Well, we survived. I survived. Monkey Boy seems to be surviving. We moved out of the old house and into this fairly nice – though far flung – rental house that costs half of what our mortgage was at the old place. And we still own the old place, which makes me feel relieved in many ways, despite still needing to pay property taxes and insurance on it.
It takes me 45-50 minutes to get home though, if I can’t get out of town by 5:00 PM. Which is impossible on the days MB is with his grandparents after school. That’s what I mean by “far flung”. We’re only 6 miles east of our old location, but it might as well be in the Inland Empire for how far away it feels when you’re sitting in traffic and MB is shouting for water, juice, snacks, or the Wall Street Journal. I think I’m going to have to pack a cooler every day just to have emergency supplies on hand – anything and everything a 3 year old MIGHT desire needs to be at my fingertips because the other night I seriously thought I was going to lose my shit while we sat in stopped traffic.
Yesterday I was depressed though. I had gone over to the old house to pick up our plants and whatnot, and the renter came over to pick up some boxes I had leftover, and she just looked so excited to be moving into my house. MY HOUSE. I cried all the way to the new house. I tried to call my two wives – you know, your girlfriends who often do much better in these situations than a husband can do - but they were not available. So I talked myself down off the ledge. We still own the house. We can still move back there someday. There were things about the house that drove me CRAZY – like the fact that I thought it was a good idea to put the cook-top right under a window. It is, in fact, NOT a good idea to do this. Your food splatters all over the blinds, and if you open the window it takes water an hour to boil. The hardwood floors sounded like buckshot when you walked across them in the mornings….CRACK! POP! CREAK! And would invariably wake MB before he was ready to get up. And as nice as the appliances were……they were mostly pieces of shit. Our refrigerator, dishwasher and microwave did not work they way we had hoped they would when we plopped 10K down for them. Here's a hint: High-end name brands do not guarantee quality. The best appliances we had were the oven and cook-top. Both Kitchenaid. Our fancy dishwasher (Jenn-Air), which looked so tough and cool in the store smelled like a garbage dump inside and made all our dishes taste like soap. Also, the living room had a fucked up layout. Kind of hard to arrange furniture in there because it was long and narrow. As a result, we never sat in there. And it was dark, even with the blinds open. And let’s not get started on the neighbors. Good lord. We were surrounded on all sides by idiots who do not understand basic street parking etiquette, Fred Sanford's white nephew, and Mrs. Kravetz's nosy daugher-in-law.
So I listed all of these things in my head, reminding myself that it wasn’t the perfect house, that it was JUST a house, and as I pulled up to a red light on Venice Blvd., I looked over and saw a young girl – maybe late 20’s – about as pregnant as I currently am (29 weeks), sitting on a bus stop looking exhausted, a little chilly, and just wishing the bus would come so she could be home already. And it kind of smacked me in the face. Yes, I’m sad I don’t live in my fancy Santa Monica house anymore…..but let’s face it. The house we are in now is far from a shit hole. We have four bedrooms. We have a nice kitchen with all the appliances. We have a huge garage attached with a washer and dryer. We have forced heat AND air conditioning. We have 2.5 bathrooms. And we both have cars. No one is taking the bus to get to and from work everyday, and I need to just shut the fuck up about being sad. We OWN a house in Santa Monica. Someday we will either live there again or sell it and buy something more modest that we can better afford. But in the meantime, we are very lucky.
And I am also very lucky the transition to Big Boy Bed has gone relatively smoothly. I dare not write more about that though, for fear of tempting the Parenting Fates to strike me a nasty blow.
