Counting chickens
Nov 9, 2007 The Story of My Life
Brett’s little brother rehabs houses. He’s an art teacher/ski instructor/ceramicist turned handyman. (An aside, none of those boys — Brett and his two brothers — ended up doing a regular career path. Must have been something in the water.) So while Brett’s been out there he’s been seeing the work that Wick does and talking to him about the work we want to do here. Wick said he’d be willing to fly out and help Brett with some projects that we thought looked nearly insurmountable and that Wick thinks would be easy. These include:
- The bath room. Remember we have one bath in a room flanked by other rooms each with a sink and a toilet and it’s the room with the bath that needs to be [happy Becca????] gutted.
- Finishing our basement. Well, Wick wouldn’t help with that — he just thinks it’d be pretty easy although we need a sump pump. The finished basement is the one thing — well, and the low mortgage payment — that we miss about our old house. If we had a finished basement we’d move our television downstairs and the kids would have a place to play where they wouldn’t drive us nuts. Also we’d like to put a toilet down there.
- Making me an office. Brett grieves my lack of office more than I do. The one thing he wanted in a new house was a place for me to work and I didn’t really get one. I don’t mind my makeshift cubicle downstairs but I’d rather have something nicer. I figured finishing the basement would solve that but Wick’s idea is to turn our carport/storage shed that’s on the side of our garage into an office. It already has electrical and the cement pad but I can’t really imagine it being an actual livable space. Thing is, Wick turned their backyard storage shed into an amazing studio apartment (with plumbing and a kitchenette) that they use for family visits and occasionally rent to artists touring Portland. It was literally a shed and now it’s this terrific luxury space. So I’m gonna let myself dream about an office. (Wick is picturing french doors opening to the yard.)
The biggest thing about the visit for Brett is getting to spend more time with his little brother than he has since college. AND getting to see his little brother being a dad (they have two kids — Violet is Madison’s age and Felix turned one this summer). Plus Wick and his wife are also trying to figure out how to make money on their own terms, too, so they’re both working for themselves — mostly, Karoline’s a realtor — and doing it around the needs of their families. It just gave Brett the encouragement he needed and now he’s feeling more optimistic about our house than he has been since we bought it.
Wow, I can’t imagine having a real office. And it would sure help our resale value to do these improvements, not that we’d want to move if we had ‘em. Having a finished basement and an office space would pretty much make this house perfect for us and we bought it planning to finish the basement but then felt just kind of discouraged when we discovered the rotting bath, etc.
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Ruminating on life with/without Brett
Nov 8, 2007 The Story of My Life
Because I miss my handsome, dimpled cohort, I’ve been thinking about the many ways I tried to sabotage our relationship at the beginning. Like periodically breaking up with him (the first time I broke up with him was because I took him to a comedy club and he laughed and I felt laughing at comedy clubs was terribly un-punk rock), and calling ex-boyfriends all the time. Every time we’d take a step to towards more commitment (after we moved in together, after he proposed, just before we moved to Portland) I’d call up an ex-boyfriend and complain about Brett. It was a lousy thing to do but I was terrified. (And because I’m a loud-mouth, I always ended up telling Brett who somehow survived all that without being jealous. I think he knew me better than I knew myself.)
Then, right after we got married, I got a crush on a guy I worked with who was a complete and utter jerk, which is the type of guy I generally fell for pre-Brett.
It scared me to think of being happy and to think of being caught in happiness.
The boy I was dating just before Brett was sort of custom-made for a girl afraid of happiness. Not that we were really dating — it was more about sex. This guy was a mess and none too nice (not mean either, really, just too screwed up to really be boyfriend material). He had a little face like a cat and he made my knees go weak. He disapproved of Brett — who had his own baggage — but when I said, “Listen, do you think you could ever love me? Because I think this guy could.” He admitted that he didn’t know if we had any kind of future, which wasn’t the same as giving his blessing but at least he could see my point.
I watch my little sisters and Jessica working out their own relationship stuff and it brings it all back; it’s so hard. It’s hard even if you find the perfect partner (because nobody’s perfect). I watch them make some of the same mistakes I did and I watch them make better choices than I ever could. I feel lucky that all my sabotage efforts went for naught. (And I am forever grateful for ex-boyfriend E who refused to meet me in-person to say good-bye before we moved to Portland because he sensed I was vulnerable. E always was a gentleman. Sorta. Anyway he was nice, which was why I dumped him.)
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Tags: boyfriend, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, Portland, working out
Speaking of empathy
Nov 7, 2007 Family, The Story of My Life
My mother-in-law took Madison again this morning so I could have time to stare at the computer screen and not write. (I took some notes and did some free writing but I’m at the stuck point when you just keep pounding the keyboard waiting for something to come through.)
When she came back they brought incense, (which Madison calls “college” because when Jessica gave me a box of it last Christmas I took a big sniff and said, “Mmmm, smells like college!”) and a big smudge stick to stick in our bathroom. Then she stood and talked a little bit and let me be angsty. You know, missing her son (and feeling a little foolish because I know having a husband missing for less than a week is really nothing) and missing my son (although not as much as his father because his father lowers my blood pressure while my son tends to raise it). And a little bit about this fantastical switch we’ve made of having us both home full-time and me working in the basement and homeschooling and basically, you know, living our dreams since this is what we always wanted since Noah was a wee tot.
It’s scary to live your dreams, you know? And then sometimes it can make a person feel defensive because to have some things we don’t have others and then it feels like maybe not having those other things speaks to the success of the whole dream-living instead of just speaking to compromise.
Anyway, it’s amazing to me that our parents — both sets — are proud of us. Even my dad who is pretty enamored of stuff (you know, the stuff of which homes are furnished and vacations are bought) thinks we’re swell. But Brett’s parents — crazy new age nuts that they are — just love all of it. They love us both at home, they love the homeschooling, they love the crazy Madison whirling around our yard.
Sometimes emotional support (and smudge sticks) comes at just the right time.
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Tags: homeschool, Homeschooling, Madison, my dad, Noah
The evils of grapefruit
Nov 7, 2007 Parenting
This morning Madison asked for and received grapefruit (along with porridge, which is how she refers to oatmeal) for breakfast. She was annoyed I didn’t put it in a bowl because Daddy always puts it in a bowl but she deigned to eat it anyway. Unfortunately, while she was pleasantly eating it (no sugar, sipping the juice out of each section as she goes) it squirted her in her eye! And you know how that hurts. She jumped up from her chair screaming and I ran and got her a wet paper towel to wash her eye out. Ten seconds later she was sitting quietly eating her grapefruit again.
“You know what I like about you?” I told her. “I like that you’re resilient. You don’t let a squirting grapefruit scare you. You go ahead and finish eating.”
She wriggled in her chair proudly.
Now Noah wouldn’t bounce back like that. If Noah, at three, had been squirted by a grapefruit he would still be refusing grapefruit. (As it is he only likes grapefruit with sugar unless it’s the very sweet kind that he has with his grandparents when we go to Florida.) But here’s the thing — I love this about each of my kids.
I’m just like Noah — easily traumatized by fruit and other unpredictable things. When he falls apart I get it because I totally see the logic of falling apart. I see why he’s doing it, I usually think it makes sense (even if I want him to stop) and so I can steer him back towards sanity since I know the path he took away from it. I love his sensitivity and his navel-gazing worrying and his poetic spirit. There are things about him that drive me crazy like when he was younger the way a tangle of emotions stopped up every transition physical or otherwise — a trait that now translates to someone who hits every step in maturation and balks, gingerly putting one toe forward before leaping to his next developmental task. But I love Noah — the good, the bad, the ugly, the very nice. And I admire so much about him.
At the same time, I love that Madison doesn’t fall apart even though I don’t personally understand what it means to be easy-going. I love her go-get-’em-ness. I love her outrageous excitement and energy. I love that she never lets anything keep her down for long. There are things about her that drive me crazy, too. Like the way that her prodigious creativity means that nearly every toy (and kitchen appliance) is pressed into a service in which it was not meant to serve, severely curtailing its lifespan. And there’s the challenge of the chaos she leaves in her wake — the stopped up sinks, torn up papers and small pieces of broken plastic. But I love Madison — the good, the bad, the ugly and the very nice. And I admire so much about her.
I’m very excited to see who these two grow up to be. I can’t wait to have the hindsight to say sagely, “Well, it’s no surprise to me that you [insert accomplishment here] because you always had inclinations that way.” They are such interesting people!
This is the only thing that makes me even slightly interested in parenting again — I know that every single kid out there is just as interesting, frustrating and fascinating. But I also know that paying attention to these two the way I want to pay attention to them is awfully hard and I don’t think my brain would stretch to any more. But if I were fabulously wealthy (i.e., didn’t have to make a living, could afford a bigger house), I’d be tempted.
