds, surrounded by bleating sheep and a frenzied me. They were patient, but we were on two different planets.

And… I realised that when it’s time to go back to work (which M increasingly is hinting is now), I need to do everything I can to find a job that really fulfills me. I want to work in a field that leaves me feeling as alive inside as I felt this weekend, something that permeates my dreams the way it did, something that inspires me so much that I would forgo precious sleep and get up 3 hours early just in order to go back on my own for more. I dread the thought of going back to work because I dreaded the work I used to do. I want to love my work. I want to be productive and creative and passionate about my work. I want that heart-pounding, mouth-salivating excitement that I felt this weekend.

I have no idea how I’ll pull that off. But I am old enough now, and experienced enough, to know that I don’t want to settle for anything less.

Providence

Yesterday I wrote a post that in which I moaned about my husband a bit.  Today, by some strange happenstance, I came across this — exactly what I needed to read to put my mind back on track.  Whether you are a believer or not,  these are sage words from which any married person can take a little wisdom.

The Difficult Side of Being SuperMummy

M was taking care of the girls over the weekend whilst I got some paperwork done. They were being what they are — loud, boisterous, excited little girls, filled with the joy of just being alive — and chasing each other around the playroom and the kitchen like lunatics, screaming at the top of their lungs. If you could get past the chaotic and ear-piercing nature of it, it was a truly delightful site — but M could not. I walked into the room just as he clapped his hands over his face with exhaustion, leaned back against the kitchen countertop and then slumped his upper body forward, so he was bent double and his elbows rested on his knees. The girls ran past again as he mumbled through gap between his palms, slowly and deliberately, “I don’t know how you manage it every day.” At that moment, I found it hilarious. Couldn’t he see this was one of the good moments? Wasn’t the girls’ joy spilling over into his heart? But M’s capacity to handle these things is less than most — where others have a gallon jug, he has more of pint jar, and life is most often wearisome for him. In that moment, he didn’t see the joy, but the chaos and the ear-piercing shrieks went straight through him.

My mother gave E2 some chicken for the first time the other day (without asking me first, but that is another issue) and I have subsequently had three of the worst nights I’ve had in a long while — it would appear that chicken is another food we shall have to add to her ever-growing avoidance list. Last night was particularly torturous: I got eight hours’ sleep, but it was broken up five times (I’ll do the math for you — that’s 90min, 90min, 90min, 90min, and 2 hours), and when it comes in short spurts like that, you might as well have only had half the amount of sleep, as rotten as it leaves you. Rolling myself out of bed that last time, I could almost feel my brain rattling around inside my skull and I wondered how, after three nights like that in a row, I would ever make it through the day to come.

As if to teach me a lesson in counting my blessings, the pain set in about an hour later. It wasn’t that bad today, but it was enough and, on top of the tiredness, I really struggled to keep it together. I prayed for patience every time I felt it start to slip away, and I was given it. We got through the day — and the lunch that ended up splattered across the floor, and the bathwater that missed the bath and landed on the rug and my trousers, and the oatmeal that got forgotten and burnt to the pan — unscathed for the most part, until at last — at last – their naptime arrived, and I got them down and dragged my aching head to my own bed. How do I manage it? He doesn’t know the half of it!, I thought to myself. I get through it with all the same chaos that he struggles with, but with pain and shattered sleep to boot. The question isn’t how I manage it, but how — without those extra handicaps to contend with — he doesn’t.

M got the girls up when he got home — noisily — and let me sleep on. It wasn’t the best nap, interrupted as it was with the girls’ squeals and whoops, M’s occasional outburst, and once, E2 toddling in to find me when her daddy wasn’t paying attention and planting her inexpert and poorly-aimed kiss on my eye. I struggled on though, so precious was that elusive sleep to me, burying my head deeper and deeper under the covers with every thud or yell from the other end of the house. Eventually I admitted it was in vain and got up. The girls had been fed and it was still early enough, and my head was filled with cobwebs that needed to be swept away, so I asked M if he fancied a good brisk walk. To my astonishment, he agreed. Twenty minutes later, the girls were in the pushchair and we were taking in great lungfuls of the cool night air, heading up the hill into town and, if I was lucky, to a nice decaf latte from the local coffee-house.

I did get my coffee, and we had a relaxing walk with a beautiful sunset, but we took too long and got back far too late, rushing to get the girls ready for bed when we returned. E1 was so overexcited by the walk that getting her into her PJs was a near impossibility, and E2 was distressed that her feed had been delayed and screamed inconsolably. What had been a refreshing and invigorating evening was quickly turning into a disaster.

I settled down in the bedroom to feed the baby, she suckling as if she thought she’d never see milk again and then, slowly, slowly, starting to fall asleep as she fed. It took ages, but I didn’t mind. M would be making dinner, she needed me, and things were calm and under control again. Disaster averted: one child in bed, the other nearly there, dinner on its way.

When I finally got her down and came back into the kitchen, dinner was not made — nothing was even started. M was asleep, face down on the table, resting his forehead on his folded arms. It had just gone 10pm, I had had three miserable nights on the trot, a day filled with pain, and had just finished my “work”, only to find he had clocked off before his job was finished. My never-ending pool of patience had finally run dry. I rapped on his skull with my knuckle and asked loudly, “Why aren’t you making dinner?!?” He raised his head listlessly and reported there was nothing to make. Rubbish! He was just being too lazy to think! I opened the fridge and surveyed it, then closed it and opened a cupboard, incredulous that I was having to pick up the slack and make dinner at this ridiculous hour. I grabbed a bag of pasta, a jar of pre-made sauce kept only for such emergencies, an onion, and some spinach. M, unwisely, started to explain that I needed to heat up the sauce in one pan and I should cook the pasta in a separate pan. I considered bringing the jar of said sauce down on his swede, but refrained and emptied it into a pan instead. We ate at nearly 10.30, in deafening silence.

He doesn’t know how I manage it every day. He doesn’t know how I manage it. I’ll tell you how I manage it. I don’t “manage” anything — I just keep going. I just do the next thing that needs to be done: I make lunch, I wipe lunch up off the floor, I change nappies, I pull poo out of the baby’s hands and hair when E1 forgets to use the toilet in time, I comfort them when they are screaming after a fall, I feed the baby, I get up at 2am, and again at 3.30am, and again at 5am, and again at 6.30 because she needs me to — I have not had more than 4 hours’ sleep in a row in over 15 months — I silence tantrums and broker the peace, I think think think about what they are putting in their mouths, I make dinner when there’s nothing to eat. I just keep doing the next thing that needs to be done, and it never ends. It doesn’t end at 5pm, it doesn’t end when they go to bed, it doesn’t end when I go to bed, it doesn’t end when I’m tired, and it doesn’t end at 10pm, when my husband — he of the full night’s sleep — is crashed out on the kitchen table, succumbed to his own weariness without having made any attempt at dinner. It’s nothing so fancy as “managing” anything — I am tethered to a treadmill that never stops. Giving up just because I’m exhausted is a luxury I don’t have.

Finding Perspective

I spent half of the day today fretting uselessly about money and trying to shake that uncomfortable, nagging feeling of being hopelessly skint — a feeling exacerbated by over-tiredness, thanks to the baby getting me up four times last night. Again and again, I asked myself why we made this move, if we were only going to end up as broke as we had been in the UK, but this time with no friends, everything so foreign and unfamiliar, and only one car at our disposal instead of two?

I don’t know what caused the baby’s problems last night, but she hardly slept more than a hour at a time. It was possibly a reaction to her first taste of chicken yesterday (we will tread carefully with that in the future) or to her first taste of beer via my milk — it was my first drink since I fell pregnant, but my mother insisted that she was babysitting last night so that M and I could walk up to the neighbourhood bar and have a drink together, like a proper couple, for the first time over a year and, boy, did that feel good!

Whichever it was, the end result was that I was up all night and never made it to church in the morning, and so I had to go to the last-chance Mass this evening. I got the time wrong and found myself standing in an empty church 30 minutes early, which gave me ample opportunity to fret some more. I should have been praying, but I find that the more stressed I am, less I pray — I can’t seem to focus, can’t stop my mind from racing away from me. I knelt in the pew and tried in vain to rein my thoughts in, but they galloped all over the place wildly. I found myself going back the money situation again and again. Why did we come over if we are going to be so broke? What was the point of all this effort?!?!?

And then it came to me in a moment of perfect clarity. This is why we are here: because although there is absolutely no spare money whatsoever, we are getting by on M’s salary alone. We are not living this tightly and yet still spiralling into the red each month as we were in the UK, short each month by hundreds and hundreds and having to drain our savings to make up the difference. More than that, we have even been out house-hunting with a realtor all last week, because is actually feasible for us to buy a house (and one that’s big enough for us to live in!) on the money M is making. And, perhaps most importantly, we are doing all this with me being able to stay home with the girls. So although life feels as difficult as it was in the UK, the realities of the two situations are actually miles apart — half a world apart, in fact.

And just like that, everything slowed down, my mind stopped racing, and I felt a bit of peace come over me at last. In those few, rare minutes away from everything, I was able to find some much-needed perspective, and it made all the difference in the world.

Back To Being Mummy’s Little Girl

We have had the loan of my sister’s car since we arrived — she started the lease when she was living out in the country, but now that she lives in a city, she can get by quite well without it and resents having to pay to park it, so she was happy enough to let us have the use of it for awhile. She very graciously gave us the first two months as a gift, and said that if we wanted to keep it longer than that, we need only give her the money to cover her payment and insurance — a very fair deal indeed. She joked that we could keep the car as long as we let her keep our cat, and I had half a mind to point out that there are cheaper ways to get yourself a cat (…why, some people even give them away), but I realised there was no point in messing up such a good deal, so I kept my gob shut!

But, good deal or no, the car goes back next weekend. As M points out, it is time (though she hasn’t said so to us, we know she found it was harder to get around without the car than she anticipated) and, the real nub of it is, we can’t afford to keep it. Several weeks of living on base-pay has driven that point right home to us. By the time we take out the rent and utilities, his child-maintenance (just slightly less), our frugal food-budget, the cable/phone/broadband package (my one real luxury), and the monthly payment for my newly acquired medical bills, the amount that is left gives us only a double-digit figure each to cover the month’s miscellaneous spending, including petrol, prescriptions, and those dreaded copays. There is simply no room for a car payment — it has got to go.

We were hoping that M would have gotten a work-van by now — they had initially said he would — but that has not happened and looks unlikely for awhile. So, he will have to take our car to work, where it will sit in a lot all day while he goes out in one of the other guy’s vans, and I will be car-less at home. More to the point, I will be dependent on my mother again. Though the obvious answer is for me to drive him to work, it becomes a practical impossibility when you factor in two sleeping toddlers, a wife who has been up three times in the night, and a 5.30am departure. M will, I know, do everything in his power to get lift into work whenever possible, but we’re both realistic enough to realise that that will be an occasional treat at best. The real answer is get M some sort of cheap run-around just to get him to work and back. Nothing fancy, but it will cost several thousand nonetheless — more expense — and take a little while to get sorted.

So, this coming weekend, my mother and the girls and I will pack up in two cars and drive half-a-day to my sister’s flat. It will be nice to see her, her new place, her city, and have a brief and joyful reunion with the cat. I am looking forward to it very much. And then, it will be back into my mother’s car, on the passenger side, to be driven home — out of control and dependent on her, an uncomfortable position I will have to get used to all over again.

Hoping For The Rains To Come

M was hired on an hourly salary plus commission, and anything above 40 hours per week was at time-and-a-half. We knew the commission wouldn’t come into play until he’d been working for awhile, so we didn’t budget for it. But we also knew that the kind of work he does rarely gets finished in a 40-hour week on either side of the world so, while we calculated that we would scrape by on the base salary, we felt fairly confident that we would likely have a bit of a cushion from overtime as well.

His first few weeks didn’t really go that way, but I didn’t worry too much, because it always takes a little while for any new job to settle out into a normal routine. I decided to ignore my worry-instincts, and force myself to relax about it and just enjoy the fact that he was getting home around 3.30 in the afternoon. But the worry was there at the back of my mind, and it didn’t help that, when I mentioned his hours to my mother, she — ever the (self-confessed) Pollyanna — gurgled, “Oooooh, isn’t that wonderful!” and I had to explain out loud what was always gnawing away in pit of my stomach — that while finishing that early might be wonderful for a salaried employee, it’s nothing but bad news to someone who is paid hourly.

After a few weeks, his schedule did begin to stabalise and the overtime came, just as we’d thought it would. His paycheques suddenly looked quite comfortable, and I began to relax. This was going to be fine. We were going to be able to afford… well, not a lavish lifestyle, but at least the kind of stable, sustainable life that we’d moved half-a-world away in order to achieve.

And then, just as quickly, he was moved to a different department — one where, as a rule, they work regular hours and don’t do overtime. When the whistle blows at the end of the day, they down tools and go home. He was starting at 6 or 7am and walking back through the door at 3pm, but he was on base pay again. I looked at the paystubs in dismay — life on this kind of money would be tight indeed… worryingly tight. M didn’t like the work anyway — the same routine thing every day, not challenging at all — and asked to be transferred back to what he was doing before. It took a lot of asking (”We’ve got to put you where the work is, you see…”), but at the end of last week, he was put back into his previous department. He anticipated more interesting work, and I anticipate more comfortable paycheques.

He’s got the interesting work, but the hours just aren’t there. Thursday, Friday, and yesterday, he got home around 2.30pm. Today, he walked through the door at 1.30. He is “concerned” — this should be their busy season, and he is coming home before the girls have finished lunch. If he — someone who never much worries himself about money or the future — is concerned, then I am quite worried indeed. After all that’s been going on — allergies, pain, medical bills, taxes, mortgage-brickwalls, the house up for sale, the hurdles of building credit — is it possible that his work could start to dry up too?

Lost in Translation

There are so many odd words that you don’t give a moment’s thought to when you’ve grown up with them. Brits don’t register any reaction at all to such things as Spotted Dick or Faggots. These words have been a part of their verbal landscape for so long that they’ve lost their obvious oddness. After awhile, they just are what they are.

I was cutting coupons tonight when M picked one of the ads up for a closer look. He frowned in confusion as he studied it. There, amongst the other ads for nappies and cough medicines and children’s vitamins, was this one which showed a tube of some sort of gel in the foreground and, beyond that, a male hand gently massaging a well-muscled shoulder. My coupon-clipping had cut off the bottom of the page, so the slogan now read, “It’s What’s Hot…”

M looked up at me, puzzled, then looked back down at the page again, and asked in utter confusion, “Who is… um… What is… Ben Gay?”

A Quick Interruption for Something Personal

I just want to interrupt normal programming to say a quick thank you to someone with whom I have no other way of communicating…

K, thank you so much for my birthday gift!  I am chuffed and have not been able to put it down since it arrived.  I was confused for a moment, and then I read your son’s name and it clicked instantly.  It’s so nice to hear from you after all this time — I hope you are well and enjoying motherhood as much as I am.  Thanks again for the gift — it was such a lovely surprise.