R. and I needed childcare help yesterday. I realized this when I sat down for two minutes to clear my head and found the Bean halfway across the backyard snatching snails off the side of the composter with a sippy cup of milk in the other hand.
Apparently, she can take herself outside now. When I inquired about this: “Hey Bean, did you go outside all by yourself?” She responded with a wave, as if she’d been doing it for ages, and I’d only just caught up. Mind you, this is an effort that requires getting down three large steps. I was not prepared for this to be our reality just yet.
There are only so many ways to contain a highly mobile one year old, it turns out. The black netting that attaches to the threshold of the back door, a device we use to keep an invasion of springtime pests at bay, was supposed to be one such barrier for a little longer. It allows the dogs to run in and out freely. Previously, it had baffled the Bean enough to keep her from pushing through herself.
Fortunately, the backyard is fenced in, so this newfound inclination to adventure outside the compound wouldn’t be so bad if the little didn’t also have a tendency to put the previously mentioned snails, small rocks and random bits of garbage she finds directly into her mouth. I’ve become an expert at the finger-hook grab to fish such debris from her pie hole—yet another item absent from my motherhood bingo card.
But the Bean’s mischief is only half the reason R. and I have our hands fuller than we thought, sooner than we anticipated. We’ve been fairly good at tag-teaming the parenting responsibilities while working from home. Sometimes we have to push our work hours past her bedtime or before she wakes (I’ve recently started getting up between 4 and 5 am to get a workout in before E. wakes up rearing to go in the 6 am hour), but this was all doable.
Then, R. got a new job, one that requires us to be in Atlanta by Thanksgiving. No problem, we thought. We’ll start on the home projects now and list by July. Then, we talked to our realtors. “In July, things start to slow down. By August, they’re dead. Your best bet is to sell between March and June.” In case, you hadn’t noticed it’s already the end of April. Our sales window was dwindling before our eyes.
That’s not to mention that obscene interest rates have transformed the seller’s market we navigated a few years back when we purchased this home into a buyer’s market where anxious sellers no longer have a built-in upper hand. Plus, we have three dogs and a baby. Each listing would require a quick deep clean and wrangling the equivalent of four naughty children out of the house for an unspecified amount of time.
I started to feel the edges of our carefully constructed plans going up in flames. The odds felt a little stacked against us. Overwhelmed by the prospect that we might barely sell this home in time or be forced to give it away in some sort of fire sale that left us in a shit position to buy in our new hometown, I threw out a long shot that was brewing in the back of my mind: “We’re going to Columbia for two weeks in about two weeks,” I ventured. “What if we listed it while we were gone?”
I could feel R.’s murderous energy on me. And if he didn’t want to kill me before, he definitely did when our realtor jumped on the idea. “I love that. It would be your best bet for sure. Do you think you can get everything done by then?” Of course we can, declared the one who has never used a power tool in her life (but once posed with a drill for an Instagram photo). How hard could it be?
By now, dear readers, you probably know that I love a tight timeline and thrive in chaos. Give me a deadline, and I will always wait until the very last second, but I will never ever miss it. R. does not care for this approach. He stresses. About everything. Always. And since R. would be tackling most of the task list we needed to get through to make our home MLS ready, he was, shall we say, less than thrilled. But not enough to back out of the timeline. We need a win, and like it or not, this is how we get it.
So, if we weren’t crazy before, we’re most certainly a little nutty now. Dogs. Beans. Re-grouting. Landscaping. Painting. Roofing. Dumping. Deep cleaning. Putting up blinds (apparently most sellers don’t share my hatred of window coverings). All the house stuff needing to done enough for pictures in six days and completely finished before we catch a 5 am flight to Cartagena on May 4th. Not to mention our day jobs—the things that enable us to afford multi-hundred dollar Home Depot trips and weirdly expensive dumpsters.
Even before this self-created mess I instigated, I feel like I haven’t seen my husband in months. We’ve both had a lot of work come through, which is a blessing, but it also means we have to execute an hourly schedule that varies wildly from day to day.
“Can you watch E. from 10 to 11, while I do my alive interview?”
“Sure, but then I need you to watch her from 11 to 12:30 while I’m in meetings.”
“And I saw that we both have things at 1 pm. Can you have the Bean with you on the call or should I reschedule my workout?”
“I can take her. I’m just listening on that call, but I need to lead the 2 pm meeting.” “I’m free then. I’ll just need you to watch her afterwards, so I can get through the email project and try to send out a newsletter.”
Are you exhausted yet? We are. It’s untenable. And beyond that, I haven’t touched my novel in weeks and I feel like I’m somehow behind on every project while still scraping by to hit the deadlines by the skin of my teeth. It’s a blessing to be so busy. I want to be more grateful. But I also want to get laid, and the fact that we’re too tired to do anything but eat dinner and veg in front of the TV before I go to bed at 9 pm like an eight year old is really cramping the fuck out of my style. I really can’t get up any earlier without feeling like I’m not sleeping at all.
I explained this conundrum to my (childless) friends, who are extremely cool about letting me vent about problems that they do not experience themselves, and J. told me that her friends call it “living parallel lives.” Truer words have never been spoken. R. and I have become two ships passing in the night, and did I mention how much I need to get laid? I need his ship to float into mine, if you catch my drift. Bow to stern, starboard style. Put his sail right in my port, ya know?
I’ve got more, but I’ll spare you. The point here is that I’m not sure how parents live intersecting lives without some help. Perhaps this would be our reality if we lived closer to family or made close friends in Austin or figured out a way to made a caregiver work in our already cramped house. We did visit a daycare, which then gave us (mostly me, it seemed) the plague for three weeks.
We haven’t found a good solution where we are, but I know a change of scenery will bring a slew of new options and opportunities. My book might happen yet. A date night may be in our future. The energy to bang will return with gusto. The parallel lives effect will lessen when we can do our work simultaneously without interruption and our interactions with the Bean become a group affair. Plus, I can’t see how making our WFH days more congruent DOESN’T correspond with a multitudinal increase in afternoon delights.
So, Atlanta here we come. We’re in the home stretch of an unsustainable situation, and I can (begrudgingly) wait for our circumstances to turn the corner. I think our detour in Columbia will offer a lovely reset. With the majority of the house-selling nonsense behind us, we might actually be able to relax a bit. Besides, Cartagena is a coastal town. Seems like a nice spot to drop our anchors after the Bean goes to bed and have a good fuck in the hot tub. Full speed ahead!
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix