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  • Aging is for the weak, and everyone else
  • More short cuts
  • Smol Ketchups
  • What’s the opposite of green juice and deep breathing
  • Living through it all online
  • The Change
  • 18
  • Ok but ALSO:
  • Midlife POV
  • Influence and Dooce
  • Horse therapy
  • You can’t go home again
  • Obsolescence
  • Before and after
  • A cringe confession on friendship

Archives from 2002-2006

It was always in our plan to move to Oregon. That’s where JB’s family lives, it’s where he’s from, it’s where we wanted to raise our children.

Then JB was working for Microsoft, and, well, you don’t quit Microsoft. You stay there as long as you can while they grind everything they can out of you, while simultaneously firehosing money and benefits in your direction. If you stay there long enough, you retire on a bed of gold ingots. Sure, your vocabulary will be replaced with Dilbert-speak, your eyelid will spasm whenever you get a new email, and your teeth will be permanently bared from years of aggressive turf-defending, but you will have a SAILBOAT.

We talked about Oregon a lot in those days, but it was never the right time. There were ladders to climb, promotions to get. My job was going well, too—I’d joined the company when they could only afford to pay starving-artist salaries, and now we were getting fat holiday bonuses.

After an insane amount of work and stress and plotting, JB and his business partners turned Vioguard from a dream into a reality. And he did quit Microsoft, which was a terrifying, epic decision and I’m so proud of him for having the balls to do it.

Forget those sailboats. They’re made of souls.

Somehow during all of this, the months and years just slid right by. The child who was a suspicious newborn will be a suspicious five-year-old next week. We thought we’d have plenty of time to figure out how to get to Oregon before the kids started school, then suddenly we were looking at local school scores and trying to figure out if we should move across town instead.

We ran low on money and we learned we didn’t need it the way we thought we did. We spent a week in Oregon with family and realized we didn’t want those moments to happen only a few times a year. JB’s father had another cancer scare. Traffic has gotten worse and city-living expenses keep piling up.

When the home you want for your family is a few hundred miles from where you’ve made your life, all you can do is keep checking that balance. For years, the scales have tipped in the favor of staying put. The timing wasn’t right. This summer, the scales finally tipped the other way, and it became clear that for a change of that magnitude, the timing will never be right. It will always involve risk and fear and compromise.

So that’s why we put the house on the market. If it sells, we’ll move to Eugene and start a new life there, and JB will continue his work with Vioguard. If it doesn’t sell, we’ll stay put until we figure out the next thing. We’re in a good position, in a lot of ways. Nothing’s forcing our hand with this move. It’s hard, once you’ve made such a big decision, to have no forward momentum—but we can afford to be patient.

At least we took that step, I tell myself. We broke out of the inertia of the timing isn’t right. Fuck the status quo. Fuck being comfortable. Fuck staying still and never reaching out to grab the ring behind the gold, the one that really means something.

August thus far has brought more changes than I ever would have thought possible—and none of them in the area I’d been focused on. Our house hasn’t sold, we don’t appear to be moving any time soon, and yet everything has tipped upside down like a snowglobe: all the little routines and realities floating off in a new direction, sparkling and winking as they catch the light.

Of the various outcomes I had imagined, back when we started talking about the possibility of putting our house on the market, none of them included what is happening now, which is nothing.

I thought we’d have a bunch of people coming by, to the point of total inconvenience—oh, we have to leave the house again, quelle fucking drag—and I thought we might get low counteroffers and I thought we might find out some terrible thing during the inspection, like that the roof is actually formed of popsicle sticks and there’s a poltergeist in the TV.

Instead, there’s been virtually no activity. We’ve had exactly two agents look at the house, and one lady who was house-hunting for her adult son and liked the place enough to go and bring her son back to see it for himself, and then they went and made an offer on a bigger place with less yardwork, and all I can say about that is that if they had bought our house I would have described them as a charmingly close family who have found the perfect sort of arrangement that works just right for them, but since they didn’t, I hope Mr. Sissy Mama’s Boy is happy in the low-maintenance mansion his MOMMY bought him, since he was clearly too much of a goddamned PUSSY to live in a house where he’d have to mow a LAWN.

Ahem.

I keep thinking about all the work we did in the days before the sign went up in our yard and I feel so stupid. We reamed out closets and painted trim and cleaned windows and ripped out weeds and bought plants and hauled stuff to the dump and re-arranged rooms and it was just this totally consuming, stressful effort that went into double-time in the last few days before it officially went on the market and I swear to god we nearly killed each other in the process.

I mean, that stuff needed to be done, and I’m glad it IS done, but jesus. I went at it like we had a ticking clock hanging over our heads, you know? Like the instant we had the MLS number we’d have crowds of people banging on our door.

Every morning before I leave for work I prep the house with the hope that somebody is going to come by, which means vacuuming, picking up, wiping counters, hiding toys, making beds, and on and on it goes. The novelty has long worn off and now I go about my cleaning-lady chores feeling more and more bitter. Will anyone come by today and notice the shining floors, the neatened children’s rooms, the carefully rolled towels arranged just so in their little stupid fucking wicker basket? Oh hey, probably not, but I can’t skip it because WHAT IF THEY DO?

I planned for every contingency except nothing. In the absence of information it’s hard to know what we should consider changing. Maybe we need a new agent, a new listing price, a new set of photos, a new economy—I just don’t know yet. For now we’re just hoping something . . . happens, soon. Anything is better than nothing.

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