We closed on the house in mid-May, the lease for our rental was up on June 1, and on May 30, our only car died in a Walgreen’s parking lot on an 88F day. I figured the car failure was due to a combination of high temperatures and the fact of the near-empty gas tank, maybe a few hundred bones to fix. It was not. The car, model year 2013 a.k.a. yesterday, was a goner. We could pay $5,000 to repair it and maybe it would last us a few more years. Or we could scrap it. The blue book value was only $9,000, and that was for a car that worked. Oh, and we didn’t fucking have $5,000. We scrapped it.
I should mention that we were going to be doing the moving ourselves, and that the removal of carpet (Nick) and installation of new floors (contractors) meant that we couldn’t really do much pre-moving. When I complained about our situation, people were quick to tell me that in a certain stage of life, you just have to hire movers. Especially with kids! they said to me. It made me feel like my skin was on fire. I recognized the sensation from the softball sexist comments that have been lobbed my way for years. It was the feeling of being microaggressed.
We didn’t have the money for movers. We had spent every dime we had on a down payment and the floors, and now we also had to conjure the existence of a family vehicle like a rabbit from a top hat. We couldn’t exactly pull the floors up plank by plank and ask for a refund. I stopped complaining. It was humiliating, and worst of all, it was boring.
Jane did not have a spot at daycare until June 10, so Nick was still doing full-time childcare. His bike became our car. I would stay home with Jane in the morning while he would pedal Desi to school in the bike trailer and pedal home. I would hand Jane to him and then walk myself to work. Then we would do it in reverse at the end of the day for pick-up. This worked fine until his bike got stolen.
We had a two day U-Haul rental for which we were meant to accomplish the entire move, and Nick and I couldn’t really work as a team because someone always needed to be home with the kids. It did not occur to me until I just typed that out that we should have had a family member come out to stay with the kids while we moved. Four years into parenting, and I still forget that having kids is a whole thing. It’s not that I intend to not plan for things, it’s that time slips away with small children underfoot. Suddenly, it was moving day and we needed to move.
Every second of our lives became that riddle where you are trying to get the fox, the hen, and the sack of grain across the river on a raft without any of the cargo destroying each other, except we didn’t even have a raft any more. The raft had completely fucking bailed on us at the Walgreen’s. We were just walking straight into the river holding a baby and a three-year-old over our heads.
Another thing that happened is that my boss quit without telling me. I heard it from someone else and he never acknowledged it. On his last day, he popped his head into my office and asked if I’d seen a book of his. I hadn’t. Then he left. That was it.
”Nature does not hurry yet everything is accomplished” is a Taoist saying I sometimes hear in Werner Herzog’s voice in my head when my life feels especially fucked.
Everything was accomplished. Did Jane ever ride shotgun in a U-Haul truck? Well, know that if it happened, she was at least in a properly secured infant seat. The absence of my boss caused less anxiety than the presence of my boss. Nick’s bike resurfaced on the other side of campus. I made the first direct plea to my parents for money since I was 20 and got myself into trouble with a credit card. I pitched it to them as a belated combined gift for Nick’s and my close-together birthdays. This made me feel less ashamed, but everyone involved knew what was up. We needed help. Their largesse became the down payment for a car we bought off the internet to be delivered to our new house.
We survived but things still didn’t feel okay. The house was a revelation but it also was depressing. We couldn’t hang art until we painted. We couldn’t paint until we stripped wallpaper. We couldn’t strip wallpaper without energy and drive. We had nothing to give to our house at the end of the day. We had given it all away to work, and to parenting, and to the existential crush of being broke.
It didn’t help that the central air in our new place was frighteningly weak. The home inspector had told me it was fine because he turned it on and it made a noise. I nodded because he looked like Timothy Olyphant and I mapped competence onto him for height?? reasons?? and Seth Bullock?? reasons?? But it was not fine, even though it made a triumphant kick-on noise. Our lives became a Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel. We were all drooping from the leaden fog of the heat, tortured and damp. I wondered if Nick still loved me. I asked him if he did. He said yes, of course. An obvious lie!!
Ah, wait, yes, I forgot to mention the toxic vapor penetrating all of this like a carbon monoxide leak!! I had stopped pumping at work and was barely nursing baby Jane at all, just for night wakeups. I was being hormonally rebuilt but instead of doing it in beta the whole thing was being shipped immediately to production as if I weren’t a real human being who needed to live my life. I was, to abuse the metaphor, buggy.
The Bay Bridge is a five-mile-long steel structure over the sparkling Chesapeake Bay that, in light of our nation’s failure to fund infrastructure improvements, always makes me think of death. Once this summer, I crossed the bridge to Annapolis and wondered if the bridge collapsed, whether I would bother trying to escape my sinking car. When I crossed the bridge that night going back the other way, I idly fantasized about driving off of it.
I would wonder things like, who would tell Nick when it was time to trim the colorless, jagged hairs that grow out of his earlobes? I didn’t want to end my life, or have a plan to do so. It just felt obvious to me that at some point a trap door would open beneath my feet and the thing that had been consuming me would pull me under once and for all.
When I first saw blood on the toilet paper last week, I cackled like a supervillain in my office’s multi-stall bathroom. I was already on my way to being better but this felt like the blood sacrifice necessary to undo whatever hex had been placed on me. Finally, I was a weaned person. I was post-reproduction. I was myself.
We finally got an HVAC guy to return our calls this week and Wayne has given us a life worth living in the form of powerful central air conditioning. Wayne also does electric work and gave us a beautifully low quote for some work for later this fall. Wayne!
Me rn:
(h/t Kathleen for sending me this image and making my day)
On Sunday, we had a lingering all-day hang with two families that live on our block. They both have boys Desi’s age and the kids mauled each other in the paddling pool for hours while the adults housed beers in the shade. Only weeks before, I was worried about getting myself across the bridge in one piece and here I was at our cool neighbor’s house feeling like I’d hit the jackpot. My beautiful baby was being passed around the circle like a well-packed bowl. Cold drinks were being pressed into my palm. I wondered what all the fuss and grief had been about. What was all of this except exactly what I wanted? A slow, lazy life with good people. A beer. A dish of diced melon still warm from the vine.
In sum, if June 2019 were an ice cream flavor, it’d be pralines and dick. Like air conditioning, when you feel like yourself, you are barely aware of it beyond that first cool rush of relief.
yr mate,
Evie
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