My Level of Awareness

First, let me start out by saying that I am, all things considered, fond of my little house. 
I feel I have to preface everything else that I am about to say by stating that fact.

We did not end up in this house by design.  When we decided to remain in Arkansas after Katrina, and I accepted permanent employment here, we were no longer eligible for rental assistance courtesy of my old job with Uncle Sam.  Thus, the press to find a house was rather urgent at the time.  We did not know the area well (I lived here last almost 13 years ago), and faced with the task of replacing every single domestic possession, I told the agent that I wanted a house I could move into as-is.  I was not going to paint, paper, renovate or fuss in any way.  The sheer task of buying a home full of appliances, furniture, linens, clothing, garden implements, oh-my-god-middle-class-americans-have-a-lot-of-crap, was already daunting enough, and I really couldn’t deal with anything remotely approaching redecoration.

She found me the house in two days.   It’s a quirky little house, and at the time it was exactly, EXACTLY, what we wanted. 

Unfortunately, when we went looking, we were also laboring under some pretty big uncertainties.  We did not know how long Kris would be unemployed (another 18 months, as things played out), and we weren’t sure what we would have left after our insurance settlement after the mortgage on the destroyed home was payed out, or how much we would sell the lot for (an unbelievable amount, much to our surprise).  We didn’t know how far our contents coverage would stretch to purchase furnishings (fairly far, as it turned out).  So basically what happened is that we probably could have afforded quite a bit more house than we ended up with.

 I routinely scan the real-estate section of the Sunday paper, for no other reason than to see what values are doing in our neighborhood.  And, as I perused the listings this weekend, I started thinking. 

You can see where this is going.

First, our house is a tad on the smallish side.  It’s about 300 sq. feet smaller than the house in Louisiana, and we feel it, even with the drastically reduced quantity of stuff our post-Katrina life encompasses.

Second, we have NO useable yard.  I purchased Harry a playhouse for his birthday.  It’s only 4 foot by 4 foot, but we are hard-pressed to find a place to put it.  Oh, don’t get me wrong, we have a yard.  Our lot is not a bad size by modern subdivision standards.  But it is on a 30 degree slope and consists of Arkansas rock and hardwood.  It’s beautiful and no maintainance.  But it is definitely NOT kid friendly.  And not conducive to my husband building his much-desired workshop that would have the added value of making it possible for me to actually park my car in the garage.  A car.  In a garage.  It’s an intriguing concept.  One I have not contemplated for some time.

So, I am sitting there, minding my own real-estate, scanning the local listings, and something popped out at me.

2.24 Acres.

2600 sq. feet.  Site built custom.

Large deck AND tiled patio with basketball court.

 About 5 miles from where I live now.

I look it up online and check the price.   Then I check again.  Then I run the numbers.  If I sold my house for a modest amount more than I bought it for (basically, enough to cover the real estate commission), I could have the house in the listing for about $250 more a month (doable, now that Kris is full-time), on exactly the same mortgage I have now.

Let me emphasize that we were NOT in the market for a house.  I didn’t write the listing information down.

But, since it’s Easter Sunday, a nice, sunny, but cold day, and with not much else to do, we go out driving around.

Just to take a look to see what’s out there, you understand.  Just to get a better idea of what’s in the neighborhood.

Turns out, you can get quite a bit of house in Arkansas for a pretty reasonable amount of money.

But here’s where it gets a bit surreal.

We’re driving around, playing games with Harry and pointing out the For-Sale signs, and Kris says to me “Hey, haven’t we seen that house?”.  I look up.

It’s THE house.  From the listing.  Sitting life-size out the windshield of my van.  And, I will be damned if it wasn’t all that, and boots, too.  (Long story, some of our friends will get the reference.)

We came back home and over Easter dinner I reiterated all the reasons that we aren’t really in the market right now.  We can save more for Harry’s education.  Our neighborhood is very convenient.  I REALLY like Harry’s current room, and it will be hard to find another like it.  And have I mentioned I hate stripping wallpaper?  And what about our new stone countertops, we JUST put in last year?  And what about the bamboo flooring we are getting quotes on this month?

The bottom line is that tomorrow we are going to look at a house.

Doesn’t hurt to look, does it?

Aren’t there just some days when you feel you can fly?

I am nothing, if not fair. 

I think some disclaimers are in order.  Somehow, I, a liberal-leaning moderate, became an unwitting poster child for the right.  After the exposure that my post on delayed childbearing garnered, I received several comments and private email conversations that made me realize that some of my post may have been taken in ways that fell a bit astray from my original intent.

So let me set this straight.

 I do not regret having my career.  I am the first person in my family to graduate with a college degree, with the exception of my paternal grandmother (she got a Normal certificate from SUNY- Elmira back when it was the Elmira Normal School).   And I am the ONLY person to have finished a PhD.  Not only did I go to graduate school, I went on a coveted National Science Foundation Fellowship and a Food for the 21st Century Fellowship that together guaranteed me six years of graduate school as a fully paid research fellow.  And I did this as a non-traditional student, starting graduate school at the ripe old age of 30.  I am proud of this accomplishment.  For somebody with my lower working class background, it is monumental.

I do not regret being a working mother.   I have the benefit of a flexible job, a quality daycare blocks away from my son, and a fantastic husband who allowed us to keep Harry in the home until he was over 18 months old.  My husband was a fantastic stay-at-home Dad, a role he is finally leaving to step back into the full-time working world for the first time in two years.

When I say I regret not having my children earlier, I do not mean in my twenties.  I was too self-centered, emotionally unstable and married to entirely the wrong man for my personality.  I assure you that having children at that stage in my life would have been an unmitigated disaster.  Your personal mileage may vary.

What I regret is the years between 34 and 37 - my late graduate school and postdoctoral years.  Those were the years when I was settled enough, with the right husband, and far less self-indulgent than in my younger years.  I needed the confidence that self-discovery of college gave me, but by my mid-thirties all the elements were in place for the life I have now.  Those years were the perfect years and I didn’t recognize them because I was following the time schedule of my much-younger classmates.  That schedule was a bit more malleable than I realized at the time by listening to the dogma of the academic world.  So many other options were open to me, if I had only thought to look.

Waiting until 39 and 40 WAS too late.  A fact which I am only now recognizing. 

And folks, here is where I will get all political on you.

It is a national shame that we hobble the potential of 50% (or more, to be fair to the responsible men out there) of the population by not acknowledging that liberal parental leave policies, quality daycare and education, and affordable healthcare are necessary to a healthy, flexible and stable workforce.  It is a national shame that we do not support women in ALL their potential - as students, daycare workers, teacher, businesswomen, lawyers, doctors, scientists, AND mothers.  It is our societal shame that we do not recognize that fathers are perfectly capable of caring for their children and giving them the support, in fact demanding of them the responsibility, of doing so.  We continue to undervalue careers that are traditionally female dominated at the same time that we build glass-ceilings that depend on sacrificing our roles as mothers on the altars of supply and demand.  It is shortsighted and it simply isn’t good business.  In no model of stable capitalism does the hinderance of workforce potential, both current and future, make any sense at all.

Make the decisions that are best for you.  Make the decisions that maximize your potential.  But make those evaluations in proportion to the real risks.  Ask yourself what “enough money” or “enough time” really means.  Is that promotion what you really want?  Will your career really be compromised by taking a year or two (or five) on the slow road? 

Ask yourself if what you have, or what you think you want, is what you actually need, or if you a shooting for an ideal that doesn’t really exist.  Ask if you are making real compromises, or just settling.  Ask yourself what actually constitutes a good life,  a life of value, a life of meaning.

But keep your eye on the clock, because you don’t have forever to do it in.

Is it only me that finds it odd that Fighter Planes are considered appropriate content for Easter Baskets?

I have a corner office.  Yes indeed.  THREE, count them three, windows and fairly spacious. 

But that is where any claim to the pinnacle of office achievement should end.

One of my windows is framed in green hedges where mockingbirds nest and sing.  But the other two of my windows look out upon a lovely view of the loading area of a large electronics chain store. 

The kind that sells lots and lots of car audio accoutrements.  Including very powerful car speakers and subwoofers.   Which they install and test where?  On the loading dock, of course.

And here is where we leave the realms of office envy and enter my personal circle of hell.

The responsibilities of my job are manifold, but a large part of it is deskwork - protocol and report writing, project management and research.  I like to tell people that science is largely 90% repetitive tedium, interspersed with 10% of intense excitement.  It’s amazing what we will put up with for that adrenaline rush when things finally work, and the data comes in, and patterns emerge.

 But for people with naturally inquisitive minds, that 90% tedium part takes a bit of discipline.  To an easily distractable person like myself (bordering on attention deficit), it’s a constant exercise in self-control.  It’s easy for the most minor of distractions to break my concentration.

Minor little things like my wall shaking and my ear bones shrieking.  Things like that.

For the most part, I have adjusted to my rather noisy back-door neighbors.  But about once a week, I have to put my hands over my ears and my forehead on my desk and repeat little mantras that sounds something like “I will not kill the geeky teenager, I will not kill the geeky teenager, I will not kill…” 

Monday was one of those days. 

It started shortly after lunch time (thus eliminating my most frequent excuse to flee the premises).  BOOM - BOOM - BA - BOOM - BOOM.  At a pitch almost slightly below normal hearing.  A pitch that reverberates through your chest and sends your heart into arrythmia.  The exact pitch that makes your inner ear protest in a pain that goes all the way down to your jaw.   I put my hands over my ears and my forehead on my desk and started my teenager-saving meditation.  Unfortunately for me, I am only a novice at transcendental thought processes, and I lack the Zen-mind necessary to perservere for 30 solid minutes of ground-rumbling thumping.  I swear that elephants in Africa perked up their ears and looked around for their distressed herdmates.

I finally got up from my desk and navigated the vibrating floor to get the complete visual to the chest-thumping soundtrack.  Parked in back of my office was a Ford Explorer with black-tinted windows.  And as far as I could tell by looking through the sole untinted window, it was completely empty.

Those little geekboys went to LUNCH and left that sucker running!  I felt the blood rush out of my protesting chest to my head, and I went to the back door of my building and threw it open - fully intending to have some choice words with some pimply little teenage boy fully young enough to be my son.    And then I saw it.   Beyond the Explorer was parked the real source of the sound.   A tiny little Honda Accord with three boys in low-slung jeans gathered around it intently, their hair blowing back with every pulse.  They looked… silly.  The speakers were likely worth more than the car.  I wondered if their mothers knew the damage their sons’ hearing was taking right now.

Then I thought back to the all the rock concerts, with seats far too close to too many speakers.  And the boys with the cool cars and the stereos turned way too loud and the abandon of wind and speed and the wash of sound.  Back to the days when a modified orange Plymouth Duster was the coolest thing I had ever seen, and so was the tattooed boy who owned it.

I satisfied myself with giving them a dirty look and slamming the door as I went back inside.  And I did what middle-aged women do when the going gets rough.

I went to Starbucks.

It’s tough, being the constant target of the paparazzi:

 But how else can one catch those intimate, unguarded moments?

 Or that unique trendsetting fashion sense,

Some people just do not understand that for the adoring public, sacrifices must be made.

Where’s my entourage when I NEED THEM?!

I am one of those people who doesn’t take compliments well.  Any nice commentary is usually met with nervous laughter and a hundred self-deprecating comments. This is one of those things I need to learn from my best friend - she always takes compliments in such a gracious, beaming, and genuinely heartfelt way, that you just feel good giving them to her. 

I can hear her now, saying “Psst.  Just say thank you.”

So.  Thanks to Antique Mommy for nominating me for a Perfect Post for March:

To get a nod from someone whose writing I unabashedly admire, is really causing me to look at my shoestrings and stutter.  And to get so many really cool people coming by to read is just icing on the cake.

So, Thank you.  A lot.

I am going to go back a little and wrap up the final question in my topic-generating exercise of weeks ago.

In a quick follow up to her question on my Meyers-Briggs personality type, Bub and Pie asks:

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

If you ask my husband about my status in this particular scale, he will probably give you an entirely different answer, because, first of all, he is one of those people who never wakes up to a bad day and manages to process through life without one modicum of self doubt, EVER.   Some people would call such folks narcissists, but he is too basically kind and generous to fall into that category.  I prefer to use the term “self-aware”.  My husband is very self-aware.

Secondly, I am NOT one of those gushing oh-by-gosh-by-golly-isn’t-life-wonderful wide-dewey-eyed optimists.  But I am, at the end of the day, an optimist.

I am one of these people that acknowledges that there are days when life serves you up far, far more lemons than you realistically need to make lemonade for personal consumption.  Or even to share with your friends.  But I also march resolutely through life with the firm commitment that if you can just manage to juggle those lemons until bedtime, that when you wake up one morning they eventually will, they absolutely HAVE to, become roses.

I think my obsession with cleaning is closely linked to my “ever upward” outlook on life.  Every morning is a clean slate for me, a chance to start over and be the person I always wanted to be.   It’s remarkably similar to the joy I get from the hard work necessary to make something old look new, to bring order into chaos.  I fundamentally know that it is just going to get dirty, disorganized and broken again anyway, but it doesn’t keep me from being strangely satisfied at looking at a clean sparkling tub, a made bed, or a mended toy.  It’s like starting over, one tiny bit at a time.  People obsessed with cleaning can never really be pessimists.  Pessimists wouldn’t see the point.

I also think it is a hereditary sort of optimism.  One that gets handed down to those of Nordic stock deep in core of our being.  Listen to “A Prairie Home Companion” and you will understand what I mean.  You either “get” it, or you don’t.  It’s the grim, determined kind of optimism that allowed the Vikings to settle Iceland and Greenland.  You get out of a boat after weeks on tossing, frozen, northern seas, step out onto a plain of rock and moss as far as the eye can see, and think “You know, I will put a vegetable garden right here, and a chicken coop would look good over there…”  That’s a kind of optimism that can only be explained by genetics.

It’s probably the same kind of optimism that accounts for Kansas.

Think about it.