Love is a House
There is danger in believing you can make anything better. It catches up with you. Eventually you might wish you had chosen the thing the world had already made for you, finished, good enough before you got to it.
The first time I lived in a home that belonged to nobody but me and my loved ones was 2006, when we bought our first house, boards on a few windows, damage to floorboards we thought was from water but actually turned out to be dog urine. Carpet in the finished attic sticky with it. Suspect plumbing and electrical. A long back yard prone to flooding dead in the middle. Ours. Nobody else’s.
It’s a ridiculous thing to value, having a mortgage and a deed. In so many places you might choose to live, renting is the standard, and better, choice. But in the Midwest, where I grew up, where I live now, the people you get taught to respect as a kid own homes. Those people take on a near-mythical status if you’ve never been one of them. I tell people I still live here because my sad little salary can buy me a fabulous house here, and it’s mostly the truth. I’ve also never had the money or the resources to move to a sexier, more sought-after city. And my city is fine. (My state, on the other hand…well, another time.)
And so, a house. No more contractor-beige walls, vinyl mini-blinds, strangers whose smells and parties and arguments seep into your life. We painted the rooms of that house deep earth tones and sunny yellows and sky blue. We laid natural slate tiles painstakingly across a 300-square-foot kitchen. We fixed the gitchy plumbing, the wiring that zapped us with little shocks each time we flipped the bathroom light switch. We planted fourteen trees. By the end of eleven years, the house was more beautiful than it had ever been, and I was exhausted. I couldn’t see anything when I looked around but work.
For a lot of cis-het women, particularly those with children, the home is a workplace, usually in addition to the workplaces where we do the jobs for which we get paid. This way of seeing the world—of being drawn to a person/place/thing’s potential rather than its actuality—multiplies this effect many times over.
And then, let’s do bring gender stereotypes into it. If I’m the handy one in my family, am I transcending the perceived limitations of femininity? Or am I just loading more work onto myself under the guise of flexing like that one cool lady-carpenter on the first edition of Trading Spaces? To this day, I don’t know. I do know that I’m exhausted, sometimes angry, and almost never at rest, and yet when I have an afternoon completely free, what I usually choose to do with my time is to repair or improve something.
After eleven years of this, in 2017, we sold that house for a very nice profit and moved, right into another fixer-upper. There are a lot of ways to rationalize this: it really is a dream house, twelve rooms, 51 windows, nine-foot ceilings, four working fireplaces, none of which we could possibly have afforded finished. But it is also a job. In the last few weeks alone, I have put a cool old door on the first-floor bathroom, installed incredibly pretty lights (including making that new hole in the ceiling and running new wire) in the second floor hallway and our bedroom, put up Christmas decorations, replaced old light switches, planned a new sconce on the back stairs…it’s a lot. It’s always a lot.
I’ve written, too, including a bar scene wherein a dude picks a fight by telling another dude, “You smell like a roasting hog’s asshole.” (Yes, my character and I both know a roasting hog would no longer have a stinking asshole. It’s a long story involving a small fire at a fake Christmas tree plant and a guy who likes to start fights. Please, nobody “well, actually” me about the fragrance of a roasting hog’s anus.) And I’ve taught, parented, home-schooled and, inexplicably, spent an inordinate amount of time styling my hair.
(What I haven’t done? Anything for Thanksgiving. We ordered a pre-made dinner we picked up today, to be warmed tomorrow afternoon. Still gonna make pie, though, because nobody makes better pie crust than me.)
This constant, almost compulsive making of things—I don’t always know if I like it. When my sister walked through that first house we bought for the first time, she touched, with the tips of her fingers, every flaw in the drywall, every scrape in the wood. There were a lot of flaws. She turned to me on the stairs, halfway through, and said, “Huh. I like new things.” I hate her a little bit for that, but also think it might be easier, and maybe even preferable, to like new things, to find a thing that’s well enough and leave it alone. I’m closer to 50 than 40. How much longer can I be the person who fixes everything?
And yet, this is the life that I’ve made. Look: Do you like it?
Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re doing the thing. Eat up. Don’t count calories. Take a turkey-coma nap. Read a good book.