Keeping A Roof Over Our Heads

This house, which apparently saw only three viewings in eight months last year and was thus pulled from the market, has now had three viewings in two days, and two of those are coming back for a second look. I have been really quite startled by the reaction it has caused in me. I mean, I knew it was coming and I thought I’d just handle it like any other hurdle in this move, but it’s really hit me hard in the guts. As soon as the first appointments were made, I developed a stonker of a headache — and that almost never happens to me — and felt in a foul mood for hours. I think it’s just the realisation that the place we live — the roof over our heads — is not a sure-thing anymore. I mean, home should be the place where you can find refuge, where you kick back and relax, regroup, recharge. But now, we can’t relax because we know that the phone can ring any minute, seven days a week, with the news that someone is coming around in a little while to look around and decide if they’d like to live here. There’s something quite frightening about knowing — or not knowing — if the place where you’re living is securely yours to stay in. And, under present circumstances, where everything is new and unfamiliar — from M’s job to the grocery shopping — and we neither of us have the comfort of our friends (but the added stresses of inlaws instead), and this pain continues to plague me unabatted… well, I think not knowing how long this roof over our heads will remain ours was just too much, and so it hit me much, much harder than I expected. I am frightened — disproportionately but truly frightened, in a primal way. I went into a blind panic: I shouted at the girls; I couldn’t think straight; I burst into tears; I was terrible to my mother and my husband.

I have also been scrambling like mad to organise a way out. Yesterday, the mortgage guy said, yep, no problem, he could preapprove us for a mortgage (“go find a yourself house!”), but the rate would be slightly higher because of M’s unusual background. Fine, ok, whatever — it’s a mortgage. Based on that, I contacted a realtor we’d been speaking to and said perhaps we should start looking at houses next week. But, this morning, when the mortgage guy sent the details through, he said he’d come upon an unexpected hurdle and needed quite a lot more documentation from M’s UK creditors — and anyone who has lived in Britain will know that these things can often take a considerable time to materialise — and that the rate, unfortunately, may be higher than he’d hoped. It looks like I will have to ring the realtor back and tell him to stand down.

So, to cover ourselves, we’ve started looking at rentals instead. The rental market in the US seems so different from the UK — so geared towards apartments and a younger (more transient) clientele, rather than houses and families– and I am having trouble finding something we can afford that I feel comfortable housing my family in. It’s incredibly difficult to trawl through the classified ads in the paper when you don’t know the area at all. Is this a good neighbourhood or a dodgy one? I don’t know which areas are downtown or way outside the city… north or south… east or west… Is that place a bargain because it’s out in the sticks or because it’s next to a crack den? I have no idea. Doing this was hard when I was kid at university in a city I knew well enough. Trying to do it now, in a strange place and with the welfare of my two precious daughters always on my mind, is really quite stressful.

The realtor who scheduled an appointment for 11.30 this morning didn’t turn up until noon. I know these things happen, but I had been jiggling the baby on my hip to hold off her feed for half-an-hour, and I was annoyed. E1 was tucking into her lunch when the bell went. I opened the door and the realtor walked boldly into the hallway, swiveling her head around to look everything over as she did. She stuck out her hand and said, “I’m Kim,” then motioning to her client, “and this is Sarah.” The baby had slipped her hand in my top to find my bra-strap and was tugging at it. Then she added, in a tone that bordered on condecending, “You can stay if you want, while we look around.”

I smiled politely and said thank you, and then closed the door behind them. She had no idea how close I’d come to shoving her neatly coiffed head against the wall, and hissing, “Yeah, I know I can stay. I paid the rent. I live here.”

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The Countdown Begins

When I got the girls up this morning, I spotted a man messing about in the front garden. I held E1 as we watched him walk around, looking down at the grass, and then he went back to his van and started moving things around in the back. He came back with some tools and bulky piece of wood, and then dug a small hole, sunk the wood in the ground, and hung a colourful sign on it. Our rental of this house has always been on a casual basis — it belongs to a friend of my mother’s who wanted someone living in it over the coldest months, which suited us as a starting point — and was never destined to last long. I knew this day would come: the “For Sale” sign has gone up.

I had planned to have something sorted by now, but it’s been harder than I expected. I had hoped to buy — I’m fed up with renting — but I don’t know this area at all and it’s difficult to househunt in a place you are completely unfamiliar with. As well as that, I am not used to being in such an urban area — everything packed so close together, on street after street after street, no open space in sight — and I’m finding it hard to see these city-houses as possible homes. Everything feels so strange, foreign and unfamiliar.

But those are just a matters of taste, which could all be overcome. The real problem is that my husband had no US credit rating. His excellent British credit score counts for nothing here in the US and, as I am not working, my excellent US score is redundant. We are working with several banks and mortgage specialists, and hope to overcome the problem, but it necessarily causes delay.

But time is not on our side. The realtor rang tonight, friendly in a smarmy way: she’s lined up two viewings for tomorrow, at 5.30 and 6.30 — right in the middle of dinnertime for girls. She’d rather we made ourselves scarce, if we’d be so kind, but that just isn’t practical with a two-year-old and a one-year-old who are expecting to be fed — we will just have to be here, uncomfortable as that will be, while other people tour the house and decide if they want to buy it. That sign and her phone call has caused me to panic afresh. I spent most of the early evening on the phone with the mortgage people going over options, and I’ve spent the rest of the night trawling realty websites. M eats his dinner, get ready for bed, and then sleeps blissfully. This is, as ever, my problem to solve.

I don’t know how I’m going to solve it. I don’t know if we’ll get a mortgage — I’m not even sure if we could rent a place with no credit history. But I’d better think of something… The clock is ticking, and we have got to get out of this house.

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Whinging… or Struggling?

My last post has raised some quite strong responses, both here and in my email inbox. Some of them made me feel quite guilty for having written it. Every one of the responses that weighed on my mind pointed out the same one thing: I have much to be grateful for and little to complain of. And they are absolutely right, so perhaps I ought to keep my focus more firmly on that and stop my whinging.

Except that no one really manages to do that all the time — as much as any of us might genuinely try to count our blessings and focus on the positive most of the time, we all have moments when we fail in that. We all have days where life gets on top of us, where we look back at our mistakes and berate ourselves. There is no one who can say honestly that they have never regretted.

I struggle with a lot of regrets. It is something I carry with me every day — and have for years — and something I’d dearly love to rid myself of. But doing that is not as easy as just simply stopping regretting, or telling myself to focus on the positive. It’s something I have to work through slowly, one (difficult or good) day at a time — and this blog is part of that. That’s why it’s called “Potential and Expectations” — it’s what the whole thing is about. And I am pretty honest in what I write: the good moments, the bad moments, and the ugly moments are all here.

Everyone has ugly moments — everyone — and the things that cause them are as much a part of a person’s life as the things that cause the moments of joy. To ignore those ugly moments, to brush them under the carpet, is to ignore what has caused them — and to ignore what has caused them is to never be able to see those issues settled and to be doomed to repeat them. I have this same problem with my mother: she and I have had issues for years, but she refuses to talk about it — avoids it like the plague — and so we never work through our problems and repeat the same mistakes over and over. I don’t want to do that in my own life, so I would rather recognise my negative thoughts right alongside with my positive thoughts and, in that way, deal with them.

It may look like whinging to a lot of people — I know that. But there is a difference between whinging and struggling: whinging wallows, struggling tries to overcome. I am trying to overcome, though it is not easy. I have a mother who built up enormous expectations for me, and a father who taught me to accept no failures whatsoever (key phrases from my childhood: “There is never any excuse” and “Don’t try your best, do it.”). I know I have a lot to be thankful for — and I am — and that I have achieved good things in my life, but there were also other things I wanted to achieve, and they niggle under my skin like a nettle-sting. I am not blaming the world for my failings — I am blaming myself.

I do need to let this go and focus on my many blessings instead, but in order to do that, I have to be able to recognise the ugly moments, and to think — and speak – freely about them here, so I can get to the other side and, I hope, finally, one day let them go.

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