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.
My situation isn’t quite the same (none of the kids stuff), but I think I know exactly how you feel. I’m in a city I would never have chosen because it’s where I got my job. It’s a great job and I love it and the people in my office, and it pays decently for your average person (but not great for law), but I don’t love the city (I don’t hate it, so a step up from Alabama, but I don’t love it). This is our third year hear and my husband is still in temporary work and interviewing for jobs in other states. So no, no house, still renting, it’s hard to think about the future and permanency and putting down roots when we don’t know whether we’ll be here or somewhere else, or what our income will be if we’re here, etc. etc. Lack of stability is super frustrating.
Sending you good house vibes and much sympathy. I also can’t function if my living space isn’t orderly, so I deeply hope your situation resolves soon. We managed to buy an apartment in New York last year, closing when I was nearly eight months pregnant. It was a hard, hard experience, and we were damn lucky to find a place we basically liked in a safe neighborhood with not-awful schools. It’s not my dream home by any means, but it’s good enough and as long as we both stay employed we can afford it, and that’s the best we could hope for in this market.
My friend, who teaches management in the business school at our big state university says the only thing that has kept her able to keep up with her life (tenure-track prof married to lawyer with four boys — two of them are 3 months old) is her au pair. I’d be happy to put you in touch with her (or you can check out her website, http://managingmotherhood.net, though content is a little slim right now because twin babies). This stuff is hard, hard, hard.