A week ago, I was sequestered with my young kids in the “breezeway” of my house. This is the unfinished area between the main living area and our small garage, a sort of screened-in mudroom common in midcentury houses. It’s where we keep our recycling bins and laundry machines and litter box and things we don’t know what to do with yet. We had finally, after 18 months in the house, gotten the walls in shape to hire painters after many nightmarish rounds of wallpaper removal and drywall resurfacing.
I don’t know if this is a rural thing, or because the pandemic has spiked demand for home improvement projects, but finding someone to paint was a whole gonzo undertaking. Two separate contractors came out to give quotes, only to later email me that they didn’t really feel like taking the job. It would be too annoying for them. “Fair!,” I thought, as I also felt it would be too annoying to do myself, which is why I was bugging them about it in the first place.
Most people didn’t call me back. I do not live in a place where you can use an app to efficiently hedge your bets with this stuff. Everyone I contacted was from a personal recommendation or from a list that the paint store would, I’m serious, only dole out to me three names at a time.
Finally I found a guy who could do it, but he worked on a paint crew during the day so he only took side jobs like mine on evenings and weekends. And I would have to pay cash. Uhhhhhhh ok fine, man, how soon can you start. And he could start pretty soon.
I cannot overstate how obsessed I have been with the state of the walls in our house this past year and a half. It was more than “just” wallpaper removal we needed, and I’m married to someone who is morally allergic to paying people to do things he can technically do himself (not that at most points of the last two years we could afford to hire much of anything out.) I ruminated, I perseverated, I frankly annoyed the shit out of myself with the walls. Ignatius Reilly and his valve, me and my walls.
They were the linchpin on which my feeling settled and “together” hinged, and yet rapid progress was impossible, especially in the last eight months. And these last eight months have been a time when I am almost always surrounded on four sides by my tormentor!
At last, though, we had hired professionals, and we had the cash somehow to float the job. The painters were at work in the main area of the house, with plastic sheeting hung between rooms to contain the dust. I could access our kitchen from the breezeway, but not any bathrooms or the bedrooms. Nick had already left by car to see his dad for a week. I wondered whether the painters would finish before me or Desi had to use the toilet. I guessed I would take them all to the gas station if it came down to it but I was not looking forward to trying to poop while my one-year-old sampled the tasting menu of the Wawa bathroom walls.
The inconvenience of having to get everyone out of the house for the painters to work on a weekend during a pandemic where there is nowhere to GOOOOOO nested just fine into my cascade of nasty little bougie plans, actually. I had already booked family photos for that Saturday and initially I had planned on having the photographer shoot in our front yard. What better way to capture 2020 than to photograph us in the place where we always fucking are?
But ultimately, I had a great deal of documentation of our flaking garage door paint and weird carpeted stoop, to the tune of 10,000 or so images on my own camera roll. And aren’t bougie family fall portraits a fantasy anyway? A world where the lighting is always warm and the kids are clean and combed and the parents, in jewel tones, are luminous with breeder pride? Nowhere in this fall family fantasy world is there a place for low-pile carpeting glued to a concrete stoop. I have had enough “real life” this year to last me for the rest of mine.
I asked the photographer if she was open to meeting us instead at a state forest where we’d spent a few afternoons over the last few months, doing the pandemic parenting weekend game of “what outdoor green space exists within an hour’s drive for the love of god I’m getting Yellow Wallpaper-ed in here call 911.”
Instead of doing the photos and heading home, we’d just get a cheap hotel room and make it a staycation, allowing the painters to work as late as they felt like. Maybe even allowing them to finish that night! My kids would get to watch hotel TV, a.k.a. the exotic programming that you cannot pause but has, crucially, “commahrcials,” in my five-year-old’s parlance.
Nick had recently been sprung from quarantine (within our house….a whole other thing where he was in his separate primate enclosure while I kept Jane home from daycare, called off Desi’s babysitter, and served Nick all meals via plate by his door like a medieval convict!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAY YOU LIVE IN INTERESTING TIMES) and we were all feeling high on our four negative COVID tests. I think Nick and I had romantic notions of stealing away into the hotel bathroom to consummate our post-quarantine lives at night while our lil blonde angels softly snored, mashed together like puppies on one of two queen beds on the other side of the wall.
I don’t know, have you ever piled a bunch of kids who had ice cream for dinner and have scarcely left their house in eight months into a thrilling Other Location and told them to settle down? It was unhinged. At one point, Nick had to take Jane for a drive to get her to sleep like she was a newborn. She had been parading around the dark hotel room trumpeting her truths, turning the air conditioning on and off, tumbling off high surfaces, while her older brother was pleading with her to please please just go to sleep Jane please.
Needless to say, neither of the adults were feeling very connected to their erotic life there at the tobacco-scented Quality Inn in Delaware. The filthiest thing about me that night was the layers of makeup applied for photos that I was too tired to wash off, that transferred in orange-y blots onto the starched white hotel pillowcases. Layers of makeup meant to frost over my features, a crumb-coat for the sagging contours of my face. The next morning, I terrified myself with my still-painted face in the brightly lit hotel bathroom mirror. I looked like a Walk of Shame who hadn’t even had any fun the night before.
We headed home from the hotel on Sunday and the painters were still at work. Nick wanted to get on the road, as planned, to see his ailing dad. He still needed to do some prep for the three courses he was going to teach (remotely) on Monday from his dad’s house in Ohio, and the drive is seven hours if you don’t stop much. This had been the arrangement from the beginning, so I sent him on his way even though I was stuck trying to figure out what to do with the kids without access to the interior of our house. Which brings us to back to our breezeway purgatory session.
At one point, I tried to change what I thought was a pee diaper on Jane while she was standing up. I managed instead to coat my jeans, my shoes and part of my arm with loose stool. At precisely the moment I realized what I had done, Desi successfully discharged a fire extinguisher into the back of my head.
It felt like one of those disastrous gross-out moments circa 2005-era mommyblogs, where the more disgusting the scene, the better the post it made. These shitshow type moments aren’t that frequent in my life these days. No one is barfing curdled breastmilk into my hair and my older kid manages bathroom stuff solo. I had to laugh because I was just utterly fucked. I couldn’t even access fresh clothes for me because I’d only packed the pants I was wearing for our hotel stay. Finally, I remembered that there were some clothes meant for Goodwill in the trunk of the car. Maybe there would be some pants in the pile, maybe they would actually fit.
I managed to excavate a pair of wide-leg cropped trousers I’d bought to wear to work after I had Jane. My midsection was then a confusing Ziploc bag of soup, not soft with fat but strangely watery and loose. I’d copped these elastic-waist gaucho things on ASOS thinking it would be a look. It was not, for me, a look, and I’d given up on trying to make them work. But they definitely still fit, and they definitely were not covered in poop.
The painters finished within an hour of my getting pooped on and fire extinguished, and the walls and trim looked so good I couldn’t even access any of the madness of the previous week, let alone the previous two hours. I was just so relieved to have a house that looked like it was intentional, someone’s home. I felt hopeful, for once, about the house where we’d be spending the entire winter. A tab I could finally close.
Four years ago, after Trump won, I did some math regarding the 2020 election. My then one-year-old would be five, a kindergartener, I calculated. That seemed as impossible to imagine as Trump being elected president. Desi was barely verbal then, still hadn’t had his first haircut.
Of course, my five-year-old is not in kindergarten now, not really, due directly to Trump’s failed leadership! He is supposed to start the hybrid model, two days a week in the physical classroom, the week after the election. As case counts surge nationwide, I don’t know what to expect. I’ve settled on feeling glad for any weeks he gets to be in school, even if the buildings get closed right back down.
Hope feels weird, almost bad. It feels vulnerable and awkward, a sticky just-born foal. We thought Nick’s dad had less than six months to live, but we just got some imaging back that suggested more time might be possible. Nick seems to have survived the budgetary bloodletting of faculty cuts that loomed large over us for most of the year. Desi, we think, will get to meet his classmates in person next month. I don’t have anything interesting going on professionally, but it’s kind of a no news is good news thing for me. I don’t feel like I’m jinxing us by saying these things out loud because of what we have already lost this year. You can’t jinx yourself if your luck is already bad!
Halloween is this weekend and I’m determined to save it. Haven’t our kids sacrificed enough? I’m thinking of texting some friends and seeing what we can pull off in one of our yards for the kids this weekend. I’m imagining them bathed in butterscotch light, swatting a Halloween piñata (???), a bougie fall family fantasy come to life.
yr mate,
Evie
P.S. 😈
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