Hey, what’s up? How’s it going? OMG.
So I mentioned last week that we were putting our place on the market. We decided to do this because we found a new house we liked. It’s about five or so blocks from where we live now.
The realtor did a walk-through of our condo last week to give us a list of things we needed to do to make ourselves ready.
First, we had to get everything out of our house—the toys, the Ikea couch, the mid-century dining table, the grandfather clock, the artwork, the pictures. The Buddha statues could stay.
We need to power-wash under the porch. We need to spruce up the vegetation on the decks. We needed to paint. We needed to sand and refinish the floors upstairs. We needed to hire a stager to make our house look like cool people live there, eating their egg white omelets on a glass-topped dinette, reading Architectural Digest on a low-slung modern sofa. Barf, but I guess that’s what the kids are into these days.
The realtor and the stager looked at me.
“You think you can do that? You’ll need to get everything out of here to do the floors, get movers, hire a painter,” the realtor asked.
“The movers are already hired,” I said. They’re coming on Wednesday.”
They both tilted their heads and looked at me with a new respect.
“It’s about to get real up in here,” I said.
And it was.
:::
Scott told me he couldn’t help me because he had to work, and he meant it. So I packed up most of our tremendous crap into boxes and put it in storage. The next step was the painting and the floors, and for this, we would go to a hotel for two nights.
The night after the movers came I wrote touching blog post about Kai’s kindergarten teacher. And another one about Kai’s ears. And I published neither of them because the next thing I knew it was 7 am on Thursday and the painters were there. We were going to spend two nights away from home. And for all the packing I’d done for the previous five days, I hadn’t packed one stitch of clothing to leave our house.
There is a recurring nightmare I have about packing, where I’m putting things in a suitcase only to realize that I have forgotten to include one important thing after another. All this time, some kind of cab or airplane is waiting for me as I frantically run from room to room trying to decide what I can let go of and what has to come with me.
This was kind of like that, only more stressful and not a dream. In the end, I had no idea what was in the suitcase that I dragged behind me when we left—and to be sure it did not contain such essentials as pull-ups for Ryan, toothbrushes, workout clothes, Scott’s glasses, or any of the one million things we tend to count on every day.
It did contain a shoe horn.
Scott held it up when we got to the hotel, like what’s with this?
“YOU SOMETIMES USE A SHOEHORN TO PUT ON YOUR SHOES,” I said in that capslocky way you get sometimes when things begin to slide out of control.
I caught my reflection in the mirror just then. I had the wild-eyed look of a Real Housewife. And little wonder, as I had already been to the wrong hotel, trying to check into the Four Points with the dog and two kids and their Happy Meals our bags only to be told that there was no reservation for “Judy” after I was asked my last name no less than five times as though it was Malisewski and not Judy WTF?, and could it be under another name (Um, Jolie-Pitt? Bertram Von Chinstrap?) before I called Scott, who told me he’d made reservations at a different hotel and he had forgotten to tell me and so the two kids, the dog and the No-Longer-Happy Meals and the bags piled back in the car.
Scott, recognizing when it was time to duck, merely said, “Thank you, honey.”
:::
It is always fun to stay at a hotel, and ours was in the heart of the fun in Chicago in the summer. It was right on the river, and the boats loaded with tourists trolled back and forth. I would like to say that it was a little staycation, but it was not. The thing is, we still had to live our lives.
Ryan had pre-school, Scott had to work, I had to work, the kids needed to be fed and bathed and put to bed. I missed an e-mail from a deranged neighbor about the summer watering schedule that led to a series of vitriolic and abusive e-mails from said neighbor. The realtor pestered me mercilessly about the offer on the other house, about matte versus semi-gloss on the floors. We had to navigate through the hotel with our old-ass dog, who is both deaf and blind and who would rather just be back at home.
Kai kept referring to our hotel as “Daddy’s apartment,” as though Daddy was not Scott Judy but Don Draper. He wanted to have his bath in Daddy’s tub, and look out Daddy’s window.
“Kai,” I said, “Daddy doesn’t live here without us.”
But maybe he does. He should. He has like a bazillion hotel points. If they were mine, I would totally move in to the Sheraton Towers, if only for a few hours a day to sit in my room and listen to the loud, carpeted silence.
:::
On Saturday, we came home. The painters were still there. We set down our bags and unhooked the dog and looked around.
The floors looked—uh, how can I put this? Oh, yes. The floors looked like ass.
There were big streaks in the polyurethane. The matte finish, all the rage with the kids, highlighted every scratch and imperfection.
The contractor came upstairs to meet us.
“Not so much,” I said.
He was going to make it right and re- redo the floors. We would have to leave again, though. And because it was so humid, it might take a few days.
I looked around. A fine layer of dust lay over everything. The counters were piled high with backpacks and receipts and picture hooks and pens—things that didn’t have place anymore, now that we didn’t have our desk or our catch-all containers or coathooks, all the things that the stager called “clutter,” but really meant our daily lives.
On the way home, we’d received a call from our realtor, that the developer had countered our offer on the other house by coming down a whopping $400 off the asking price, which was the counter-offer equivalent of telling us to go screw ourselves.
My shoulders slumped. We had dinner plans that night, plans we’d made weeks ago. A sitter was coming in two hours. We were sweaty and vaguely sour. I’d been wearing my outfit for three days, switching out only the undergarments.
“Can you start tomorrow?” I asked.
:::
If motherhood has taught me one thing, it’s how to be at once gross and presentable, and it was that state I found myself in two hours later, sipping a cold cava rose, waiting for our friends at Juno.
“This is going down way to fast,” I said. I was referring to the cava, but there was a wider meaning there, as well.
Scott nodded, sipping his Japanese beer. “I know what you mean.”
We were quiet for a few minutes.
“We’ve just gotta…keep the ship afloat,” he said.
I knew exactly what he meant. And it was huge for Scott to say this, to let go in this way. Scott is a guy who likes order and control and we were definitely no longer in control. The house was total mess, the new house was not even close to a sure thing. I have never been more aware of my true role in my family—that of providing a stable and predictable environment, and how unstable and weird everything seemed to be at this moment.
“Honey, we’re not keeping the ship afloat,” I said. “We’ve lashed ourselves to the mast. All we can do is hope we don’t sink.”
I sipped my cava and made a mental list of the things I’d need to pack for another two days in a hotel. This time, I thought, I’d remember to bring clothes for Kai.
Comments