Leftovers

It’s all leftover food, leftover feelings around here.  We brought a lot of food home from the wedding, which has helped keep us eating good dinners even though Mama didn’t have a weekend to shop and cook.  We also brought a lot of feelings home – Sunrise Sunset kind of feelings and others, the ragtag accompaniment to Big Family Doings.  The discontent of normal life, after the shimmering brightness of a perfectly harmonious weekend.

We continue to grapple with so many variables here – jobs, home, neighborhood, schools, the impossibility of making a living in America today.  It’s so hard to settle on a course when everything changes daily.  There is no constant upon which to build – it feels like a mess.  I hate Alabama, and my emotional and social well being in New Orleans is definitely better.  But this city throws so many barriers up to people with children.  And my job is not one that allows absorption of “Dealing with Barriers” time.  There are only 24 hours in a day and I’m so behind on billing already, and yet I spent 4 hours Monday morning dealing with a backlog of emails from their school/church/doctors/LA bar/working on finding summer daycare/etc.  I need a live-in domestic worker.  And that doesn’t make sense – wouldn’t it be more sensible to quit and be my own live-in domestic worker?  But I would hate it.  But it’s just a transfer of labor  and money otherwise – I make a living and then transfer all (not all – most) of what I earn to other people who are performing work I could do myself.  But how else to do this?

I need to be independently wealthy.  There is a service here called The Occasional Wife, and I looked up their services the other day.  $40 an hour, and they’d switch out my kids summer/winter clothes, clean my toilet, read through all of the daily nonsense we get from school re: field trips and book fairs and then process it and produce a digest for me.  It’s like an off-the-cuff executive assistant.  She’ll organize my fridge, plan my meals, mop the floor, clean out a closet.  If you divide my hours worked into my salary, I make more like $35.  So it’s probably more worth it to do it myself.  What price sanity?  What price relaxation, or sleep?  My liberal, feminist heart balks at the term “occasional wife” as shorthand for “domestic servant,” but the truth is we need another pair of hands and the name of the service is less important than what it could do for us.  Maybe an au pair?

One bright spot – we’ve enrolled Jack in a hip hop dance class this summer.  I think he’s going to love it.  He gave me some crap about putting a boy in dance, which is a Girl Thing, and so I forced him to watch some youtube videos of Mikhail Baryshnikov and this NYC boys’ ballet group.  The work we have to do to deconstruct the gender brainwashing he gets exposed to . . .  He’s a singular 8 year old in that he already knows what The Patriarchy is and why we have to smash it.  Yet not so singular that he doesn’t balk and scoff at dance class, even though he spent about 4 hours dancing like a madman on Saturday at the wedding.  I’m hoping this dance teacher will draw out his artistic side and not make him feel weird about being a boy in dance.  He’s got a talent and proclivity for it.

Pray we get into a house soon.  I’m about to lose my mind wading through boxes over here, trying on new house after new house, imagining us in it and calculating financing and then NOPE.  MOVE ALONG.  An orderly house helps make an orderly mind, and right now both are a total catastrophe.  When we moved and it was chaos, everyone said “By June 1, you’ll be all set!  Settled into a permanent home, kids’ schools sorted, everything fine!”  It’s clearly not going to happen by then – even if we picked a house, offered, and finalized a contract on a house today (which we did not), financing takes 6 weeks or so.  Soooo . . . maybe we’ll be set by July 1.  Or August 1.  Or Labor Day.  Or MAYBE NEVER.

Ooooh, it’s time for bed.  Maybe a good sleep will cure me of this melancholy.  Here’s hoping.  Send us some good house mojo, readers.  I’m about to lose my mind over here, and I need all the prayers and positive thoughts I can get.