Saturday, June 13, 2009
Goodbye, old sod
We signed a contract to sell our house Thursday. It's too big, too expensive and too much work and we're tired of keeping up with it all. Paying a mortgage on rooms we don't use meant to house children who don't exist seems more and more silly, especially as we face so much uncertainty in the journalism field.
The people who are buying it are a relentlessly enthusiastic couple from Baldwin. Our realtor tells us that when they were making offers and we were countering, they called her every day to see if we'd changed our minds about what we would accept. Now that we've signed, they're still calling her every day. I'm not sure why. They've already mentally moved in all their furniture and decided which of their three children are going to have which room. Big Big Man wondered if they had a little one (they do), and if they'd keep the stencils he'd done in Little Big Man's room of alphabet blocks and our old pets Cinnamon, Geordi and Elvis.
Of course, we'll make a new home wherever we end up, our home is our family, blah blah blah. But I can't help but feel culpable in what feels like a defeat. The part of me that still wants the big house and the big yard on the nice street is the one that talked Big Big Man into buying our place six years ago, when he liked the sweet capes and more modest places we were looking at. But I wouldn't even consider them, and I ignored all the faintly chiming warning bells when we figured out what our mortgage payments would be (around 40 percent of our take-home pay) and bought a four-bedroom before we had even started trying to have kids.
So now I'm paying for it with a loss of face. We're back looking in all the modest neighborhoods we had been in before, and I lie awake in bed at night frantic about whether we can find a decent house on a decent street. We had to tell our neighbors we were selling, explaining that we needed to downsize without letting on how dire the situation could really be, and now that we've signed a contract, there may be nosey questions about price. (If I have the nerve, I'll be telling them to look it up on the Internet.)
But it's not really a disaster. We're going to make money off the deal, and we're going to use that for a down payment on the next place. And long term, Big Big Man or I could maybe work less and be home with the little guy more. That's what I'm hoping for. Between Little Big Man's five or six therapy appointments a week, working and taking care of the house (we no longer have a cleaning person or a yard crew), I feel like I can barely parent, let alone do anything for myself. I'm in the library now writing this after the morning yoga class I signed up for, because I know if I go home, there's no way I'm getting near the laptop.
So here's to a future full of less chaos and more money. Wish me good luck, cause I'm going to need it.
