It’s been a month that I’ve been doing this and some of the first things I wrote in isolation already read like pandemic cliches, especially if you’re someone who spends a lot of time on Twitter.
Nick and I were talking about how this time last year was somehow more existentially demanding of us. Nick was in his first year as a professor, meaning lots of courses built from scratch, long nights at the computer for him. We’d had a baby between his first and second semester, and our rented townhouse built in 1905 felt like it was closing in on us.
You had to ascend a treacherously steep staircase to use the only bathroom, made even more dangerous by the owner’s choice to paint the wooden stairsteps, rendering them frictionless. I was up and down that staircase holding a baby a hundred times a day, breathing little prayers of deliverance to a higher power I don’t believe in. I never wore socks, obviously! Sometimes my bare feet would get too dusty and lose their yoga-ish stickiness and I’d have to wash them in the bathtub, all biblical and shit, in order to use the stairs safely again.
There was no dishwasher, no divided sink, the litter box was in the kitchen. When it rained, all of the rooms had a spot that took on water.
Jane was a better sleeper than my eldest but she was still sleeping like a four-month-old. I was back to work but she didn’t have a spot at daycare yet, so we were paying our date night sitter $12/hour cash to care for her during the 25 hours per week Nick was in front of a classroom. This was slightly more expensive that full-time daycare would be for us and it didn’t even cover the whole work week. The balance of the work week was spent with her in his office, in a pack-n-play or bouncy chair or his lap, while he tried to manage the rest of his workload.
Like many Americans, most of my short maternity leave that had just ended was unpaid. We’d screwed up our 2018 taxes and surprise! owed a bunch of money, we’d paid Jane’s birth off in full like noobs, our credit card balances were mounting as we tried to hold on to enough liquidity to buy a house to escape that townhouse.
Oh, I forgot that the townhouse didn’t have air conditioning and we live, essentially, in a swamp! Soon, our only car, which I expected to last us at least five more years, died itself very dead. Lol when I type this all out it was truly just a puff pastry of administrative distress. So many delicious layers of pain, and packed so tightly together.
Our lease was due to end in June and while I imagine we could have negotiated with our landlord to go month to month, we were dying in that rental and couldn’t face an extended period of impermanence. We’d lived in three places in three years, Nick’s time in grad school had been an extended purgatory, goalposts shifting every few months. In April of last year, we closed on a house, moved in May, here we are.
My brain is a lemon so I processed this as a huge failure.
????????
I attended a party in the summer at a friend’s house and their home sent me into a months-long tailspin about money and status. I was destabilized by this beyond a reasonable degree. This home was large, opulent but not tacky, airy, clean, enviable. It was like finding out someone you work with is actually royalty, or more accurately, finding out that everyone you work with is royalty and you, alone, are trash.
We’d bought a fixer on purpose — we didn’t want to pay for someone else’s upgrade choices and we definitely didn’t want a flip. I guess we expected to have yawning stretches of free time to get to work on it, or even the dough to have someone else do it for us. Weirdly!!!!, we didn’t have either. Instead, we inched along and I felt persecuted by what I perceived to be our lack of progress. As usual, I thought it was beneath me to have to wait for anything good. I wanted it when I wanted it, which is always right now.
I’m not sure when I got over it, but I did. Maybe around the time we finally replaced the swinging death blades of the vertical blinds in the main living area with something a little less Ramada Inn 1988. After-school pickup was my responsibility and when I pulled into the driveway with Desi and Jane in the evening, I always said, “here we are, best place on Earth!” Having kids is a lot of indoctrination (Isn’t Daddy the best cook? Isn’t Jane the cutest baby?) so I wasn’t fully aware I was doing it. Eventually, Desi started sighing and saying under his breath, “best place on Earth” as we approached the house.
I feel like we’ve done nothing on the house, but really we’ve done so much. Pulled up the dingy carpet, put down wood floors, replaced some light fixtures, removed a lot of wallpaper, scraped and repainted the splintery, peeling garage door, hacked through years of yard overgrowth, installed a dishwasher, replaced the vertical blinds, taken down the weird wooden saloon doors. A hundred little maintenance fixes that do nothing but get us to functioning at a base level.
We have to pay for a bunch of electrical work soon, and service or replace (ugh) our air conditioning unit. I’m hoping to get someone in to replace all of the 1970s wicker-and-brass paddle ceiling fans with something less objectionable. And of course, we still have to paint the walls! I can’t wait to get our art hung, to get rid of our enormous IKEA expedit shelf once and for all. I barely think about other people’s houses anymore. I have enough to think about with my own.
Right now, our home is the only place that exists, making it both the worst place on Earth and the best place on Earth. I don’t know when we will get to all the upgrades I have in mind. Money is still tight and like everything else in life right now, progress is stalled indefinitely. When will it be ethical to have people in our home servicing appliances? How soon will we be able to send our kids somewhere else so that we can do work on the house without them underfoot?
I want to paint our brick fireplace, something that offends Nick on a spiritual level. I think it would look nice the color of our neighbor’s crepe myrtle when it blossoms. I look at that tree all day every day, my own Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window situation. I’d do it today if I had the time and the space to get it done, but of course, I’ll wait. All I can do right now is wait.
yr mate,
Evie
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