Internal Struggle

This is one of the things I am going to miss most. And the thought of not having my garden around me is so painful, I almost can't face it at all.

Since the kids came along, I admit I haven't had the time to devote to it that I once did, but this has probably made me healthier since I wasn't obsessing about every blip and burble of change. But not slaving over it and not caring about it are not the same thing.

I realize with a whole new clarity how much I need to see those first shoots poking out of the earth in spring, how necessary to my psyche are those little buds forming on the rose canes, the first flash of blue when the cranesbills bloom, the cheery, nodding heads of the daffodils, the clouds of crabapple blossoms raining onto the green, green grass.

I am in mourning.

Yes, I can probably make a new garden. It might even be a better garden in some respects, but it will never be this garden again. And I have no assurance than anyone moving in will care two straws for what I've created here. In fact, the reverse is more likely. When my grandma's house was sold, her huge, beautiful flowerbed was tilled under by the new owner. Twenty-five years of work and love and creativity, gone under the plow blade. Henry Mitchell was all too right when he said the garden rarely outlives the gardener.

I will make a new garden -- how can I not? -- but this one, this first garden, the one that has given me so much joy in the design and planting, this one will be imprinted on my heart.

When God Opens a Door

sometimes He kicks your butt right through it.

The owners received our offer and said they want to accept it, but their builder for their new house has offered to buy their current house by October 5th if it hasn't sold. If they accept a contingent offer (like ours) their builder is off the hook. Then if our house doesn't sell and the contract becomes null and void, they are in a pickle. Sooooo....they said if we make it a hard offer and take out a bridge loan, they'll drop the price a further $5,000. That makes the selling price of the house ridiculous.

All this hit the fan last night and I went to bed telling Tim that NO WAY was I doing a bridge loan. Too risky, too risky, too risky. You have to make 2 mortgage payments until your first house sells and if it doesn't, you still have the balloon payment at the end of 6 months. Not a chance am I agreeing to that.

Fast forward to this morning. Just got off the phone with my dad, who said the bridge loan thing wasn't a bad idea. It certainly wouldn't cost us five grand in interest and it would take all the pressure off trying to keep this place in sellable condition with three little mess-makers running around. We'd have time to do a little painting in the new house and make the necessary repairs to this one. When I expressed my vast distaste for the bridge loan, my dad said "We'll just buy your house and then list it ourselves. That will probably be best anyway." My mom said, "I think this is a God thing, dear," to which I replied, "I'm not sure I like the God thing..."

This sounds sacreligious, but what I really mean is that we always say we want the neon sign, the handwriting on the wall, the obvious path pointed out to us. But sometimes, if your heart is a little rebellious, if the path isn't quite the one you might have chosen, the neon sign isn't exactly a welcome event.

This is where trust comes in. I am not very good at trust. I am much better at control. Well, that's really to say I am much more comfortable with control, because Trust is really the opposite of control. It's more or less saying that I relinquish control. And that is scary stuff. I am trying to let go of the control here, but it's hard to pry my fingers off the handlebars, even when the bike is going in circles.

I like circles; they're round and comfortable and don't take you anywhere you haven't been before.

Fun For Everyone

The house we've been circling around for 2 months went down in price by $15,000 and as a result it became an offer we couldn't refuse. So we made the offer. After that I had a panic attack that lasted approximately 15 hours.

Really, it went beyond panic attack to something approaching a psychotic break.

I am much better now, though I will admit to an undercurrent of anxiety which my exhausted body can no longer channel. I am simply too tired to hyperventhilate and weep uncontrollably anymore. Not to mention too tired to pace for hours without stopping.

I wish I knew where all this crazy comes from. I have had panic attacks off and on throughout my adult life, though the first one that I could identify as a full-blown panic attack didn't hit me until I was 26, when I got laid off from my job, was on the rocks with my long-term boyfriend and informed by my landlady that she was selling my apartment all in the same month. That made for some panic.

I had panic attacks after my 2nd and 3rd children were born, and I had a lovely one right after we'd spent 3 days painting our living room. We sat in the newly reconstructed room watching tv and out of the corner of my eye I kept seeing the tan paint, which in the incandescent light looked green. Really green. The more it intruded on my consciousness, the more internally frantic I became until I suddenly burst out crying, clutching my chest because I couldn't breathe properly.

Small wonder my husband is totally flummoxed at times like this.

He is, however, bery bery good to me, in spite of his complete inability to help me at all. He stayed up with me Friday night until I fell asleep at 2 a.m. and wisely told me to call my mother when the panic overwhelmed me again the following day. He was eyeing me warily throughout the offer process, I think because he was afraid I might do something that would seem truly crazy in front of the realtor. I did have to pace a lot, and at one point I picked up Grant and carried him around for a bit, purely because I needed his 48 pounds to tether me to something solid.

I felt nauseous for the duration of the attack, which made it impossible to eat. I slept a grand total of 2 1/2 hours and was so manic I couldn't stop pacing. Worst of all, I could not shut off my brain, which ran down all sorts of paranoid paths without check. I can confidently say that I have a very good idea of what it feels like to be a meth addict.

What pulled me back from the abyss? Several things were helpful. My mother is expert at talking me down and has a very calming aura (and although I hate that word -- aura -- it's pretty acurate; she does radiate a certain peacefulness that's very soothing). My children were exquisitely sweet. Grant, when I told him I was sad about leaving my garden said, "we could cut your flowers and move them with love to the new house!" My beautiful Abby Kate walked in on me sobbing, put her little arms around me, brought me tissues and then made me a card to help me feel better. Maggie chipped in by only pooping on her dad's watch. Several people were praying for me -- my sister, my mother in law, my mom, some really great friends of my parents who happened to be visiting during all of this (and who got my case history from Abby Kate "Mommy doesn't like change very much."). I think other people praying for you wraps you in a protective bubble, very nice when you are too keyed up to pray for yourself.

So here we are. We made the offer, we're waiting to see if they accept. I am off my ledge for the time being and am trying to 'be still and know that He is God' (thanks, Steven Curtis Chapman). Now we'll see what we will see.

Retributive Kharma

Why is it that on the night we stay up late having An Important Discussion About Our Future, our four year old wanders in at 4:45 a.m. and proceeds to disrupt sleep for us until Tim's alarm goes off? Some sort of bizarre synergy -- you know, like "I'll push, you pull; you free-fall into space and I'll land on you like a trampoline" -- that sort of thing.

Or possibly the feral instincts of small children who know when you are most vulnerable and choose that time to set the seal on your complete inability to form coherent thought for the day. You could argue that their self-preservation instincts are woefully underdeveloped, since this sort of disruption in my already deprived sleep cycle greatly increases the chances that I will sell them later on ebay.

Wow, am I knackered today.

We met with our realtor last night and are both encouraged and vastly nervous. We think we can get what we need to out of this house, we also think we can make a good (for us) offer on the dream house without seeming insulting. We also learned that houses in our price range are selling well, despite all the media propaganda explaining how the housing bubble has burst and the market is dead.

Now that we are really on the brink of a serious decision, we are trying hard to go into everything with eyes wide open. Can we deal with the shortcomings that house has? The lot's rather small, the driveway is sloped, the tile is not a fave, there are way too many trees in the backyard, the basement is large, but not laid out in the most functional configuration for our family. Can we cope with all this? With the things that are basically not changeable?

Not sure. We're going to try to decide something this weekend, so we can at least move forward.

On the up-side, I did find a houseplan that is almost identical in size and style, though much nicer in elevation, so if we could find a sweet lot, we could build more or less the same house. Something else to think about.

Cheap Psychotherapy

So in light of my ulcer-creating anxiety about our might-be-happening move, I have been plumbing the depths of my psyche trying to figure out why I have such trouble with change and why I would cling, barnacle-like, to a house that we have clearly outgrown and which gives me fits on a daily basis. All I can come up with is this:

We moved a lot when I was a kid.

I'm not going to throw my hat in the ring with Army brats and migrant workers -- we didn't move that much -- but we did move around a bit and often at crucial times in my life when not moving would have been preferable. We moved twice before I was 6, both times within the same city. Then we moved to a different city in the same state when I was 7. Then at age 13 we changed school districts, though not houses. The real whopper was between my junior and senior years of high school when we moved halfway across the country. Then my parents moved again (old state, new city) between my junior and senior year of college, so my last summer home was one in which I had absolutely no social life whatsoever because I flat out didn't know a single soul and couldn't see a lot of point in getting to know anyone since I was only going to be there 2 1/2 months. In retrospect, I probably should have stayed in Minneapolis, where I was in school, but since I was coming off a semester abroad and had no money, going home seemed like the best (cheapest) option. Also, my parents insisted. I had a couple of forced-moves after college, both times because my duplex was sold. And then I got laid off in the Great Teacher Layoff of 1994 and ended up moving states yet again to find work.

I don't really like moving.

I think this is at the root of my problem. That, and the fact that I have worked for 10 years on this house and feel like I have finally achieved a sense of my own style (however obscured by clutter that style may be) and I am reluctant in the extreme to a)start over on a new house and b) live in a house redolent of someone else's taste.

And yes, I am a picky little twink, as I'm sure my husband would tell you if I ever let him touch my blog. Which I won't. Ever.

I worry, too, about my garden. No one moving in to this house is going to know what I know about it, or care like I do about all my goofy plants. I mention this to Tim and he gives one of those snorts -- the snorts that mean "too damn right, no one's gonna care!" -- and then he says "and don't think you're having a garden like this in any new house. It's too big and flowers cost money." Which of course makes me want to smack him. What if the shoe were on the other foot? It might look something like this:

"And don't think there'll be any football in the new house. Football is right off the menu."
"What? You don't mean that."
"I most certainly do. Look what a mess it's made of things. Too much of it and no time to get it all watched. No more. I'm not having it."
"But that's not fair! You can't just say 'No football.' You're not God, you know. It makes me happy. How can you not want me to be happy?"
"Sometimes we have to make sacrifices for the family. Football's a luxury."
"Not college football, that's practically free."
"No way. I know how this goes. One little college game here, then it's a little NFL behind my back, then we're knee deep in Fox Sports and ESPN. Forget it."
"I just need to see the uniforms, the bright colors, the mascots. Just a few mascots and some halftime analysis"
"I don't see it happening. I mean, you've got enough to do without that complicating things. Let it go."
"You bastard! You selfish bastard!"

Or something like that. I'm just guessing.

Wow, did I get off the point. But here's the real thing. If I don't start sleeping soon, I'm going to have to call the whole thing off just so I can stop being so crazy.

Day Two...

of my extended panic attack.

I think if we would just make an actual decision here, I would feel better. Right now I am overwhelmed with the what ifs. Also I haven't eaten today which is making me shaky and I am sleeping poorly, which is making me the Wicked Witch of the West.

What if we buy this huge house (and that's huge by my standards, not by anyone else's. It's only the size of one floor of my parents' house) and I am still the disorganized moron I am here? Who am I kidding...I will definitely be disorganized, only I will no longer have the excuse of Not Enough Space.

A thwacking big tranquilizer would not come amiss right now, just to stop my brain.

Feeling Ill

Why am I like this? Any change -- even any prospect of change -- makes me nauseous. Not only that, but so keyed up I can't seem to sit still (and yet manage to be utterly unproductive at the same time. I know, it's a gift). House anxiety is overwhelming me. If we move, I'll be unhappy for Reasons, Set A. If we don't move, I'll be unhappy for Reasons, Set B. Worst of all, I am caught in a nether-hell of indecision.

My husband, he of the not-terribly-helpful school of Get Over It thinks I am certifiable. How could I not be happy with the new house? WHAT IS WRONG WITH ME? He wonders in completely unsubtle tones. He is very fond of a little philosophy he calls "Losing by Less," the idea being that you're going to lose one way or the other, so try to minimize your loss by taking the less (albeit slightly) obnoxious path. So looking at this through his eyes, I should jump on the chance to move because it trumps the losing by less game (he would argue that it's not even losing by less -- it's actually winning).

But it doesn't feel like winning. It feels scary and unfamiliar and uncomfortable and a lot like losing.

How I would love to be like Tim's buddy, Dan. Dan, as far as I can tell, never gets fussed about anything. Anything. I would love to be on that sort of even keel. Okay, so maybe you never feel spectacularly elated, but neither does your stomach devour itself with worry. Then again, I would still be me and I am often able to get worked into a positive frenzy over things that are complete non-events for other people. Again, it's a gift. And it should be noted that I live with Tim, who has a real talent for making me feel backed into a corner (like saying -- "If we buy this house, we won't ever have to move again. We could live here until we die." What? No exit clause? That makes me want to hyperventhilate.)

So here I am, in what probably qualifies as the stupidest quandry in the free world. I feel like I'm between the rock and the hard place. Seen with a little perspective, I'm really between the comfy chair and the sofa. Just how much do I really want to stretch out?

Sometimes it is really hard to be me.