… a new record, even for me.
This house, this move… it is so much work, so much stress. I keep taking these little baby steps away from the original plan to the point that I hardly recognize where I am. How many more things do I have to give up to make this work? How many more things do I have to walk away from to make him happy? And how much more does he have to give up for me? Maybe this is just how a marriage works… you both keep compromising until neither of you are happy. And if that’s the case, it sucks.
Rob is working on this house for us, but also for his mother. It is her house. She paid for it. She’s paying for the renovation. We are just renters, and Rob is just a worker. Which, in her sick mind means that she gets to yell and scream and demean her son. She gets to call him terrible names and hang up on him when he doesn’t do or say exactly what she hopes he’ll do or say at the exact second she hopes he’ll say it. Never mind if what she wants is unreasonable. Never mind that there’s no way possible for him to know what he’s supposed to say. Never mind that she changes her addled mind every 30 seconds.
So today, she screams at him that he isn’t using “some fucking common sense” because he asked if she wanted to email us the agreement she expects the drywall guy to sign. She begins railing… how can she possibly write the agreement and send it to us? she’s getting on a plane. She’s very busy. He needs to write it out by hand and have the guy sign it. How’s he supposed to know that?
On the drive from AZ to IA, she yelled at him that he wasn’t driving fast enough, she wanted us to arrive sooner. Even explaining that it was not safe to drive faster, she screamed. Explaining that there was a speed governor on the truck that did not allow us to drive faster, she yelled. Apparently, we should go back in time and leave a day sooner if we can’t drive faster, because she wants us there NOW.
This is indicative of the way this entire process has worked. She asks for advice from someone who actually knows what they are doing, she receives advice, she does something completely counter to the advice she is given, and then she is pissed at the advice-giver and at Rob (for doing what she said instead of the advice from the professional) because she didn’t get the results they said she would get IF she followed the advice. And of course, it’s NEVER her fault.
So today, one more outlandish screaming match later, and my husband is ready to give up. Give up the house. Give up our dog. Give up even more of my possessions. He wants to live in some crappy little student-housing apartment outside of town so that he doesn’t have to deal with his mother anymore.
I know he’s tired. He’s been working under her outrageous demands for months now. Most days, he starts working as soon as he rolls out of bed and he works until he falls back into bed at the end of the day. And looking around the house, at how much more there is to do, it’s clear that we have a long, long, long road ahead before it is finished.
We have no kitchen. And Diana hasn’t ordered the cabinets yet. We have several rooms with bare drywall. We have only half a fence. We have no windows in the basement (and with all the rain, the mold they spent an entire day cleaning off with heavy chemicals is back). And Diana keeps pissing off all of the workers so they stop showing up to work. The only person who continues to work is Rob. And he’s doing it for free.
I get what he’s going through. I get why he’s mad. I get that he doesn’t want to deal with it anymore. I see why he wants to quit. I am not blind to all of this. I get it.
But what about me? I gave up my house in Phoenix. I’m humiliated to report that it is being foreclosed on. I gave up working with people that I know and like, who seem to like me, who I consider friends to work in an office with people who barely speak to me, and when they do, it is not usually conversation I can really get into. I gave up all of my support structure. My friends, my family, everyone who cares about me except Rob… they are all a couple thousand miles away. I gave up Sam - my puppy… a sweet little dog that was MY dog… who actually liked me so that we could keep Lizzy. Lizzy is sweet also, but she is Rob’s dog. I adore her, but she isn’t my dog. I can’t seem to really connect with her. I am so lonely here that I can hardly breathe. Rob is all I have here, and he is too stressed out and tired to really pay much attention to me.
I gave all of this up because of the promise of this beautiful, comfortable house. Even though Rob would be in school and I would not see much of him, I would have this space. I could have room for the treadmill. I could have a beautiful office. I could have a nice big kitchen. I would have room to keep all of my holiday decorations - and have someplace to display them all during the holidays. We would have a backyard for Lizzy to run around and play in, and a doggy door so she could get out of the bad weather. We would have room to have a child, either our own or a foster child. This gorgeous house that would be perfect for entertaining (if I ever manage to make any friends here). It would even have a “coffee room”… a small room with wingback chairs on one side and counter space and wet bar on the other… a place to set up a decent coffee pot… a comfortable spot where I could curl up and read. Lots of light… A space in the attic for a spiritual circle so that Rob and I could actually have a dedicated area for ritual, rather than scrambling to find a spot and all of the stuff to do it now… which is why we practice so infrequently. I miss having the space for this. I had space at the last house I lived in, but not in the house I bought with Rob. And I have missed it so much.
So what does an apartment mean? No more Lizzy. She’d have to go. And being that we live in Iowa, she would probably go to the pound, and more than likely be destroyed. This is not a friendly state for pit bulls. No more private washer and dryer. The horrible laundromat - that terrible place I have been barely tolerating for the past month because I know that soon - oh so soon - my washer and dryer will be connected in the house and I won’t have to go there anymore… that laundromat is now a weekly visit. For 5 years. An apartment means limited space. Even if we had 3 bedrooms, which I could hardly justify the extra money for… It would still mean one room for us, one room for the office, and one room for the futon/spare room. No place for a treadmill. No place for yoga. No place for reading room. No place to practice our faith. No place for the coffee pot, other than the kitchen counter, which, knowing us, would be buried in about 37 seconds. The entire year we lived in our last house, I made a grand total of 4 pots of coffee, because in order to get to the coffee pot, it required 45 minutes to clean the kitchen first just to find the damn thing. Given the small area most apartments have for dining room, I would probably have to give up my mother’s dining room table, chairs and china cabinet. No storage space to put holiday decorations, which I guess doesn’t matter, because as cramped as we’ll be, it would only be an inconvenience to have the decorations out anyway.
It is too much. I do not think I can take this huge leap backwards. I am not a kid anymore. I can’t be happy with cinder block and plywood bookshelves and milk crate end tables and a folding card table and chairs for a dining room set. I can’t be happy living under someone who thinks that moving furniture at 3am is the perfect weeknight activity. Or thin walls that let me hear every argument and sexual act of my neighbors, or stolen parking spaces, or people who think it’s perfectly acceptable to leave bags of garbage in the walkway overnight (or over weeks).
I am a snob. I will admit it, I suppose. I don’t like hanging around laundromats and apartment complexes. I don’t like being around people who think it’s not only acceptable, but fun to sit on someone else’s car drinking a 40 and smoking like a chimney. I don’t like going places where people think it’s ok to leave their trash on the counters, and if they spill something there’s no need to wipe it up. I don’t want to live like that.
What are my options? I can’t think of a good one. Make my husband miserable by dealing with his horrible mother for months or more so that I can have the home I want, or make myself miserable by getting rid of everything I love but him to live in some shit hole apartment in the middle of nowhere, Iowa.